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This week was hectic but productive. After the entire last week testing the mock beater bar, we are finally constructing the actual one. We inserted two short bars beneath the beater bar in order to increase the robot's efficiency in controlling the ball in place when making angle movements. The bars would be pulled up by a pneumatic piston when the robot advances over the ramp. Soon after that, we assembled a prototype kicker on the test chassis. The kicker was simply three pieces of Bosch assembled together in the shape of a facial razor. Once assembled, we tested it out with several types of surgical tubing. We also experimented with a variety of different tensions of the tubing and number of degrees to wind the kicker back. There were periods of sullen frustration as we pondered how the kicker should be wound back. Finally, we concluded on leaving the lone CIM motor remaining for hanging. For the kicker, a FisherPrice motor will be modified to fit a DeWalt drill transmission and connected to the kicking device by a gear-shifting pulley system. After that decision was made, Mr. Leong and Mr. Tom went to work on the transmission while we started our next important task - the bumpers.

With the help of Dr. Ing, we disassembled the bumper from last year's robot and, with the layout sample, cut two sets of fabric in red and blue (because we need two color sets of bumpers this year). We then passed the cut fabric to the PR team for embroidery. In the meantime, we sliced the pool noodles down to length and taped two to each piece of wood. For the longer bumpers, we added a pool noodle piece to both ends. When that was done, we moved to helping the mentors in making the kicker's transmission and hubs for the new rubber wheels which we decided to try because the old ones were wearing out. For the transmission, we first made the spool for the winch that operates the kicker. The aluminum chunk had to be cut and filed to size. For the hubs, we drilled, tapped, and counterbored them. We then attached the hubs to the new Colson rubber wheels and then the wheels went onto the chassis. Changing the wheels was a good choice because the robot ran better with them. While we marvelled at the robot's performance, Mr. Tom was making plates for the pulley device for the kicker and Mr. Leong was making a locking cap for the DeWalt transmission on the other side of the shop. After all the components were ready, Mr. Ing assembled the transmission.

While playing with the kicker on the mock robot, we found out that the rear ramp of our goal post was too high. Consequently, Dr. Ing, who has now became our "godfather", brought in lumber and helped us reconstruct a new one. Lastly, Mr. Tom made new plates for the wheels because, as of now, the plates scraped against the ramp when we tried to steer the robot to drive sideways along the ramp. The new plates would cave inward to give clearance for the ramp.

This week was filled with problems and challenges for most of the electrical team. During the beginning of Week Five, everything was going quite smoothly. The veterans updated the crab drive mode. They reorganized the messy code to a neater version. They also managed to reduce the circular deadband (the deadband for the rotating motor for crab drive) to 0.02 (two percent of the max joystick value). Meanwhile, the newer members worked on the switch program for the Cypress I/O board. Jonathan was assigned to do work on the encoder program; the team wanted him to have the encoder program read the number of revolutions the encoder made and the actual distance the robot moved in feet. Bryant helped the newer members wire and solder the potentiometer for their autonomous (which was later changed for the kicker instead of for the autonomous). By Sunday, the program was done and working. To make sure it worked, he had to lay on the ground and see if the program read 5.6 feet as the robot drove parallel to his body length.

However, starting on Sunday, problems arose. When Jessica and Ying were working on the switch program, they noticed that only the driver station was reading the value; the laptop running the program was not reading the value. They made a post on ChiefDelphi to get help from other teams. However, no solution or suggestion was found for this problem until Tuesday. On Tuesday, one of the ChiefDelphi posters suggested that the switch program did not need three digital inputs; it just needed one digital input with different arrays. After applying this suggestion, the problem was fixed.

After these tasks were done, the newer members were assigned to do the pneumatics system. Meanwhile, the veterans were assigned separate tasks. Sam was responsible for working on auto-tracking with the camera while Fu Quan was assigned the rewrite of the crab drive. Since the crab drive is heavily dependent upon the absolute encoder, if we were to lose that point of reference, we will lose control of the crab drive. Hence, we developed a backup plan to manually rotate the crab module using the joystick and lock the drive into arcade mode only. After Sam was done with his task, he was assigned to work on the kicker program. The kicker uses a motor, surgical tubing, pneumatic system, and potential/kinetic energy to kick the ball and Sam has to program all of these aspects for the kicker.

