Results: 

Gracious Professionalism Award

This weekend, Photon competed at the Katy District Event. To begin, we would like to thank our alliance captain the 9478 Robo-Colts, and our other alliance member the 9121 Mavericks. We would also like to congratulate the winning alliance of 118, 8576, 7616. 

Photon went 7-8-0 overall at this event, and finished ranked 18th before being invited by 9478 to join their alliance. After inviting 9121 to our alliance, we fell to the lower bracket after playing against the 2nd alliance. After that we won against the 6th alliance in the lower bracket and then fell to the 1st alliance. 

In addition to this, we were honored to be awarded the Gracious Professionalism Award and look forward to competing in the Houston District Event.

Failures and Fixes:

Failure: The intake that Photon has is the exact same version of the 3847’s intake, but the way that we move the note from the intake to the indexer and launcher is different. We have an extra 2×1 added to the inner frame where the note rides up against. This caused different problems that weren’t seen on the 3847 robot due to the note having to be more vertical to contact the index rollers. During the later qualification matches on Friday, we had a couple of issues that required us to fix the intake in different ways after each match. 

1st incident: We believe the intake roller became unbolted due to not checking them after every match to see if they were tightened which caused them to fall off at the end of the match after having issues with it during the match. 

2nd incident: During this match, we had trouble with the intake jamming and not fully intaking. We found out after the match that the hot glue that held the hub to the roller became detached. 

The glue holding hub to roller snapped, so we put a bolt to re-secure them together

3rd incident: Pulley got worn down thanks to the intake jamming

4th incident: Then the belt got worn down too because we didn’t replace it when we changed the pulley

Fix: To make sure this doesn’t happen in the future, we will be replacing the belt along with the pulley when the pulley is worn down or breaks. For our roller, to prevent the hot glue from getting dislodged, we put another screw into the roller to make sure this doesn’t happen. 

Failure: We have several autons, but we have one specifically which is designed to collect and shoot 4 notes into the speaker. During this auton in one of our matches, however, two notes got jammed in our intake which caused us to get a penalty. For the rest of the match, no matter how many times we tried, we were unable to eject the notes, therefore we weren’t able to score and collect any more notes during the whole match. One of the notes got stuck above our top roller while the other one got stuck below the first one (shown in the picture below).

Fix: To (hopefully) prevent this from happening in future matches, we are planning on installing a plate that is on the Spectrum 3847 robot. This plate will be mounted above the top roller to stop the note from getting stuck above the roller, and giving it a more direct path into the feeder. 

Controls update:

For Katy, we knew that we wanted to try and use our 4-note auton. The first time we ran it in Quals, we were only able to get 2 out of the 4 notes because we bumped into one of our alliance members. This being said,  our auton most likely would have worked if they lined up a little bit closer to the driver station. Then we had another chance to run our auton, but were only able to get 3 out of 4 notes because the robot didn’t move far enough to be able to intake the 4th note. We then tried running our 4-note auton again, but only got 1 out of 4 notes in the speaker because we had trouble with our intake and the note didn’t shoot out of the feeder. We were then able to run the auton for a fourth time but the note was preloaded too high and the robot didn’t get aligned with the speaker, causing it to shoot over. During Playoffs, we also ran our 4-note auton, however had a lot of trouble intaking and feeding the note. 

Planned Improvements:

• Add some plates above the intake that hold the note in place when the arm is up to prevent the note from slipping out

• Add wedges so only one note can enter horizontally in intake

• Add a button where we can lock on the angle for each chain on the stage

• Podium shot

• Button to lock on directions for amp and subwoofer

• Add shaft so if we get one hook for climb it will slide over and other one will catch

• Visual feedback of a note through leds

• Get the 4 note auto working

And just a fun fact: For the third year in a row at Photon’s first event, we won Gracious Professionalism! 

Source: Spectrum