"The Little Things" - Helpful hints for all
 

The purpose of this thread is to compile a list of things your team does that may seem small, but really give you a distinct advantage either on or off the field. These can include things your team does, or things you've seen other teams do.

Think pre-season prep, build season, at events, travel plans, Chairman's Award, Sponsor relations...

For example...

- Hot Glue certain electrical connections

- Zip tie battery to main breaker connection

- Send sponsors thank you letters and include a team picture with the robot. A small gesture but it goes a long way.

- Have all team members have input on the Chairman's Award essay and study the final version. You never know who will end up talking to a judge at an event.

Remember that FIRST and CD get a ton of new rookies every year. Think hard about the little things your team may do and don't take anything for granted.

Re: "The Little Things" - Helpful hints for all
 

- There is no situation in FRC where you can safely say "well, I guess we don't need a pick list".

- Don't fix mechanical problems with software, ever.

- Keep your robot and your strategy simple and you won't have to worry nearly as much about almost every problem that plagues FRC robots (weight, CG, reliability, system integration, etc)

- Great teams with great software have control loops. Clever teams without software have pneumatics.

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- Pre-match checklists and pre-flight tests are always necessary. It doesn't matter how well your robot ran in the last match, check everything again. This goes the same for post-match checks.

- Driver training can never be overvalued, and is very commonly undervalued.

- Never stop learning. There is something you can learn from every team, every student, every mentor, you talk to.

- "Custom" does not always mean "better".

- Every student should be knowledgable on every part of the robot. A software student should be able to explain any mechanical part on the robot as well as a mechanical student can explain any other part.

- Take time and design something right the first time. Tweaking should be done to improve, not to make something work.

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The most important part of the robot, regardless of the game, is the drivetrain.

MAKE SURE THE BATTERY DOES NOT FALL OUT

Design things to be much stronger than you think they need to be. When something goes wrong (your robot falls off 2 second level of the pyramid), and your robot doesn't break, it's very impressive to watch

Don't get too attached to an idea. Your first idea is never the best, and 99.99% of the time, there's somebody who can help you make it better. (as JVN says, design is all about iteration.)

At a competition, doing well is not an excuse for not testing the robot. This is why you don't tell your drivers the team's rank until its time for alliance selection.

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Battery management.

Both the robot and the driver station.

I would add to you checklists to check if the driver station is charged. If your battery is suspect, get a replacement. You don't need the driver station to die.

Have a robot battery management plan.

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- Test setup your pit before an event, keep it the same from event to event, it will really speed up repairs if you know where things are.

- Save all your team documents in one place (Dropbox, Google Drive, another cloud or server solution). It's far easier to find something you already have than it is to remake it.

- Standardize your hole sizes and fasteners. We use 3/16" rivets and 10-24 bolts in 13/64" holes, it may not be a perfect solution but it works very well for most FRC robots.

- Limit your building materials: we try to only use a few select standard building materials to actually stock that way we if we need to remake something at competition we have the spare material to build it from. Our list includes 1x1x1/16" square and angle aluminum, 1x1x1/8" angle aluminum, 1/16" polycarb, and .09 sheet aluminum. A few other things creep in but for the most part everything is made from those items.

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Don't trust everything you read on Chief Delphi.
There have been specific rules against the above comment in the robot rules several years.

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Don't use set screws to transfer torque or loads. I even try to avoid them in no load applications such as encoders. Outside of FIRST I only use them in very low load situations, low vibration settings.

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This is in reference to <R65> in the 2013 manual. Standard practice for many teams, including mine, is to apply hot glue to PWM connections. Was this disallowed at any events this year?

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As our teacher says
"when in doubt, roll pin it!"

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To go along with these, mechanical connections beat adhesives and friction every single time.

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Great teams with great software have control loops but prefer pneumatics.

Re: "The Little Things" - Helpful hints for all
 

Fixed.

As for my own contributions:

• Don't implement software changes just before a match, especially if that software has a chance to be stuck in an infinite loop.
• Always check your batteries before a match if possible. CTRE sells a great battery checker if you're willing to shell out $125.
• Rule #34 of Chief Delphi: if a question regarding FIRST robotics exists, there is a thread about it on Chief Delphi.
• Keep track of all students going to a regional, especially when it is out of the country. Use some kind of head-count or buddy-system. If it is out-of-country, make sure that all students have their passports with them.

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Bumpers are a lot easier to deal with if they aren't an afterthought.

The rule you don't read will be the one that gets you--so at least look at all of them.

"But it passed at X" is not a reason for the inspector to pass an illegal robot--particularly if X is not an official event.

Failing to plan is planning to fail. Have a plan for travel and any time not in the venue, even if it's "Free time, be back at point X by time Y".

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Abiding by the rules is a necessity. None of them are optional; they are all strict design constraints that MUST be met in order to compete. Although a good shooter may be more of a differentiating factor between good and bad robots than good bumpers, existing and legal bumpers are more of a necessity to be on the field than an existing shooter is.

As for technical stuff: avoid shoulders, grooves or other features on live shafts that concentrate stress between the driving torque and the load. Putting a snap ring groove between a driving sprocket and arm hub is asking for the shaft to fail where a spacer would do perfectly fine.

