Off season projects
 

I was wondering what off season projects other teams are doing now that FRC is over. I know that 4183 is making a NURC robot. What are your teams doing?

Re: Off season projects
 

4276 discussed working on a swerve drive, various pneumatic applications, and onboard vision tracking techniques.

Re: Off season projects
 

Have a meeting to discuss the successes and shortcomings of your season with all team members and mentors present. I can attest to the fact that 15 year old teams are still finding new and exciting ways to fail and therefore are always seeking to improve after every season. Maybe you should formalize training, draft an official business plan, start or add functionality to your website, rebuild parts of last year's robot, connect with local teams at offseason events, draft legislation for a local or state official to sponsor for FIRST, talk to radio and TV stations about broadcasting your team or local events, try out different drive trains or game piece manipulators to learn more about the advantages and disadvantages of core functions you can apply to actual future competitions...

You need to play to your strengths and eliminate weaknesses, and it's best to uncover and target necessary change specific to your team.

I wish you success.

Re: Off season projects
 

We have arduinos that we might start experimenting with, especially because we are switching to labview next year from C++ and you can use labview with the arduinos :eek:

And I know that I want to lay out a robot guideline for next year like
-whether or not we really need floor pickup
-Transmissions
-Drivetrain
-Height
-Electronics and wire routing (something we have never done ever.)
-practice designs in AutoCAD

We are also going to code last years robot and this years robot in labview for practice

I also hope we do fun projects like making a go-cart with first materials and making a quad-rotor with arduinos

Re: Off season projects
 

3623 is planning a few offseason activities (into the school year). We have only 3 students who did not graduate returning, but we already have 10 or more joining the Boys and Girls Club JUST to do Robotics next year!

We want to build something (ideally a new drive system, maybe a mechanism), do a few thought excercises (give them an old game manual, give us the first thoughts; go over an old robot and give us negatives) and obviously training.

Re: Off season projects
 

We need to work with our returning and new students to make sure that they can take over for our seniors. A couple off season events should help. I would like to see our programming team take on field centric robot control for our swerve drive. Can an inexpensive IMU give accurate heading for an entire match? This is a big challenge. Are they up to it. We have used carbon fiber cloth laminated on .25" birch plywood for many things along with pultrusions. Do foam core composites and honeycomb composite panels have a place on the robots. Can we master the fabrication methods? I have a few students in mind for this project. Can buss looks to be taking on a significant role in the future. May be it's time to play with can. We have avoided it til now. There are always more robot studies than time and we don't want to burn everyone out.

Re: Off season projects
 

Team wise we will be doing the following;

• 2470 is working on a summer sheet metal chassis for off-season events
• 3081 is designing and building a outreach robot that can shoot tshirts, basketballs and frisbees
• 2470 is creating a sponsorship packet to hand out to local businesses
• FTC #5943 is working on recruiting sponsors to start 2 additional teams

Personally my tasks after the season have grown;

• Recruiting and Training new mentors for 2470
• Working with FTC in MN
• Growing GOFIRST at Dunwoody
• Running/planning outreach events for 2470/3081
• Creating team infastructure with 3081 mentors
• Helping out other local teams with programming and recruitment
• Wishing for districts in MN so we can have more matches

Re: Off season projects
 

I'm trying to get my team some more stick time at a few off season events (Beantown Blitz, MARC and Rah Cha Cha Ruckus). I would like to take some of my kids on some of my off season volunteering events so they too can get a passion for volunteering directly for FIRST (every team should do this. The community needs us especially if were gonna make districts work. Let's all step up and do our part for the cause). We need to fundraise so we can go to a second regional next year (the drives team had alot of practice time waiting since week one and it showed on Newton but all the time in the shop is nowhere near as critical as time spent on a field taking on live competition). I would like to add new blood to the Rah Cha Cha Rucks planning committee and try to lure some of my team members there, especially if the event ends up at Edison Tech and I am sure there are community projects to do as well (I know Rolling Thunder has a big demo they do at the Monroe County Fair we like to participate in and we also go to the New York State fair as well.

Re: Off season projects
 

As far as I remember LabView program cannot run stand alone on Arduino, per LabView guys. One should be able to interface cRIO with Arduino and send/receive data and do the processing in Aduino, it will be interesting. It will be interesting to see if Vision processing can be done this way.:)

Re: Off season projects
 

We're planning on rebuilding Spooky IV, our "aircraft carrier" from 2007.

