Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Team 254, NASA Ames Robotics "The Cheesy Poofs", proudly presents our 2014 robot: Barrage.

Barrage will compete at the Central Valley Regional, Waterloo Regional, Silicon Valley Regional, and FIRST Championship.

Team 254 is sponsored by NASA Ames Research Center, Lockheed Martin, The Mercadante Family, Ooyala, TR Manufacturing, Qualcomm, HP, West Coast Products, The Magarelli Family, The Yun Family, Google, Modern Machine, The Gebhart Family, Aditazz, Cisco Meraki, Vivid-Hosting, Nvidia, BAE Systems, Gilbert Spray Coat, Pacific Coast Metal, S&S Welding, Good Plastics, Team Whyachi, Applied Welding, World Metal Finishing, The Jimenez Family, and Bellarmine College Preparatory.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Oh. My. Travus.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Awesome!

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Once again another beautiful machine. Can't wait to see her up close this Friday.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

That. Auto. Wow!

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

such robot

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Not available in my location... NO!

http://puu.sh/7hXdC.png

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

At first I thought it was frame-by-frame video...then it dawned on me that that's actually a 2 sided pickup...

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

quick question, how do you guys plan on doing 3 ball auto if other robots need to be touching the balls they're using for their auto shots?

also HYPE #254BLAZEIT

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Gregor, I had the same reaction.

The buildup then...

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Great looking bot!

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Give it a few minutes and try again. Sorry about that.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

We plan on doing the three ball auto as shown in the video. Our alliance partners will be touching the balls near the intakes.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Works now. Thanks guys.

Awesome video better robot. Very impressed as always.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

But how did you get the wood to look so shiny?

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

15 seconds into the video you can see the mega pneumatic. It has a baby pneumatic attached for the latch. The back wall for shooting is latched and stationary, except for when they want to open it?

Holy Catch Batman... :eek:

*My only question: Is there hot detection for path selection, or is it 3 hot/3 not?*

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Fancy editing software. Pat must be pretty good at it.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

gotcha, them touching the others balls seemed more possible after rewatching the video. Awesome job as usual!

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

I love the catcher and rear intake. Sweet looking robot as always.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

I really hope it's built strong enough...

Knowing you guys, it probably is, but be careful. There's a real danger in your intake system using a pneumatic cylinder like that. If your intake system takes a lateral hit, say "bye-bye" to the cylinder shaft. Fortunately, you've got another on the other side.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Anyone have a mirror? Won't load for me.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Incredible ... as always

EDIT - Quick question for you. What material is that on the rollers? I've seen teams use it before and it seems pretty effective but I've never bothered to find out what it is.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Again, a perfect example of simplicity being genious!

I hate it when we over think things!;)

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

G5
For ROBOTS starting in the white ZONE, the TEAM may preload one (1) of their ALLIANCE’s BALLS such that the BALL is touching their ROBOT.

For ROBOTS starting in their GOALIE ZONE the TEAM may decide if the BALL is: staged between the TRUSS and the ZONE LINE and not contacting an ALLIANCE partner, or removed from the FIELD for the MATCH.

If a ROBOT does not report to a MATCH, its ALLIANCE may decide if the BALL is: staged between the TRUSS and the ZONE LINE and not contacting an ALLIANCE partner, or removed from the FIELD for the MATCH.


Doesn't necessarily have to be touching.


Awesome robot from Team 254 :eek:

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Just noticed the catcher...

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

My Jaw Dropped. Wow, that was amazing.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Awesome robot. I love how the intakes can hold the ball on the bumper. This robot built for rough gameplay: no way that ball is gonna get knocked out, high shot release and able to shoot with intakes retracted.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Wow.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1DzZ7oShl4

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Fantastic robot as always. I'm sure a lot of qualification matches against this bot will be over in that first 10 seconds. Might even be the year that we see someone beat the 2056/1114 combo.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Wow, amazing robot!

I guess the skystalker video had some truth to it with the wheel shooter.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

3 hot.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

I figured as much. :)

What methods do you use for compensating shots with under-inflated and grossly over-inflated balls?

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Absolutely speechless. That robot is beautiful! I cannot wait to see you guys compete.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Not shooting from 18' away. :)

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Do you guys have a picture of it yet? I'd love to be able to use it as one of my desktop wallpapers.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

What keeps the tubing spinning on the shaft? Is the friction alone enough to get the job done or is there some kind of mechanical latch holding it on?

