pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Good God! Is that 4 CIMs per side for the drivetrain?

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

I thought only 6 cim's were allowed this year.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Looks like 3 CIMs per side, there is a 4th on one side resting above the frame, it doesn't look mounted to me, and are those versa wheels I see? Nice job, looks great!

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

6 CIMs, 2 miniCIMs? Or extra CIM to confuse? Seems like the driver will be the power source for climbing? I'm no expert on mechanical matters, but maybe the pneumatic cylinder engages a power take-off. Is seems like shifters are unnecessary with so much power on the drive as you can be both fast and pushy.

Just a guess, so feel free to prove me wrong.

We'll miss you at the Phoenix Regional this year.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

I wish I could coax our students to properly label the wires such as I see here. Nice job!

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

That's a pretty nifty drive-train you got there. Wonder how you are going to do the other activations. On the cool part you can just speed too wherever you want. Love the robot so far!

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Looks like another stellar drivetrain for 610.

Intriguing #35 chain there. Even more intriguing is the massive smiley face.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

This picture makes me happy my team is using talons.:-)

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

One of those gears in the drivetrain looks a little out of place. I would guess it's there for pto

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Agreed, 6/8 "CIM" single speed w/ PTO.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Beautiful job so far!

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Ooh...strong drivetrain. Me gusta. Me gusta mucho.

This thing looks like it's built for power. That PTO seems good with the 6 CIMs, but if it's not a PTO, that seems a little bit of overkill for a DT in a game where defense isn't going to be too common.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

I dunno, man. This is the most open field since 2007 (excluding 2009 for obvious reasons). I feel like this is a good year to gain an advantage with incredible drive trains, but I get that feeling just about every year.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

The smiley is covering SOOMMETHIIINNG..:rolleyes:

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

No the robot is just happy that after build tonight its going to Tim Hortons.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Where's the Chief Delphi "like" button?

Be right back, getting a large double double from the timmies around the corner.

-Nick

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Oh, why do you taunt me so? Here I am stuck in Texas with no Timmy's to be found for over a thousand miles...

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Looks good! Very elegant PTO setup.

I've got a tin of coffee in my pantry and shipping to Texas is only $10.35 via Canada Post. The offer is out there!

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Michigan has Timmy's Of course, we drive South to go to Canada...;)

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

I'm in Texas too. The last time we flew out of Vancouver, we bought a big box of TimBits from the Tim Hortons in the Departure Lounge. My wife (from Toronto) and I debated auctioning them off, individually, during the flight since it would be a long time before many of the other passengers would be able to get their fix again. We ended up eating them all ourselves :D

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Krispy Kreme > Tim Hortons.

And it's not even close.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Where did you get the air tank holder? On another note, great looking drive train!! Looks really clean.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Maine has them too. Here in Washington I have to drive up across the border to BC for an iced cap. If it wasn't for border patrol getting super suspicious of going through all that hassle for a beverage I'd do it more often. (The Canadians understand though)

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

I think it is just a battery tester :)

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

For a more relevant question... How is the new 2CAN working for you, and CANbus in general, so far in 2013?

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

I'm not 610 but I can tell you that 79 hasn't had any problems with either the 2CAN or the CANbus in general this year. The only major problem we have is that our electrical team has a nasty habit of pull Jags off the bus that we still talk to and it introduces a stutter into the system. Despite our best efforts we have not been able to rectify this problem (the electrical team removing Jags, the stutter is fixed by not writing to that Jag).

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Well, another Saturday in the books. Figured I'd post a quick response before a night-time Timmie's run...

I can't really comment about the drivetrain, other than the fact that I really like it, and that student designer Ryan Tam (Gr. 11) deserves a tons of recognition for the design and manufacture of it. He worked under the mentorship of Mr. Stehlik, and there are a lot of neat little details in it that just don't show up in this picture... (i.e. all 4 side plates are identical, how the square channels are securely connected to the side plates with only one fastener, the in-between CIM "floating" encoders + mounts)

It's not flashy, but it's really well thought out, with a ton of detail to maximize ease of machining, assembly, and maintenance.

To answer some questions:

Yes, the smiley is covering something. We noticed one of the frisbee manipulating components got into the picture, and needed to be covered up.

The air tank holder is custom cut 1/4" lexan on our CNC router, again designed by Ryan Tam. It is basically four holes, as the tanks have a nice raised boss at each end that you can support them by.

As for CAN, it worked well for us last year, but we had a few hundred lines of code dedicated to CAN Error Recovery. Without it, we would have been dead in the water. We used the black serial adapter last year, and this is the first year we are using the 2CAN. It's still a bit early to give any meaningful feedback, as all we've done is some light open-loop driving.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Im interested in the CAN Error Recovery stuff. Could you elaborate?

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

We coded our robot in Java using the Command-based template.

Within each subsystem that used a Jaguar, we ensured that whenever we caught a CANTimeOutException, we called a subsystem-specific recovery method to re-initialize and verify the configurations of all Jags within that subsystem.

This ended up being a bit tricky for some sub-systems, as we switched Jaguar configurations depending on the task we were doing. i.e. the drivetrain could be in VBus, Position, or Speed mode at different times in the match. We had to keep track of these states, and restore them gracefully.