Re: Off season projects
 

To save space I'll just point you here:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...25&postcount=8

Re: Off season projects
 

A fleet of homemade segways for the team!

Re: Off season projects
 

team 3572 builds and races an eletric car with NECA.

Re: Off season projects
 

Our team has a large amount of summer/offseason projects currently in the works or in discussion. Amongst these are:

-CAD Training/Design Competitions
Fairly self explanatory, we want to continue to improve our team's design process, and one of the best ways to do this is more practice.

-Rebuilding the Showbot
We created an old showbot which still has all the old parts intact-- one of our offseason plans might involve redesigning a "showbot platform" for all types of situations.

-Branding/Imagery
Branding and imagery have historically been a problem for our team, and we'd like to formulate a good set of guidelines and standard vector logos for team and public use.

-Offseason competitions
We'll be helping to host or hosting a number of off-season events, some of which are still in the works

-Electronics refinement
Probably coming a bit late, but we'd like to make our electronics systems much more compact and easier to manage, so we'll be doing some planning on the offseason for this. Might be merged with the showbot redesign.

-Drive train testing
Testing various drive trains for CoF, maneuverability, etc. Might be integrated into the showbot platform. This is only possible because of the lower cost parts of VexPro.

Our team is fairly large (80+ students and 30+ mentors), so we can probably get a good chunk of these done. Honestly I'll be happy if we can get even one or two of these things done. This is also sort of a preliminary sum of all the ideas and confirmed activities that have been floating around the team since kickoff. The best source of ideas is always the team's membership!

45's season truly never stops, so while we prepare for IRI and relay for life we will also be giving cad lessons and working on an off season swerve drive 'bot. We're also working on advanced telemetry in code and perfecting autonomous recording in teleop.

Re: Off season projects
 

Our team is going to make a 2-speed gear box for the first time! We already designed it we just need to see if it works.

Re: Off season projects
 

Ironically enough, our team is thinking of switching out of labview and into C++

Re: Off season projects
 

If you switch, go to Java rather than c++. We recently switched from c++ to Java and liked it a lot better.

Re: Off season projects
 

Five students from Team 696 recently launched a near-space weather balloon with 3 Go-Pros and a multitude of other sensors. More information will be posted soon!:D

Re: Off season projects
 

Team 3929 is completely rebuilding their robot. It looks nothing like the one that went to competitions.

The mentors are fooling around with their own projects, among them are R/C toys (personally own a quadcopter, rally car, micro quad, toy plane), and some of the other mentors have some other fun toys.

Oh, and all of us like to volunteer everywhere we can. It's good for the soul. :D

Re: Off season projects
 

I'm working on a telepresence robot with an integrated scouting program on a tri omniwheel drivetrain.

Our team is working on a sheet metal chassis and doing some cad training.

Re: Off season projects
 

4485 is experimenting with drive system gear ratios, learning to use encoder data, and gyro/encoder assisted autonomous and tele drive modes. In the Fall we plan to focus on learning to implement vision processing.

Re: Off season projects
 

A few of our kids are doing a quadcopter buildoff this summer.

Re: Off season projects
 

A few of our students are getting together with your programming mentor and creating a segway like device.

Re: Off season projects
 

We have parts made for a swerve drive. We got more to finish before we start assembly. Now that we are about at the 50 percent completion, I can already tell we won't be using swerve for a competition robot. We are having fun building , and learning a lot. I think this drive will turn into a demo bot or a defense robot for driving practice.

On that note, I have been thinking about restoring our 2011 mecanum robot and build a kit-bot on steroids. So with the 2013 2-speed tank drive practice bot, we could have every drive base covered to practice against.

Also, we might want to convert our 2013 practice bot into a cycler with floor pickup and ten point hang. We debated about a climber+dumper+shooter versus a cycler. Since hindsight is 20/20, it would be fun try the other aspects of the game we missed this season.

Re: Off season projects
 

Personally I would not change from C++ since Labview (with the restricted bandwith) becomes quite laggy at times especially with a larger code, and also you can do a lot more with C++ and it is commonly used in the business world.

Re: Off season projects
 

I don't want to start a debate but +1 , Labview is meant to be a programming language for non programmers. If you know C++ stick with it.