In the middle of the week, Sacred Hearts asked us for help with their pneumatics system. Ying, Jessica, and Bryant could not get our pneumatics to work before Sacred Hearts left; apparently the relay was not plugged in properly. After the pneumatics were wired up correctly, they worked on programming the other components of the autonomous (like the potentiometer) while Jonathan worked on the encoder. During the remainder of the week, Ying and Jessica were having problems with the Cypress I/O board and analog signals. At the same time, Sam and Bryant continued to try and determine the accuracy of the auto-tracking with the camera. It was decided that this could not be done until the goal the being assembled by the mechanical team was set up.

By Friday, Fu Quan finished his override code. The use of switches is being considered because it is easier for the driver to use the override code when the sensors essential to the crab drive fail.

We also were paid a visit by KITV4 on Friday. Sam explained the advantages and components of the crab drive while Jonathan explained how the camera tracked the target on the dashboard. After KITV4 left, Jessica and Ying continued to work on the pot and Cypress I/O board. The voltage of the pot couldn't be determined until they got the correct pot from Bryant. Later on, Sam taught the newer members how the crab drive teleop, begin, periodic tasks, and finish programs worked (so they can fully understand the drive in order to implement it during autonomous).

All of us began rushing to complete the project by the Monday Feb. 15th deadline. Surprisingly, we found out later that the deadline has been extended until the 17th. In a sense, we found that as a relief, but that only means that we will have to cram everything as soon as possible because all of us will be too busy next week to finish it at the last minute. But, every extra minute is equivalent to something being improved, so we will utilize the time until deadline.

Our week started off by finishing the compilation of the scenes. Since lighting was hardly used last year, Yue Shi and Michelle spent some time figuring out a couple of lighting systems. Michelle tried the Sunlight system, and it looked decent enough for us to use it permanently. Two Sunlights were used in total for the resort center scene and the train scene, and one extra omni for both.

On the other hand, Yue Shi and Michelle also began rendering because they were spending too much time trying to correct the lighting. If we do not start rendering, we might not make the deadline at that rate. Therefore, Yue Shi started rendering one of the 180 degree scenes of the train. That rendering process is about 9 minutes per frame and is going to take such a long time to complete. Michelle started to render the wireframe scene and luckily it is only taking about 1 minute per frame (9 times faster than the other scene!) because the whole scene is not as complicated than the other scenes.

We are going to all start to render using other peoples' computers as well. By doing this, we will be able to speed up the rendering process substantially. Eventually, we are going to combine all of the parts and make it into a single 30 second animation.

Sean was very busy with soccer so he was not able to do very much this week. Since the season is done now, he will be able to help finish the whole animation next week.

This week, we did a lot of arts and crafts. We started off the week by spray-painting the scrap pieces of bumper material. Let's just say it was not so good; almost a disaster, actually. So Mr. Tui told us about how some other team is embroidering theirs and thought that Mr. Lau might know someone who can embroider ours. It turns out that Mr. Higa from the Graphics Learning Center has an embroidering machine! After we asked him if he could embroider it for us, he started making examples on scrap pieces. The machine only has a limited number of fonts programmed into it, but it still looks pretty nice.

The competition goodies also came in! We started making stamps and transparent labels for them. We will need to design tags for the leis as soon as possible, but the homemade fan designs are looking pretty nice!

We also finished editing the essays and submitted the Woodie Flowers Award essay and pictures for our nomination of Ms. Elaine Owens. We may consider renominating Mr. Alan Ing for the Woodie Flowers Award for the Championships by "refreshing" his entry essay since that is apparently allowed now.

We are currently busy looking for pictures for Chairman's. It's better to finish that first. We are also developing ideas on improvements for the binder. Let's hope the result is good.

There were also two important visits we had to cover and document: the visit from Sacred Hearts and the visit from KITV4 news. We took pictures, videotaped, and helped them with anything they needed. Now we have evidence of their visits for future team members to look at.

And that's it for Week Five. It's getting kind of scary realizing that we only have Week Six and Crunch Time before the actual competition. There are still many things for us to figure out. For instance, the video that we were unable to work on this week due to the animation team having their own work to complete and also figuring out who's going to speak at the school assembly, as well as who will face the judges for the Chairman's Award interviews? There is no time to waste! Thank goodness we are not the ones handling the dangerous tools or else there would have been some stress-induced casualties already.

Week Five is over and the website due date is coming! This week we managed to finish the Week Four gallery and found some clip art for the various buttons on our site. We also took pictures of the many events that have occurred during Week Five such as the demonstration of the auto tracking camera and the kicker. The most important thing we did this week was collect scoring information from each team member on how well our site did this year, and the result is that we should add some videos of what we are doing throughout the season. Our plan for next week it is to finish the whole site with no mistakes!