Can You Help Us?

We are struggling with precision and repeatability with our robot! Can you help us?

We use the EV3 gyro sensor to drive straight and turn precisely. But the gyro values seem to change over time. This is a big problem for us.

For example, when we drive the robot in a straight line across the field, it starts ending as much as 10 beams to the left (N on a field). Slowly, it moves right to be at what should be 0*. Then, it begins to migrate further to the right (S on a field).

Turns behave the same way. A 90* turn goes too far, then over time, it's correct, then not far enough.

So, over the coarse of a programming session of 30-60 minutes or more, we have to keep changing our gyro values.

This is an issue at a tournament. It's impossible to know exactly which values to use.

Please leave us a comment if you have suggestions.

Thank you!

Code For Our Test

Dinner With The T.E.A.M.

You know the team spends a lot of time at your house when Hauken gets out the frying pan, wooden spoon, and oil to cook his own pork fried rice for dinner.
Last time Kenneth brought a crockpot with his dinner!

Our Mentors Disappeared!?

Today's meeting kicked off with a sign on the door saying, "What would you do if your coaches and mentors disappeared for one meeting? Hmm...". A judge had asked us that question at our sectional tournament. So our coaches were inspired to find out!

So we ran our meeting all by ourselves for two hours. We did really well too! We started out by setting goals for the meeting. Then we practiced our skit a couple times. Next we created and completed our own teamwork exercises. After that we broke into two sub-teams. One worked on building attachments and rethinking some programming and strategy. For inspiration, the other group did research on how other teams accomplish certain robot tasks. Finally we met back together to see what we could do with everything we had learned.

When our coaches joined us for the end of the meeting, we discussed what we learned. It was really cool to see what we were capable of on our own. It really gave us a good sense of teamwork and leadership and better feel for what the role of the coach means to us. Actually, it was so fun, we talked of possibly trying it again sometime!

After dinner, some of the team stayed extra and worked further on attatchment designs and strategy for our robot. We also began testing our gyro sensors to see how consistent and accurate we can get them and which one of the two we own works best.

It was a neat meeting that was productive and gave us new experiences in a fun way!

Waukesha JanBoree

Each year at the Waukesha JanBoree, we bring our robot and our project display boards to share with our community. We have many families who come back year after year to see our team, our robot, and see what new thing we invented!

This year we displayed at the library for about two hours and introduced hundreds of people to FIRST! We had so many interested people, it was hard to keep up! Some families were so excited about what we showed them that they came back to our table two, even three times!

Overall it was a fun and successful day.