IEEE Preparation Begins – Ally L
At the start of this Monday’s open room, the IEEE picnic was in less than 12 hours. We would be demonstrating the 2025 season’s robot, Lefty, at the event. We had not run Lefty for a few weeks, as we were using the 2024 robot Cronus for other demos. So, we needed to do some testing to make sure that Lefty would be working correctly in front of one of our biggest sponsors.
We started out by installing any parts of the robot that had been removed for our convenience. Lefty’s CANivore, a small electronic device which helps us make our CAN wiring more reliable, was attached to Cronus. Cronus had its own CANivore during its season, but it stopped working. So, when we needed to demo Cronus we just unplugged the device from Lefty and added it to Cronus. So, plugging it back into Lefty was a quick fix.
We had also removed the large polycarbonate plate that protects the inside of Lefty from falling game pieces. This plate was extremely important when we were in matches and running the robot, but is very inconvenient when we need to be able to see inside and test Lefty. Thankfully, this was also a quick fix, with the plate being attached by a large number of zip ties secured throughout the robot.
Miraculous Programmers
After Lefty had all of its pieces back, we began testing software. Sadly, the controls weren’t working: the robot wouldn’t move! We checked, and it was not an issue with the electronics on the robot – something was wrong in code, somewhere.
This is where we began to face more problems. Eden Prairie High School had recently banned GitHub, the platform we use to access our code, on the school wifi and school laptops, and we had not known, because it was summer. So, to find our robot code and try to fix the problems, we had to download all of the tools and applications the programmers needed onto someone’s personal computer connected to a phone hotspot. While that loaded very slowly, we tried to figure out what the problems were with controlling the robot.
The Engineering Deputies ended up spending four and a half hours straight solving this issue. We tried to call past captains and programmers on the team to help, but none of them knew what to do. Engineering mentors arrived and did not know how to fix the problems. The deputies kept working. When the open room was about to end, the robot began to move. Thank you so much to our miraculous engineering deputies with their amazing programming skills. We wouldn’t have a working robot for IEEE without you!
Lego Sorting
While our programmers worked, the rest of the open room worked on a project to get our storage closet cleaned out (a project we started in our second offseason open room). There were many boxes of Legos for old FLL robots in the closet (it took around 8 people to carry all of them) but they were not sorted. We covered one of our huge tables in Lego kits and tried to organize them. This will be a project to continue for several more open rooms, as we did not make too much progress with there being so many Legos.
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