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Standardize all your fasteners.

If you need more than a handful of tools to fix your robot you did it wrong.

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-This has been discussed before and there are multiple views, but I believe that crimps are better than soldering. You don't have to wait for irons to heat up(bad during elims) and is hard to mess up. We switched to all crimps this year and have had so many less problems with electrical.

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Utilize the resources that you have.

We don't have access to a CNC machine, or a waterjet, or plasma cutter, or a welder. But we do have a laser cutter capable of cutting plastic, so you will see tons of ABS plastic on our robot.

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Any code with 10 minutes of driver practice is better than PID-controlled omni-directional speed-curved code without driver practice. That being said, leftmotor = joystick1.y and rightmotor = joystick2.y should be the starting point, not the ending point for drive code.

Don't be ashamed to switch to an easier strategy. For example: this year, if you were scoring less than 50% (which many teams were) in the 3-point goal, switch to the 2-point goal.

Never leave a competition before alliance selections have finished.

Don't cause silly penalties.

Make sure that at least 2 programmers understand any given section of code.

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-Put your bumpers as low as reasonable.

-Keep your robot's center of gravity as low as possible.

-Prioritize game piece acquisition over everything except the drivetrain itself.

, Bryan

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Why?

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You're more likely to win pushing matches if you have lower bumpers than your opponents. Part of their weight will shift on to your robot and you will gain traction and they will lose it. It also helps to have stiff bumpers that don't move up and down at all.

Lower bumpers also normally make it harder for your robot to tip over since your at less of an angle when your bumpers hit the ground.

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While I can't speak for Bryan, I can say that the reason our team would like to do this is that lower bumpers are advantageous for CoG reasons, pushing match reasons, and avoiding tipping.

The lower CoG is quite obvious. However, less obvious are the pushing match advantages. During a pushing match, normal force is quite often transferred between the robots. Consider 2 robots with equal weight and traction capabilities, both at 145 lbs with bumpers and battery but different bumper heights. When they engage in a pushing match, it is possible that the one with higher bumpers may transfer some of its weight to the robot with lower bumpers. Now you may have the high bumper robot with 130 lbs of normal force available to "turn into" tractive force, while the low bumper robot might have 160 lbs of normal force to "turn into" tractive force. This means the robot with lower bumpers could have more pushing force due to the increased normal force on its wheels. The ground still supports the total weight of both robots, but not necessarily equally at all points. In addition the robot with higher bumpers may tend to get up-ended in this situation.

It can also help in avoiding tipping. If the bumpers are lower, they will "catch" the robot as it tips more quickly than if they are higher up. I have also seen robots tip such that their support polygon is the frame and the bumpers, which is way less probable with lower bumpers.

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Swarf is the devil. Protect your electronics.

Tug-test all crimps.

Program manual overrides for your fancy code so that when a sensor fails or the mechanism ends up in an unexpected state, the drivers have a way to recover or work around the problem.

Remember your robot is going to have to go through doors in the bag. Plan bumper transportation accordingly.

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Focus on a strong feature of your robot and just try to make it consistent.

You're more likely to get chosen in alliance selections if you have even one feature that makes your robot stand out. Our team's success this year was largely because we had a very consistent 5-disc autonomous. A team we work closely with generally seeded higher than us last year, but didn't have one particular feature they could "sell" to other teams.

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Plan for locations for electronics, compressors, batteries in your design, not as an afterthought.

Good scouting wins matches, great scouting wins competitions.
and related:
Good scouting is not a replacement for a good robot.
But a good robot is also not a replacement for good scouting.

Also in the thread of scouting: if you don't have the resources to scout, because you're a rookie team or have a small team, some other team does, and they are likely to accept the addition of two or three scouts into their scouting team in exchange for data.

And of course, always be graciously professional. GP in winning, GP in losing, GP on and off the field. It will get you further than any robot-related item in FRC.

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I'm sure I can think of more, but a post in the thread reminds me of a major misconception most new teams have.

Playing good defense is not about ramming or pushing your opponent. It's about preventing them from accomplishing what they want to do for as long as possible.

Avoiding defense well is not about out-pushing the defending robot. It is about evading them ask quickly as possible and continuing on to scoring.

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- Talk to people. Talk to people from other teams, talk to people on your team, know what is going on at the event, know what is going on in your own shop. Building connections with other teams can be the difference between playing on Saturday and not. Building connections within your team is the difference between existing and not. People like to work with people they know.

- Welds are light. Rivets are light. Nuts and bolts are heavy. Consider which you prefer on your robot.

- For mechanical: Programmers are your friends.

- For programmers: mechanical are your friends.

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Make electronics very easy to access because you never know when you need to change or replace something.

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Evaluate your needs each year. Don't expect to be able to use a similar setup to a previous year just because it worked then.

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- Label everything you take to competitions. A pen, a few pieces of paper, and some tape can really help. You can easily check which box has what you need and can make other notes on the labels.

- Always take raw material to competitions. You never know what can break. At IRI, our shooter support welds cracked and we had nothing to fix them. Thankfully, 67 had some 1/8th inch thick sheet metal and was awesome enough to let us have some. Even after Battle at the Border, the shooter is still going strong.

