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Hello! Welcome to Build Season Week 14 and Competition Season Week 6. This week marked a critical phase in our journey, as we prepared for our final regional event of the season—the East Bay Regional. The team initiated the week by conducting autonomous routine testing on the competition robot, while simultaneously mounting the newly machined elevator onto the beta robot. These tasks set the stage for a week of focused iteration and refinement. Following the mechanical progress, the control systems subteam worked diligently to complete the wiring on the beta robot. This step was essential to enable the beta bot’s readiness for driver practice and autonomous testing. Early in the week, on Tuesday, we encountered some challenges related to the laserCAN system. However, through quick troubleshooting and effective teamwork, we identified a reliable workaround, allowing practice and testing to proceed without major delays. A notable highlight from the software team was the successful execution of a three-piece autonomous routine—an exciting achievement that reflects our continuous improvement and dedication. By Wednesday, the team resolved several hardware issues and replaced the problematic laserCAN component. We also spent time refining our autonomous routines to ensure reliability and performance heading into the competition. On Friday, we finalized all necessary preparations and packed up for the regional. Upon arriving at Berkeley High School, [...]

Auto Decision (2024-2025) While PathPlanner traditionally has been what we’ve relied on for autonomous routines, in the 2023 season, Choreo began making its rise, a software that could optimize the path far more efficiently. While we made several paths with it, we were unable to figure out event markers, and positions in the path where commands could be added into the path. This was similar to our auto routines in the 2022 season, before the huge PathPlanner update. Our paths had to be broken up, with commands added in individually, each section of the path recorded as an index number to put together afterward. This year, autos were easier to create as commands could be written separately and referenced within the actual path just by writing the name. Choreo, no matter how quickly it optimized the path, would be disadvantageous if we couldn’t figure out event markers, which started this fall project. We tested and were able to get event markers to function within Choreo paths. Yet running them compared to PathPlanner, there wasn’t much difference in execution, merely a UI preference. We began researching to see which would be the best option to switch to in the coming season, as Choreo was relatively new and somewhat buggy. We discovered another big PathPlanner update, which included several new [...]

During the 2024  fall season for Iron Claw Robotics, team 972, we began driver training much earlier than in previous years. We started the process in mid/late September to give new and returning students a chance to try out our last year's competition robot, Vivace. Although initial attempts to provide time for students to get accustomed to the robot did not succeed due to technical issues with tape strength, wheels, and an inconsistent area to drive, improvements in field setup meant that with each practice, we were able to get more and more time to drive. In mid-October, we decided that we were ready to have driver tryouts and set a date for the 27th of October. For driver tryouts, we brought out each student who wanted to become the driver one at a time to complete certain tasks in front of a group of evaluators consisting of the team captains. These tasks included weaving through cones, driving in circles while keeping the robot pointed at a target, driving in a straight line, and driving in figure eight. Throughout these tests, the students were timed and penalized if they hit either one of the cones being used to make the course or the foam balls at the edge of the field. Once the tryouts were done the captains reviewed [...]