6/23/2025 – Ally L
This Monday was Talon’s second offseason open room of the summer. The weather was the opposite of last week’s, coming off of a weekend of heat warnings and record temperatures, rather than unusually chilly storms. Despite the sunny and warm weather, we kicked off the open room with hard work indoors.
Drift-sco, Again!
Drift-sco is a cool offseason project made from an old season bot: our 2013 robot, Disc-o. However, to make it more fun to drive and to give a challenge to our programmers, we added partially disassembled swerve modules to the front two wheels and omniwheels to the back two wheels. This sounds complicated, but it means that the front two wheels can only be controlled to turn: they will roll forward freely, but you can steer them using a motor. The back two wheels go forward normally, but will roll sideways freely, allowing the robot to easily move from right to left. The goal is to make driving this robot feel like drifting a car – down to the steering wheel video game controller that we’ll use to steer it.
Our first challenge of building Drift-sco came last week, when its roboRIO wasn’t working, no matter what we tried. This week, we focused our attention on the PDP (Power Distribution Panel). The PDP is what gives the RIO the electricity it needs to turn on. Last week, we were mainly testing how the RIO was connected to the PDP, because we thought it was a connection issue between the two parts, or an issue inside the RIO. However, when we started testing the PDP this week, the problem was quickly solved! The tiny fuses on the PDP, which regulate power so that the RIO doesn’t receive too much power and get damaged, were not working. A student working on Drift-sco said
“I feel like that fuse shouldn’t have a weird black spot on the inside.”
Once we replaced the fuses with shiny new ones, the RIO cheerfully blinked to life!
The next issue in building Drift-sco, though, was getting it ready for programming. We needed to make sure the radio, which the programmers use to connect to the robot, was properly wired, and that the programmers could control all of the motors. A quick swap of one wire helped the radio turn on, but the rest of the motors did not follow. One motor, a part of Drift-sco’s unique drivetrain, didn’t have any lights! That variety of motor, called a Falcon, has small lights on the top that blink to show whether the motor is receiving power, as well as other information. When it has no lights, it doesn’t have any power. We, once again, assumed it was the old wires we were using to connect everything (as this robot was built in 2013). However, we soon realized it was another issue from the PDP! This time, though, replacing the breaker that regulates power didn’t do anything – we’re not quite sure what is wrong, but we’ll see if we can fix it in next week’s open room.
Jasper the Cat!
On Monday, Talon’s wonderful head mentor brought her cat, Jasper, to the open room. Jasper loves treats, looking at trees, and chewing on things, but does not like doors and loud noises. He was adopted two months ago in late April!
Jasper bravely explored the open room, wandering around and on top of tables, smelling all of the tools, and even sitting in a robot! He was very well behaved for a photo opportunity, sitting on top of Drift-sco.
Only Slightly Toasty
During the Reefscape season this year, while building our robot Lefty, a Kraken motor stopped working and gave off a very burnt smell. We checked some things, but had no idea what we could have done to break it! So, we sent an email to the company that we bought it from, and they told us that they’d fix it and send it back to us. Last week, we received our motor back! The top section of the motor was shiny and new, but the rest of the outside casing was the same, even with our little label saying what the motor was used for on the robot. After the whole shipping and replacement process, the motor smelled only slightly toasty. Despite this, it still has not worked. We’ve tested it several times, and even with all of the wires going to it working, the motor won’t spin! Its little lights turn on, so it has power, but they only flash red, and when we tried to control it, nothing happened. Next week, we’ll try to figure out the issue further, now that we’re sure the motor doesn’t work.
A Faraway Storage Closet
With summer beginning, EPHS is looking to get the school organized and cleaned after the school year. To help them out, we moved some of our old supplies from a storage closet on the opposite side of the high school over to the robotics room. We took five heavy storage totes on a cart back to the open room, and moved our old robots out of the way in the closet. In open room, we found what each box held.
The first few boxes had supplies for the old summer camps Talon used to run. They were filled with tiny robot parts, straws, spoons, and even golf balls! Another summer camp box had everything from ethernet cords to toy cars and food dye. The next box held supplies from when we used to host a week zero, a long time ago, which was mostly a wide variety of types of extension cords. The box at the very bottom, what was making the cart seem heavy, was filled to the brim with old computers. They were computers so old they had DVD players built-in! We’ll figure out what to do with all of this old stuff in another open room.
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