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I would have have failed you at inspection when I used to inspect regularly.
See full text of the rule below for everyone elses reference.

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- Listen to peoples' ideas. REALLY listen.

- My ideas are not better than OUR ideas. No matter how good I may think they are, we can make it better.

- Ask questions, don't make assumptions. Then listen to the answers to the questions you ask.

- Don't let your drive coach and best asset go to Texas.

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- Don't be afraid to ask for help with the fear that it will "reveal your design". Honestly, there aren't a lot of unique ideas in FRC, and it's extremely rare that an FRC team would have been able to dominate with an idea if only they had thought of it. The help you need is far more valuable than the imaginary competitive advantage you get revealing that your shooter uses a bucket or that your hanger is passive.

- 4 CIMs is the minimum for a competitive drivetrain, excluding some edge cases that probably don't apply to your robot.

- In many years, the specific design you choose isn't as important as the amount of development, iteration, and practice time you put into perfecting it.

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1.) Have tight, well built bumpers that match the FIRST logo color scheme. Use stencils to paint the numbers on so that they all match. Take time to make sure that said numbers are on straight. Does this necessarily make your robot function better? No. Do I consider this necessary? Yes.

2.) Have at least one "cool", "unique", or "ridiculous" looking component of your robot. Anything that identifies you is automatically going to put you a little higher in people's minds. It seems wrong in principle to think that a RI3D robot with spray painted parts is more likely to get picked than an equally performing RI3D robot without them but its true.

3.) Maintain athleticism in the robot. This is a sport, the robot is an athlete. Try to accomplish tasks smoothly and consistently rather than violently. The best teams this year pulled into the feeder station gracefully and quickly to load as opposed to crashing into the wall coming in and slamming on the joysticks pulling out. Don't make a weak robot, but sometimes more power is not what you need.

4.) Be friendly and talk to other teams. If everyone knows your name, you're doing a good job. Like point 1, does it make your robot perform better? No. Will talking to other teams and learning about their robots and how their team works in general benefit your team more than looking like a buffoon dancing to cotton-eye joe (credit to Karthik on that one)? Yes. If you have no assignments or jobs at a competition, watch some matches, cheer for some other teams, make friends. Create a team presence at the competition.

Re: "The Little Things" - Helpful hints for all
 

Here's a couple actually helpful ones:

-Inform the students to never talk to the drivers about their driving at a competition. Criticism from the other students will destroy your driver's confidence and they will question who to listen to. Let everyone know that your drive coach is the only person to make any driving comments to so everything is filtered and clear when it gets to the students.

-Never be afraid to break out the sawz-all. Most top teams have at one point realized they headed down the wrong path and were smart enough to admit it and srap everything to become competitive. If you aren't willing to do this be prepared to get left in the dust ofthe teams that adapt and improve every event they go to.

-Don't reinvent everything, LOOK AT OLD DESIGNS!!!

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The build season isn't really six weeks long, and your withholding allowance is your best friend. Use it to continue iterating on a mechanism, or add a new mechanism to your robot. It can be difficult to keep yourself motivated after the six weeks is over, but you would be amazed how much can be changed between events. Never stop improving.

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- Networking, Networking, Networking. I know other have said how it's important to talk to others in terms of competition, and this is totally true. People tend to work with people they know, so make those connections, they will come in handy. Even if they don't help you for the event your at, I'm sure that connection will be useful at event later in the season or in future years come Saturday afternoon.

Also for both students and mentors sake, networking is extremely useful to help you at competition but also for your team outside of competition and for you personally. By talking to other teams, volunteers, and planning volunteers, you might just find a new sponsor for your team, discover new outreach opportunities, make contacts to carry into your career, or land an internship for the summer.

There are so many great people involved in FIRST, so try to reach out and meet a lot of them.

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- Standardize your parts, drivetrains, materials, tools, pneumatics, everything. The FRC season is already a pain when it comes to manipulation systems, DT specs, packaging, etc. so, why make the game harder than you have to?

- Experiment in the off-season. I see too many teams that want to 'try item X' in the FRC season. Now, if it's for a manipulation system, that's understandable, but trying something fancy during the FRC season is unnecessary.

- Set realistic expectations of the game. That is to say that when it comes to guessing how well your opponents will run, always aim high. Overestimating your opponents is always better than underestimating them.

- Talk outside the team (aka network). Often times, a group of people can get a scary case of group-think, where the group tends to follow the ideas of one person or tends to stick to one idea. Talking to a 3rd party (parnets, other mentors, etc.) will give you new perspective and help you to break out of that group think.

- Learn from the past (games and teams). Look into similar games, look into why teams made the decisions that they did. The past is a window into the future.

- Sunny G.

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-When designing, look at old designs that worked really well and modify them to your needs. Like our OCCRA team looked at many 2012 robots for this years game which requires shooting a ball.

-Floor pick up is not that important. The good teams in the 2011 season and 2013 season never picked up from the floor

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A lot of great stuff in this thread! A few things to add/repeat:

- Effective scouting and good strategy can make a significant difference in the performance of your robot/team throughout an event. In eliminations, getting the right 3rd robot and carefully understanding the strengths and weaknesses of all 6 robots on the field can make a tremendous difference.

