FIRST
Hyperion
1-week coding project.
Summary
Hyperion was the first project I ever worked on. It was an FRC robot that I had one week to program completely from scratch. I had no prior experience with robotics, Java, or PID control.
The first subsystem I programmed was the drivetrain. Hyperion featured a tank drive with 4 Falcon 500 motors and TALON SRX motor controllers. I implemented a basic arcade drive and then added a simple PID controller in code to help with optimized driving.
The next subsystem I programmed was the intake and magazine system. Hyperion had a four-bar over-the-bumper intake powered by a pneumatic piston. The balls were intook by powered rollers with compliant wheels and driven by a belt system. For this system, I programmed the piston to extend and retract the intake. At the same time the piston would extend, the rollers would start spinning to intake the balls. The intake leads into a passive polycarb funnel that feeds into the magazine, which is a series of powered and passive rollers. The whole magazine system is powered chain, a versa planetary gearbox, and a BAG motor. The magazine system was programmed to pull balls up to the shooter, where it was stopped by kicker wheels until the shooter was ready to fire.
From the magazine, the balls are fed into the shooter. The shooter had a hood with a powered roller attached to it and a flywheel shooter powered by two Falcon 500 motors, and the whole system was driven by belt and pulley. The shooter utilized a limelight 2 to track the target and distance. The limelight 2 utilized a retroreflective tape target that was placed on the goal. I color thresholded and contour filtered the limelight to detect the target. I used the limelight's distance measurement within a hashmap to determine the optimal flywheel speed. Within the hashmap, I obtained optimal values by shooting from different distances around the field and recording the optimal flywheel rpm for each distance. I then used a PID controller to spin the wheel up to speed and shoot once it was within a specified error threshold. While the wheel could shoot up to 2500 rpm, I still set the error threshold to below 50 rpm.
Last things I programmed were the climber and control system. The climber consisted of two telescoping arms on each side powered by a Falcon 500 motor and a modified gearbox. It was pretty simple to program, as I just had to extend and retract the arms. The control system wasn't too difficult either. I bounded the buttons of an Xbox controller to different commands. I also programmed autonomous paths that started from 3 different spots on the field, each shooting two balls at the start, and then "parking" on a balance station. I used an application called PathPlanner to create paths and implement them into code. Lastly, I implemented a simple dashboard using Shuffleboard to display the limelight's camera feed, shooter speed, autonomous chooser, and other information rebgarding performance.
Overall, this project was an incredible opportunity for me to learn about programming, robotics, and engineering as a whole. Shoutout David, Ash, Anuva, Feiyue, and everyone who helped me with this project.
Watch me compete and win with Hyperion at my first ever competiton here → Steel City Showdown