Team Members (from left to right): Mykal Valentine, Christopher Jarrette, Hout "Peter" Nga


Mr. Bucket

Stats

Problems

Our first problem was with the gear trains. The wheels at the end of the gear box, no matter how fast the motors were spinning, would always turn abnormally slowly. We supposed that the resistance was on account of the friction. We spent hours check up on the meshing of the gears, we forgot to check to see if the problem wasn't with the box itself.

An earlier version of our robot. The gear boxes are almost the same, but it is not as tall and sexy as the final version.
After getting very fed up with our gear boxes, we decided to go to lab and ask a TA. The unlucky TA that would be forced to help us would be Ross (who would help us the most for the rest of the competition.) It turns out that we had not properly braced our gear boxes so their corners were not perfect 90 degree angles. This caused the gears not to mesh well thus causing a lot of friction.

Time it took us to figure this out:: Most likely 10-11 hours at the least.
Time it took Ross to figure this out:: 15-30 seconds.

Next problem: our happyboard. Our happy board was very interesting. Depending on it's orientation, it would either hold or not hold power from the batteries. At first, we thought it was a soldering mistake on our behalf. After re-soldering it a few times, we decided to suck up our pride and beg Ross for help again. After thinking for a while, he decided that the problem had something to do with the wire connecting the battery pack to the happyboard, so he decided to remove all doubt and cut the wire short and attached one end directly to the board itself. For a while(something like 5-6 minutes,) it seemed like it would work, seemed being the operative word there. After we revealed that it still did not work, all Ross could say was that something was really screwed up. It wasn't until the day of the mock competition that Ross would be able to fix it (mostly.)

Our last serious problem would cause us to lose very early in the competition. We decided to rewrite the calibrate_gyro() code to make it faster. Unfortunately, the new code doesn't work when the RF is on. Since the competition required the use of RF, at least until the decided that the RF system wasn't working, our robot failed to move in its public appearence. It was pretty embarrassing. Also regrettable since the RF system was turned off a couple of matches after ours.

Strategy

Mr. Bucket on the seeding competition board.
Our strategy for 6.270 was simple: get our balls before anyone else could. Our low gear ratio allowed our robot to move much faster than most of the competiting robots (except for probably Samuel Jackson, since they used 6(!!!) motors.) We planned to go to the two corner goals, since the middle goal would be too hard to get to. Since a lot of the teams only planned to go for one goal (I'm not sure why. It resulted in a lot of double wins during the finals.) Our robot simply pushed the balls into the goals, no fancy stuff.

Our strategy may seem simple (and it really was,) but it's merely the watered down strategy of a grander strategy that we never got to implement. You may notice that our robot is a bit taller than others. We originally planned to have the robot shoot opponent's balls out of the table in order to help guarantee our success. We would use light sensors in order to differentiate our balls from the opponent's. The ball shooter was going to go in the neck of the robot. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough time to actually build the ball shooter, so we were left with a robot with a very long neck.

The Competition

Our robot performed its best in the seeding rounds. We won our first match, so we placed in the top half of the competition. Unfortunately, our batteries ran out during the final seconds of our first match, so our robot was unable to perform for its second match and lost. Mr. Bucket won one of the two matches during the morning competition, but lost its first round in the finals due to the conflict of the RF system and our calibrate_gyro code.

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