- Don't focus all your energy into one subsystem to the exclusion of other dependent subsystems. Yes, drivetrain comes first, but don't focus all your time on the shooter (or arm/elevator) only to learn that you can't score game pieces you don't have because you failed to design an efficient and reliable acquisition system!

- Do your best to thoroughly understand the game in the first few days... and keep up with the subtle game changes/evolutions throughout the season! Designing and building the pinnacle of technical achievement won't help you on Saturday afternoon if your robot doesn't play the right game. Also, understand that Week 1 and Championships may be two dramatically different games.

I disagree with all of the above... I would agree that floor pickup should never be a forgone conclusion (and maybe that's what you meant, but not what came out). A lot of successful teams didn't use floor pickup in 2013.. and didn't have any reason to change that. A few teams were successful without floor pickup in 2011... and more teams definitely could have, but most teams over-estimated its value. But in both years there were highly successful teams that relied on floor pickup to implement their strategy.

You need only look as far back as 2012 to see a game in which floor pickup was nearly critical to being successful.

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I completely disagree with that. There are no 2012 robots that would have been competitive without a floor pickup. It is completely game dependent and you should never write off an idea. This year many people wrote off a robot without an intake. Every previous year intakes have been super useful(2011 is arguable) and even this year intakes gave a huge point and seeding advantage.

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I'll pile on to this.

No robot necessarily needs to do every part of the game. The jack of all trades is often the master of none.

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+1

I wasn't around for 2011, but from what I've it was very rare to see a good team without a floor pickup. In 2012 you basically needed a floor pickup to be competitive. In 2013, ~50% of the top tier teams had floor pickups, as opposed to the ~5% of all teams that had one. And then look back to 2009, 2008, 2006, 2000, and I'm sure some other games I'm not familiar with.

2 conclusions:

1. Don't make assumptions about the game you haven't seen yet.
2. Even if a certain strategy isn't quite as effective as others, if you are the only robot at a competition who can execute that strategy successfully, your chances of getting picked are pretty high.

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-Mid competition, if your strategy is not working, try something else.

We had trouble recovering shooter RPM after each shot. It took an unreasonable amount of time between 3 point shots, because the rpm had to recover to almost exactly what it was.

We tried shooting 2 pointers, and found we were far better at it because the lack of need for high precision. Our shooter could fire so fast, from the back of the pyramid all 4 disks were in the air at once before the first struck the chains. We could score 2 pointers far faster and in far greater quantity than before. Too bad we didn't try this Before Eliminations, or we may have been selected for an even better alliance.

Also it did look pretty impressive seeing a robot spewing disks

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Just thought I'd add to / play devil's advocate with a few of the responses in this thread.

Lots of people piled on to this response, probably going a bit too far. The way you wrote this it's not factually correct or great advice. Almost every competitive team in 2011 had a floor loader. This isn't to say that a simpler robot that did not pick up off the floor couldn't be effective. In fact, one of them, 1503, was extremely effective.

In 2013, you *definitely* didn't need a floor loader to be competitive. Many of the best teams didn't have one.

A good takeaway from this should be "Game tasks are far less essential than you think they are." There are very few tasks that a robot MUST do to be competitive. Don't fall into the trap of "if we want to keep up with team XXXX, we have to climb / floor load / whatever"

Be weary of conflating correlation with causation here. The implication here is that the top teams picked up off the floor primarily, which just isn't true.

Using Top 25 as a proxy for "top tier teams", only 9 or 10 of them had a floor pickup that was used extensively in teleop. Another 5 or 6 had pickups almost exclusively used in autonomous mode. Of the top 25, 18-19 of them used the feeder station as their primary source of discs in teleop.

The top teams had intakes for autonomous mode, and many of those teams picked up off the floor in teleop, yes. But having a floor pickup instead of a human loader, with no autonomous, could actually make you a *less* effective scorer depending on the speed of your floor pickup and driver ability. I saw it many times this year - a team spends 20-30 seconds chasing 4 stray discs while a human loaded cycler runs home, gets 4, and runs back before the floor pickup is done.

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I did write a rebuttal for Chris Is Me, but I realized that I would just be derailing this thread even further. Let's try to get back on track.

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- Although easy, using Google searches and YouTube videos during the first few days of the build season may not provide the "best" design and/or strategy for the game challenge.

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Use two different colors of pneumatic tubing. One color for the port responsible for extending the piston and another color for the retraction port. That way it's easy to trace the tubing and make repairs. I really wish we had done this on our 2013 bot, we replaced our shooter at our third regional and it probably took an extra 15 minutes to redo the plumbing because all the tubing was red.

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Add about .003" to the center distance between gears in gearboxes. It can help the gearboxes run well with the lower quality gears and the practically non-existent wear-in-times that FRC sees.

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Design with the intent that everything can be replaced quickly! You never know what may go wrong.

Don't use bolts to fasten electronics that may need to be replaced on a dime (motor controllers and sidecars).