We had to handle the deadlock condition as well, because sometimes the error recovery would cause more CANTimeoutExceptions if the affected Jag wasn't ready to be re-initialized. Gracefully handling this condition without stopping your entire CAN communications bus was a bit tricky.

At worst we only wanted a single sub-system to "pause" just long enough to gracefully re-initialize the Jaguars after an exception. All the other sub-systems had to keep going as if nothing happened.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Is the perimeter of this thing really under 112 inches? It looks huge!

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Our perimeter measures out at 110".

The VersaWheels do funny things to the perspective.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Interesting, maybe I'll have to chat with you guys in more depth post season about this. We use Iterative and C++ so your approach wouldn't work for us.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

This is especially true with 256's drivetrain.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...hreadid=112141

-Nick

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Sweet multimeter.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

I agree with you here. With the lack of safe zones, teams that decide not to pursue shooting will have a very good opportunity to be a defense bot.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

I disagree. There is one rather large safe zone of each side of the field(the pyramid)

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

While I agree with you that those are two major protected zones, this field can be considered more open because there is nothing in the middle of the field. I have a feeling that lots of teams will have to traverse the field to the feeding station, so defense in the middle of the field may be at a premium. I'd be interested to see a list of percentages on how much of each game's field is taken up by field elements or protected areas.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

How do the horizontal tubes attach to your side plates? I see a bolt coming out but can't tell what that is anchored in.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

We put three roll pins through the side plates that fit into the inside corners of the horizontal tubes. The fourth corner is used for a threaded rod to tie everything together. We started using this construction a few years ago, and it has served us well.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

So the threaded rod crosses the entire chassis?

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Yes! You can see it through the holes in the square tubes at the back of the robot.
Use one of the two bottom holes for the threaded rod. Gravity and the inside corner of the square tube will help everything line up. The oval cutouts aren't just to save weight, but also provide access into the tube to help align the threaded rod when assembling/disassembling.

This square tube + plate + roll pins + threaded rod assembly is one of my favourite "little-things" that our Design and Manufacturing sub-teams do.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

So what was behind the smiley face?

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Tim Hortons > EVERYTHING

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Timmies put Krispy Kreme out of business where I come from :cool:

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Is there a CAD file of this drivetrain available? The floating encoders and mounts sound like a really cool idea and I would like to take a look at them if I could.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Video of Mr. Lim's dance moves.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Mr. Lim's dance moves were so fantastic they couldn't possibly fit behind one tiny smiley face.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Glad to see you made it home safe Mr. Hoffman. ;)

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

We will probably upload our CAD to www.frc-designs.com at some point in the future. I would do it now, but unfortunately, I, and many other members of our team, are currently writing exams, so we don't have much time to sort out our CAD and upload it. I'll explain a bit about how our encoders are mounted.

As you can see in the picture, our CIMs are pretty close together. We made a small plastic piece with our 3-axis CNC router that looks like a rectangle with a semi-circle cut out on either side of it. These portions of a circle are made to fit perfectly around a CIM. There was a hole in the middle of the piece for an encoder to fit through so we could screw it on. We then slid the piece in between the CIMs. The friction was enough to keep the plastic piece in place.

We then used our usual method to connect the encoder to the shaft. On 610 we use a technique we borrowed from 188, which is using surgical tubing to connect an encoder to a shaft. We simply slide the encoder into one end of the surgical tubing and the shaft into the other end. It works extremely well and we have never had issues with it.

If you have any more questions feel free to ask or message me! Hopefully we'll be able to get that CAD uploaded soon.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Who is Mr. Lim?

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

That is probably some of the neatest wiring I've ever seen...

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

I bet you've never seen 254's electronics board...

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

I have not! I'll check it out sometime

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Wow... someone can't compliment a robot without you saying "but 254's is better"...

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

Fair enough. I'm being too harsh. 610 has a great looking electronics board, but 254 is notoriously picky about having straight wiring, etc., so I suggested that he take a look at their electronics bard. In any case, you sure cant argue with 610's results.

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

FIRST Robotics Canada did a series of webinars during build season this year, and we did a quick walk-through of our electronics board on one of them. The goal was to show younger teams what a completed board could look like, and how things generally are wired:

Part 1:
http://youtu.be/wRDkPfUYakM

Part 2:
http://youtu.be/BN2ih23KMMc

I think our boards are pretty effective and fairly neat, and there are a lot of little details our students do which make a big difference, but aren't particularly flashy. I won't claim that our boards are the prettiest, or the neatest, but they work pretty well, and are some of the most straightforward I've had to troubleshoot and service. I also think our electronics build process is something that most every team in FRC can duplicate, even low-resource teams.

We tend to focus on things like labelling every single wire at both ends, putting zip-tied strain-relieved disconnects at every motor, speed controller and sensor with standardized connectors/pinouts and pigtail lengths to make replacing components a lot easier. These are the types of time-consuming nitty-gritty things that won't win you a lot of fans or awards, but it'll win you a lot of matches.

As far as electrical board go, I know both my students and I are very proud of the work they've done, but if you're looking for truly inspirational electrical boards, you should definitely take a look at this thread:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=111976

Re: pic: Team 610 - 2013 Electronics Board
 

This is the kind of stuff judges look for in the Quality award.