Re: Off season projects
 

Team 2543 will be working on a golf robot and fundraising events, such as a summer camp for kids. Right now we are working in organizing and cleaning the shop, moving the tables around and such to work more efficiently. We have been brainstorming for offseason ideas, but nothing concrete yet.

Re: Off season projects
 

A perfect off-season project to work on would be to experiment with and see the different applications of team 585's Arbitrary Quadrature Encoder.

For this entrepreneurial, we have designed the Arbitrary Quadrature Encoder for other FIRST teams to use. This can just plug straight into the Jaguar and replace the stubborn commercial encoders. With this encoder, a team can place it on motors that cannot normally have encoders (window motors), and a linear application such as an elevator system.

We are now at a point where we can start printing the circuit boards. For more information and a demonstration go to our Kickstarter page at http://kck.st/147OyqI

Good Off-Season Activity Ideas?
 

Hey guys, so recently i've noticed that my team (Team 1758) has a huge lack of off-season events to attend and activities to participate in. I think its very beneficial to the team as a whole and to the members individually if there are a lot of things to do during the off-season, whether it be community outreach activities related to FIRST or robotics activities. Do you guys have any ideas for what teams can do during the off-season?

Re: Good Off-Season Activity Ideas?
 

heres a list of plans my team is doing

-design and build a new pit
-hold robot demos
-possibly design and build a sheetmetal nonadrive
-hold CAD/code classes for team members

Re: Good Off-Season Activity Ideas?
 

What exactly do you mean by robot demos?

Re: Good Off-Season Activity Ideas?
 

our team demos our robot(s) during the offseason to spread stem, some of the orginizations we are looking into this year are demos for local girl scout troops, 4h groups, science musuem summer camps, and state fair events. we also are planning on doing a number of demos for sponsors/potential sponsors.

some of the things we do at these demos are show the robot capibilities, discuss FIRST and what it is, allow the kids to drve the robot and various other stuff

Re: Good Off-Season Activity Ideas?
 

My team will normally prototype a drivetrain, demonstrate our robots at various community events, and sometimes we will hold summer camps for elementary school kids in our area.

Not to derail this thread but what is a nonadrive?

Re: Good Off-Season Activity Ideas?
 

It is basically your teams octocanum but with omnis and a center strafe wheel

Re: Good Off-Season Activity Ideas?
 

Ah, the offseason. So many things that you can do. I am going to divide this list into 2 parts: robot and team.

Robot

• Prototype new drivetrains
• Prototype new building methods
• Train students to use tools
• Train students to use Cad/code/wire
• Build things that your team will find useful. My team has built a cart, wire rack, and battery charging station.
• Build an outreach bot (T-shirt cannon?)
• Perfect your competition robot from the previous year.
• Hold a competition to see who can CAD the best ___________. (I would fill that blank with either cart or chassis, but you can use your imagination)

Team

• Attend offseason events
• Fundraise
• Recruit new members
• Demo your robot to sponsors
• Demo your robot to your school administration
• Demo your robot to your school's students
• Let students who aren't in robotics drive the robot
• Start up and help new FIRST teams (jrFLL, FLL, FTC, or FRC)
• Create new tutorials for other teams to use (see Simbot app or Miss Daisy's Team in a Box)
• Hold team bonding events. My team has done bowling, paintball, and a video game party.

I'm sure there are about ten thousand ideas that I have had that aren't on this list, but This is what I could think of off the top of my head. Most of it is pretty basic stuff.

Re: Good Off-Season Activity Ideas?
 

Here are few things Team 4384 does...

http://team4384.org/about-us/community/

This time around we will be taking our 2013 robot, but shoot frisbees outside at lower speed due to safety concern. After summer break we will get started with workshops and in fabrication.

Re: Good Off-Season Activity Ideas?
 

One of the best ways to generate offseason event sis to ask your team, as a whole, "What do we need to improve?", and then, "How can we improve that?"

Example: This year, my team was highly unsatisfied with our robot performance and build schedule/technique. So, in order to improve, we're setting up training sessions in CAD and robot strategy and design process. We're still in brainstorming and organization phases for this (it'll speed up after MSHSL, AP tests, and leadership selection), but already it's quite clear that this is the direction that we, as a team, want to go.

Last year we focused on improving our outreach and relationships with teams in our area-- so we hosted a robot basketball tournament for one our sponsors' employees., in addition to helping a team in southern Minnesota (3018, Nordic Storm) host an offseason event, River Rendezvous, and attending many of the offseason training events in our area.