Think of how you can save weight when you design parts, not when you put the robot on the scale.

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Design around consistency and Murphy's Law.

That is to say that if a design works 75% of the time in the shop, chances are that it'll work less in practice, and even less in competition. A good design is a consistent design.

For the past 3-4 years, I've been a part of machines that were not consistent, and at some points, it got so bad, that I was more scared of our machine jamming than of our opponents. That's when you know it's bad.

- Sunny G.

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-The Chief Delphi is your best friend. You can learn anything from here! especially during offseason. So make sure someone on the team is keeping up with it daily.

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If you only focus on one thing for a robot, make it the drive train. There is a wealth of information available concerning them over the decades of competition. It's a lot easier to improve, swap out, or just lightly iterate on a game-specific mechanism than scrap a drive base mid-season. You get a passable one out of the box with easy upgrades available to peruse through online. Plenty of universal systems like WCD and other configurations are available to easily adapt to the current year's limits, and there is a design calculator there to let you plug and play to figure out if your idea will work. It's a lot of little things you can do on a drive base to make a big impact.

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Or use this handy dandy calculator from WCP which adds things in for you.

At the same time, any drivetrain that takes longer than 2-3 days to finish is more complex than you need (this ignores swerve because if you can only focus on one part of your robot, you shouldn't be doing swerve). The Kitbot on Steroids can be built in a half an hour if a team knows what they're doing, and it's not hard to read up how. 3 days for any custom drive should be plenty.

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When I said floor pick up was not that important, I wasn't saying that it was useless or you don't need one!

Floor pick up is really only important when things are easy to pick up. Frisbees were hard so it wasnt important. 2012 basketballs were really easy to pick up, so you pretty much needed one. And in 2011, Most teams did have one, yes, but, I remember the cycling teams like The Thunder Chickens and The Gator Bots were much faster than trying to pick up tubes (mainly because they were so light that they moved out of the way easy)

As for years before that, I cant speak, I have only been around since '11

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I think that the team you are really thinking of is Spartonics 1503.

I also think that the better way to phrase this to make everyone happy is that a complex strategy and design is not necessary. Keeping things simple and leaving the in game thinking to a minimum is more effective than swamping drivers with options that they will never use or, even worse, use ineffectively.

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Another important thing to consider is the mechanism of the game piece return to the field. In 2012, game pieces were placed in the inbounding station AFTER your opponents had already scored them. If a robot could only acquire game pieces from the inbounding station and not the floor, that robot would be choosing to generally play from behind.

In 2010, balls were returned by the alliance that scored them, which made the recycling strategy executed by 469 effective.

In 2011 and 2013, game pieces remained as scored for the rest of the match. Any new game pieces introduced could be received directly from a feeding station, meaning that this would be a viable strategy as an exclusive method of acquiring game pieces.

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Building on this in 2011 you were allowed to throw tubes on the field during teleop. In 2013 white discs were not allowed to be thrown.

If white discs were allowed to be thrown during teleop (ignoring safety issues) we probably would have seen more ground pickup robots.

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What if they didn't have the human feeding stations this year. Intakes would have been pretty important then. The point is that you cannot make a generalization about a manipulator because it is totally game dependent.

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Then it would have been a much different game.


I'll make several generalizations about next year right now (and I have no more knowledge of the game than you do at this point).


Why can I make these bets? Because I'm betting against the teams not the game. The simple fact is in 2012 I saw more teams focus on picking up a ball from the floor for 1.5 minutes in a match... But their shooter was useless. They would have been better off optimizing a human load only approach. It's all allocation of resources.

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Well any ways, back to the topic.

Make sure your motors wont trip the breakers or burn out the motors. For drive trains that can mean having a gear that is traction limited and for other mechanisms is may a form of stall detection.

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This would have been more important a couple years back, but it's still relevant:

Whatever the maximum dimension(s) are, build the robot 1/2" to 1" undersized... just in case your measurement happens to differ from the inspectors' measurement. They WILL make you shrink the robot!

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keep the design simple. the fewer moving parts that can break the better.

design for serviceability. you shouldn't have to this to get to a bolt.

pick your driver before the season and design the robot to fit their driving style so you get the most out of your machine. i've seen too many teams with mecanum drive, never really use it. as an ex driver who has a very aggressive "in your face" driving style, a 13fps single speed 4cim robot with average traction was suboptimal for how i drove.

Re: "The Little Things" - Helpful hints for all
 

Weight (beyond just making inspection) really does make a difference. We drove noticeably faster with our offseason intake off rather than on. Not everyone wants to build a 90lb robot, but those that do will accelerate much faster than the vast majority of teams.

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Also don't underestimate the height to CG has on handling and general feel to the driver. From the minor end of weight transfer front > back (but no angular change) all the way to enough weight transfer to cause angular change it's all varying levels of annoying to the driver.

This effect is magnified during turns. We've had drivers complain about tall robots having weird turning characteristics during accelerating turns, and I'm certain this is affected by weight transfer.

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If you have old crap in the shop that you're almost certainly never going to need or want, throw it out. Do that every year.

