Electrical Design

The only electronic changes made to driving that differed from the original design was the removal of the encoders from the drive motors. This change was made because the goal of autonomous driving was left behind early on due to the larger than expected time requirements of the rest of the robot.

Motors instead of Servos were used for latching. This was because it took a low of torque to move the latch mechanism when under the full force of the catapult. Because of this, two digital switches had to be used to determine what position the latch mechanism was in.

The only electrical changes made to the catapult were the iterative increasing of motor power and motor controller capability. As of the end of the competition, the highest amperage motor controller on the robot is dedicated to the catapult winch motor.

Because we abandoned all of our hopes for sophisticated controls halfway though the term in favor of making the robot work at all, and because the teleoperation was moved to a raspberry PI, only the Arduino mega was required for lower-level controls. This simplified the layout and wiring of the electrical board quite a bit.

the Arduino WIFI module was left behind early on because our software leader (Alex Edwards) already had experience setting up a server on a raspberry PI and connecting to it. This was one of the better decisions we made, because the raspberry PI was much easier to set up and is likely much easier to debug than a manually wired WIFI module and potentially multiple Arduinos.