Ultimately, the best way to spend your time offseason is to ask your students and your mentors "what do we want to do," and then try to make that happen. At least, that's been my experience with offseason events.

Re: Good Off-Season Activity Ideas?
 

If your team members want to participate in a competition during the fall, take a look at VEX.

Engineering Projects
 

Hi,
So now when the off - season starts to kick in our team is planning on starting some engineering projects. What projects your team is doing? What suggestions you have on the kinds of projects we should do and are useful?

Re: Engineering Projects
 

This off season we are most likely going to work on team skill building. Things like programming, tool use, 6 wheel drive, etc. One project that we did a few years ago was a farming robot. It would drive around, dig a small trench, dispense seeds, and cover it back up with dirt. We live in a pretty rural area and there is an annual county fair which we displayed it at.

Also, you can look here for ideas:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/se...=4969910&pp=25
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...hreadid=116681
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ght=off+season

Re: Engineering Projects
 

We're planning to get more into iterative design, CAD, and CNC, with a focus on overall build quality (Up to now, our robots frequently end up looking like topheavy 80/20 bowls full of electronic spaghetti)

We've been wanting to build a promo bot for a few years, so that will likey be the major project we're tackling, and in the process, there's been talk of starting on a swerve drive. (The two of those could be combined, swerve is the ideal drive for showing off :D)

Re: Off season projects
 

-We're rebuilding our 2012 bot as our designated 'demo bot'. Frisbees don't do well in close quarters ::ouch:: We're taking this opportunity to teach our programmers C++ as we'll be reprogramming the bot as well to make it easier to control for anyone who want to drive it around.

-Besides that, we've talked about trying swerve again, a tshirt launcher, sheet metal drives, new robot cart, redoing our pits, redoing our driver station, and a few more things... We're meeting next week to talk about this season, and prioritize what we need to accomplish before next January.

Re: Off season projects
 

Our team is working on an encyclopedia on our website of everything a rookie team would need to know about FIRST and building a robot....our programming team is working on vision processing...and our mentors/coach are working on recruiting and building up our underclassmen base

Also there's been talk about:
-re-doing our pit design
-having the programming team learn AutoCAD
-build a new robot cart
-do workshops teaching all of our rookies how to work with tools

Re: Off season projects
 

My team and I are going to build an attachment for our robot that is basically a tshirt launcher but with pneumatics and are other robot parts to help promote our team sponsorship and membership in a cool and fun way!
::ouch:: ::ouch:: :)

Re: Off season projects
 

Team 3484 is working on supplying more sponsors and community outreach. We are also preparing our 2013 robot for some off season events.

However, the big project we are working on is an off road robot that will be able to pull a small aluminum trailer of students in local parades.

Re: Off season projects
 

Here is a link to a picture of our T-shirt launcher http://www.team708.org/uploads/1/4/1...3_orig.jpg?166

Re: Off season projects
 

I can't speak for the team as a whole but the programming department is looking at:

• Potentially switching to Java from LabVIEW as well as redeveloping our LabVIEW code to make it easier to use with Mercurial and SCM through modularization of code
• Continuing Arduino integration for LED control
• Developing an Android FRC scouting app with picklist integration
• Creating a Java program to automatically scrape team data and generate our scouting spreadsheet and picklist equations
• Catching miscellaneous things on fire
• Building a library of common code elements that we have used over the years and publishing it for use by other teams

As well as numerous other activities I have doubtlessly forgotten about.

Re: Off season projects
 

3481 Bronc Botz is currently building our imagining of 148's Nonadrive (pre-2013) drive-train and chassis.

We're using VEX channel and custom sheet-metal... AndyMark Omni-wheels/Colson wheels/West Coast Products Dead Axle Hubs... and building to 2012 chassis size. RED bumpers as a hat-tip to 148.

HOPING things return to pre-2013 size in 2014 season...

--Michael Blake

Re: Off season projects
 

Team 3132 will be spending the majority of our time organising our off season event, the Duel Down Under, as part of the Asia Pacific Invitational, which will have an FLL Open Championship and an FTC Invitational. On top of all of this, we will be training new members.

Re: Off season projects
 

The deavastors will be
fundraising for 2 regional next year
getting ready for the TRR
trying to get as many sponsors as possible
and a super secret project with baylor