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Or recycle it. We took scrap aluminum to a recycler in town, where they pay $0.50/lb for Aluminum.
I don't remember the prices for copper and steel, but they buy it

Overall, we made $100 off of 2 KOP bins of little chips and pieces too small to be used. Not a huge amount, but it buys a pizza party.

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If you don't know something, don't be afraid to ask.

If you have students with nothing to do, and no extra hands to teach them something, have a list of things on hand for them to do.

I created this document for my team, just for that purpose: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...2dtMwW8T4/edit

Feel free to make a copy of this and edit it to fit your own team. (And feel free to give me suggestions to add!)

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Good point. We actually give our aluminum to the metals teacher, who does aluminum casting/molding in his class. He has quite a few aluminum ingots made from former robot parts. But yeah, we don't throw metals into the trash.

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Unless you are 973's driver, who can manage to drive a robot on one wheel without tipping it over.

Additional tip: Always have a way to keep in contact with every team member, you'll never know when you need a certain person in the pits or down on the field.

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Buy a label maker and label all of the drawers and boxes in the shop.

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-Label, label, label. We label our tool cart and cupboards. This makes it so much easier for anyone to grab you a part. Our bolt cases has CADed bolts taped to the top so we can quickly grab a bolt and know for sure what size it is.

-Keep things clean, whether it be your shop, pit, or robot. So many things are preventable when you stay clean. Less safety hazards, better pits, less malfunctioning parts. Someone have nothing to do? They clean.

-Network. I have had two years in FIRST and I already know so many people on other teams. For those new to Chief Delphi, networking really does help you in the long run. Maybe you'll be picked for an alliance because of it.

-Teach. If a team member asks you a question, answer them. Don't say "I don't know" or "Because I said so". If they're taking the time to ask, help them understand. If you don't know, tell them where they might find an answer. No one likes to do things blindly.

-Scout well. Never blow off scouting. It doesn't matter if you're placed last in your competition all day, you never know what will happen. Scouting not only helps in alliance selection, but in every match you play.

-If you get stressed, take a break. Too many people try to work when they're obviously frazzled. When you work while stressed, errors are made, and the stress increases.

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Ziptie-ing batteries is a big deal. it seems like the connectors are so tight that they'd never get unplugged but we lost an eliminations match because of it. It may actually have saved us the next game though because our opponents wasted the entire match trying to knock our battery out (we ziptied it though).

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THE LITTLE 1/2" BUMP

It is a problem for us almost every year!

2011: The 1/2" bump around the mini bot pole: Made us Red-card many times for contacting the pole above the red line

2012: Didn't affect us much, but our mecanums got stuck on the Key sometimes

2013: The bump around the pyramid legs: When we ran into it, it destroyed our scoop many times. More than it should've

-PREPARE FOR THE BUMP-

Re: "The Little Things" - Helpful hints for all
 

I remember a team having a problem with it in 2010, too. Funny part is, it was just the runup to the Bump itself...

And it's called out in the Manual almost every year.

--The entire Game Manual (and the Administrative Manual) is important. If you only read the "important parts", you'll probably miss some little detail--like the small bumps next to field elements.

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As mentioned above, make your electronics easily accessible and strategically place them. At the Las Vegas competition last year, our robot was small and lightweight. Our electronics were so scrunched up, it was hard for more than one person to work on it. Also, the shooter motors were in the way to make some arrangements. Also, place electronic components strategically to ease confusion. Place the motor controllers near the motors themselves, or at least in the direction of the motor. If you are arranging your motor controllers in a square, have the front left drive motor in the front left, etcetera. Also, think about overheating. We didn't have a problem with this because we had an overall good electronics arrangement, if too many electronics are in a too small, enclosed space, they will overheat. Also, if you are using a coprocessor, like a Raspberry Pi or an oDroid, place it so you can cool it very effectively. That way, you will be able to overclock it more without worrying about heat damage.

Also, VERY IMPORTANT:
DO NOT CUT CORNERS! Do everything completely and don't skip steps, like skipping wearing safety goggles when testing a shooter prototype. Things happen and it is a mess!

Also, keep plenty of time to debug on your robot. You should spend at least an entire build season day debugging code and making sure it works. Make sure the entire team knows what you're doing, even if it isn't what they don't do. For example, if you are putting vision tracking, let the team know how you wish to tackle it. Not only will people be more comfortable with you doing it, but people who have done it before may step up and offer you a helping hand

As mentioned before, know every part of the robot. I, myself, am very curious and like to go to other team members who do not seem that busy at the moment and ask what their robot does and how it works. This also improves the reputation of the team.

ANOTHER IMPORTANT THING:
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT!
GRACIOUS PROFFESIONALISM: Engineers must have a good amounts of this. It is what brings them forward and gets people to like them
Shake hands with others at competiotions
Cheer other teams even if they are an opponent
Be nice and welcome others' ideas.
Offer a helping hand to anyone who needs help. This could be just getting a tool for them.
Tell the Truth! Do not give someone a false positive. That could be catastrophic

NEVER BOO OR MAKE CYNICAL REMARKS. It probably is anyways against the rules, but if it isn't, never make fun of a robot or say anything rude or bad. That team spent it's time working on it's robot and they should be recognized!

This all above, I wish to implement to my behavior this year

Re: "The Little Things" - Helpful hints for all
 

With Team 1165's great engineering skills, we designed a battery holder that snugly held the battery while allowing it to be completely accessible. Also, I prefer velcro over zip ties because velcro is easier to use when you want to reuse it. Even better of an idea, though also dangerous, would be to place a verry powerful NiB magnet on the battery and the robot. If powerful enough, it will restrict the axes of movement but allow the battery to move enough so it doesn't get destroyed by the vibrations. On our battery restraint, even if it was ope, it would have protected the battery from the highest g-forces possibly (falling from the third rung)

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He's not talking about zip-tying the battery into place; he's talking about the practice of wrapping a zip tie around the Anderson connector that links the battery with the robot. This mechanically prevents the battery from being unplugged.

I don't think we should be suggesting to teams that they affix very strong magnets to their robot and battery. Among many, many other issues: How do you attach the battery to the magnet? And if you know how to do that, why can't you attach the battery to the robot that way?

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Reusable zip ties work really well on the battery connectors. If you spend a lot of time making a fancy battery box, the team will take it off when the robot weighs too much, so simple and light solutions are always good. However, a single zip tie is NOT STRONG ENOUGH to restrain a battery. If the robot is hit hard enough (like falling off the tower), the battery will break the zip tie, and could hit something important (like the power distribution board).
To add to the list-
Always make sure you maintain your batteries well.
Do not leave a bunch of batteries in a place where they will go from <32*F to >80*F.
Make sure that all of your team knows never to lift the batteries by the connector. Someday, the terminals will be ripped right off of the battery.

Also, don't ever charge a battery that you suspect may be damaged/dropped. The battery will expand, get stuck in your charger cart, and leak stinky acid all over the place.

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The battery holder was a very simple design and I think it weighs ~1 pound or less. It was just a half cage of aluminum lined with foam to grip and protect the battery. This was mounted on the outside of the robot chassis, making it VERY accessible. Also, to quench any doubts we had about whether it would hold, we placed a piece of velcro on top to make sure it stays put

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The thing is, you never notice how important any one of the little things until it bites you in the bud at the worst possible time.



Final 2 at CalGames. The box in the lower right of the picture is our battery box (the real battery was still attached, we drove across the field and hung with it laying on the ground). Had we put a few zipties in the box between matches, we would have likely been able to make up the 16 points that separated our alliances, and could have taken the other alliance to a third match.

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Wow! I'm surprised there isn't battery acid all over the place. If I can get team permission, I will post a photo of our battery holder. It was bolted on!

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-during fundraiser and off season make folks bring lunch!! and save on pizza!

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Velcro battery connector:


Robot handles from aircraft cable and pneumatic tubing (1 at each corner of the robot):

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Attaching square tube to plate using 3 roll pins and threaded rod:
(Also, identical drive plates so you can't mix them up on assembly - left/right/inside/outside are identical)

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Quick release bumper mounts:

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Drivetrain gearbox integrated between drive rails:


Chain tensioner from off-centre drilled shaft:


Quick disconnect spade terminals on speed controller:


Surgical tubing to connect encoders and pots to shafts:


Mount PDB on spacers so you can run wires UNDER it (instead of around/over it):

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Standard pigtail lengths on every motor w/ Anderson connectors:


Extra solenoids and speed controllers on the board:
-If a solenoid fails, we swap the tubes over to the spare solenoid and change the mapping in programming. Unused spare solenoids are plugged with tubes that have been folded over and zip-tied. This is a cheap plug that doesn't leak.
-If a speed controller fails, we disconnect the motor from the failed speed controller, and run an extension wire to a spare motor controller. Because there are quick disconnect spade terminals on all speed controllers, this is can be done very quickly. Programmers then remap to the spare controller.

Re: "The Little Things" - Helpful hints for all
 

Thanks a lot for posting those, just awesome stuff.

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Mr. Lim, you rock! Diggin the PDB on spacers. That's going on the next robot

I'm just the messenger for a lot of these. Mr. Stehlik on 610 deserves the credit for coming up with most, if not all of these tips and tricks. The students worked out the details to do the implementations. We don't build particularly flashy robots on 610, but a lot of these little unseen details are some of the things I'm most proud of our students for doing. It's not glamorous work (who really wants to crimp standard length pigtails on every sensor and motor? Or machine bumper brackets?) But I think they all make a big difference, and the students who are willing to roll up their sleeves and take on these "little big things" should be celebrated.

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Not sure how I feel about this one.

I would think the twisting slack the surgical tubing has would be a bad thing?

There is a wood dowel inserted in the surgical tubing the entire length except for the ends that slip over the shafts.

We normally mount the encoder right next to the shaft, so the surgical tube length is very small.

This year we couldn't do this because our CIMs were mounted close together, and we couldn't fit the encoder between them. We borrowed the wood dowel workaround from 188, who had done this a few years prior. I was skeptical at first, but when the guys at 188 said it ended up working great, we went ahead with it too. In our implementation, the encoders are held in place by a floating encoder mount. It uses the cylindrical shape of the CIMs, the fact that the encoders are to big to fit between the CIMs, and the slight tension from the surgical tubing to hold the encoders in place.

Re: "The Little Things" - Helpful hints for all
 

I'll second that, as long as you have the surgical tubing properly attached to the encoder and the shaft it works great. We always ziptie the surgical tubing on both ends.

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The things 610 does to make the little things easier are the reason they are World Champions. Also it took me a second to determine why the PDB was not in a case. Its a beta board. But lifting the PDB is a really good idea, and I like it alot.

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I'd seen varirations of everything, but the spacers on the PDB and the redundant solenoids and motor controllers are tiny little things that really blew my mind. Those are both literally very tiny things that can make a world of difference. I'm keeping those for later.

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Our Electrical team did a great job with their setup. However, since we had a very compact and low cog robot that can climb to the third rung and that can shoot frisbees to the high goal, our electrical board was scrunched inside the worst possible places! However, this was just a design flaw. Also, VELCRO! VELCRO is a friend!. We velcro'd many things, inclugind the bridge and the drivers. Mostly every electrical equipment except the crio and the ds. The velcro allowed us the move the electrical part to access another part. We could simply move the bridge to get full access to the shooter board. Also, our robot was quite modular. We could completely remove the shooter by unfastening a couple of bolts!

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OK,
I have been asked to weigh in on R65 so here goes. Yes, gluing is in violation of this rule (tampering includes ... gluing) but I think it is more important to look at the practice and it's repercussions. Hot glue is 'HOT' by nature and the devices you are trying to glue are not. Often the glue does not adhere to the parts in the way you want so you have a false sense of security thinking the parts are secure when they are not. They just have a big blob of useless glue attached to them. Gluing connectors into a speed controller can render the $100+ part useless when someone rips the #24 or #26 wires out of the PWM connector. If the person who is applying the glue gets a little over indulgent, the glue gets down inside the device either damaging parts as it is applied or by holding in heat that otherwise would be dissipated in the atmosphere. Rapid heating and cooling can tear parts from the circuit board. The result is the same, early failure of the internal component. We have allowed teams to perform their own repairs on electrical parts but gluing parts to them makes repairs almost impossible. As I say to people all the time, "Think for a minute and I bet you will come up with a better idea." We mount everything on perf stock. It is easy to work and all of our parts simply tie wrap to the stock. For PWM cables, we take the wire down to the deck and tie it in place. The tension holds the connector in place and a pair of wire cutters will remove both the connector and controller in the event of a failure. Gluing also makes it almost impossible to reuse the parts next year.
My Murphy's Law corollary is "Something will always go wrong at the worst possible time, on Einstein." You want to win and that means being able to change failed devices quickly. As posted earlier, we use quick connect tabs on our controllers. These are available in boxes of 100 from Digikey. So no other tools but a wire cutter is needed to change out a controller and you will have no dropped screws to look for. If everything is labeled (using colored tape or with real labels) then there is no thought needed to swap out a suspect part be it electrical mechanical or pneumatic.

Re: "The Little Things" - Helpful hints for all
 

An excellent idea!

Indeed: use industrial-strength velcro, and a little extra wire. Being able to pull a speed controller (or CRio, or sidecar, or solenoid, or any other electronic component) off of the robot without disconnecting anything, where it can be jimmied/fiddled-with/tightened/etc, is a godsend for fast electronics repair! And it holds up great even under competition impacts--if anything, it helps with shock absorption.

Mr. Lim's ideas are all excellent, too. We do the additional speed controllers and solenoids thing, but never thought of mounting the PDB on spacers!

Some of 1551's standard practices that I haven't seen (or glossed over):

--keep a detailed inventory of what you have, in what quantity, and where it's stored.

--clean up every night, even if you're just coming back in the morning.

--do off-season projects that require design, and have potential applicability to FRC (manipulators, drive trains, etc). Include but don't limit to improvements on the previous year's robot.

--if you can't build two robots, at least build two drivetrains, and give one to your drivers as fast as possible.

--have tryouts. Some people think they're much better drivers than they are, and vice-versa.

--when a student says they don't handle pressure well, don't put them on the drive team.

--solder, don't crimp. (Or solder AND crimp!) (Yes, I know this contradicts other advice in this thread... As two people, get three different answers! You should also have quick crimp connectors available for really fast, omg-it's-timeout-and-we're-in-the-finals repairs.) On that note:

--invest in a high-quality crimping tool.

--consider tensioned steel cable for upper mechanical structure. It's very light, and somewhat annoying to work with, but can provide amazing strength and stability for almost no weight. But if you use it, use swedges with a good swedge crimper, and turnbuckles to account for expansion.

--invest in a mini-mill and mini-lathe for competition. Mount them on a cart, use that cart for (labeled) storage of all your bits and bobbins. I can't tell you how much use these devices have seen at FLR and Buckeye, much of it for other teams--and it keeps our pit organized as well!

--build homework/dinner time into each build night, and have a quiet room for students to work until they're done with their schoolwork; but be vigilant about off-goofing and shenaniganery!

--invite your sponsors to everything you do. Everything.

GREAT THREAD! Thanks for starting it!