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

A lot of friction. The material isn't going anywhere. We had to be creative to get it onto the shaft in the first place.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Best wood robot I've ever seen.

Actual question though, do you think the strong backspin on the balls will cause issue with the balls bouncing back out of the goals or have you already tested whether or not this is an issue.

#clapclap

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

And you wonder why they're going to compete against a team that has never lost a regional the last year they'll be playing regionals...

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

We have had the horizontal bars behind our goals all season, and the arc of the shot has been optimized with this in mind. We have not noticed a lot of bounce backs.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

OH. MY. ROBOT.
I'm sooooo excited to meet the bot at Waterloo, it is GORGEOUS #suchrobot #muchwow

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Very cool. It's always details like these that set 254's robots apart.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Liked what I saw earlier in the season and liked what I saw this weekend. Hopefully we can have some fun in a match or more at CVR.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

I cried for 20 mins straight.:(

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

It is actually super soft surgical tubing, 1.5" OD, from Mcmaster. (the urethane posted about earlier was used on previous robots)

-Paul Ventimiglia

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Great bot!

What is the shooter wheel made of?

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

I'm curious to the purpose of the two cylinders attached to the "hood" of the shooter. As far as I can tell, the piece looks to be rigidly mounted, so they don't appear to be a way of retracting or changing the angle on the hood.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

It took me a while too but there is a linkage up there to move part of the hood out of the way. My guess is for truss shots.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

I've been watching this video for the past 15 minutes trying to even remotely decipher how your shooting mechanism works but have not figured out an answer, how does it work?

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

I would also guess that it is to help with catching the ball.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

I'm pretty sure most of their high goal scoring will be directly up against the player station wall. Because they put backspin on the ball they can likely fire the ball into the top of the goal pretty hard and make it in. If this is the case then the that use case would be what the fold back hood is primarily for.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

To all the Poofs (and there do seem to be a lot of you these days):
Beautiful robot. Absolutely beautiful. If you had unveiled it last week I might have questioned some of the tradeoffs you made, but after playing week 1 I'm convinced you had incredible foresight.

Many other teams will struggle to play catchup and implement some of the things you've been planning for since kickoff.

I love the over-center linkage. That is my favorite detail. :)

I'm sorry I won't get the chance to see it in person.

-John

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Wow, I'm loving your design considerations. Did a conversation like this happen at some point?

"It's going to be a brutally physical game"
-"How about we put on 2 intakes and release the ball at the highest point we can."
"Sounds good. Lets max out the auto points too."

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

And then the conversation led to... lets use as much pneumatics as we can to make it all work... better yet, lets mount pneumatics on pneumatics!

Great work, beautiful bot, can't wait to see it in action at some point!

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

I discounted early on the notion of a three-ball hot auton.

Wow, I was dead wrong. You guys can actually shoot in 5 seconds.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

What kind of drive train was that? I didn't get a good look at the drive base in the video.

Looks like a fantastic machine. I can't wait to see this beauty at championship. :D

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Wow. I am sad that I won't be able to see this robot in waterloo. :-(

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Beautiful bot!!

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

What type of hexacopter were you guys using? My first though was a dji flame wheel but it is really hard to tell.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

I don't have any insider info, but I'd bet Dean Kamen's denim it's their perennially reliable WCD.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

im really curious as to the purpose of the latch on the cylinders that i assume allow it to open up to catch. why do you need the latch, seems a odd place to put one unless it allows you to make minute adjustments to the shooter compression?

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

My intial thought is that they're spring release pistons in an effort to save air.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

I am going to assume it is because that piston appears to be actuate the backboard of the shooter, probably to assist with catching, so the latch prevents it from moving at all during the shot.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

That might be true. I'd also wager it's because of the lever arm between those pistons and the shooter arc plates. Given that they're probably compressing the ball quite a bit, I'd expect without the latch that the pistons would give slightly under the compression load, making the shot less consistent. The latch makes it solid metal holding the load, as opposed to air.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Bingo.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

i figured it had to do with ball compression

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

After watching this a bunch of times, the only thing that goes through my head now is "Dang that's a lot of batteries"

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

If you freeze the video with 4.7 s on the auto-clock, you can see 2x 2009 robots, 2x 2008 robots, a small mountain of batteries on the left, and several bumpers in both red and blue on the right.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Yup, that's what I'm talking about haha

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Amazing.
If 3 seconds isn't enough time for you to appreciate the detail shots of all the beautiful engineering that went into this robot I made an album of them.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

The Poof/Cookie lab is extremely impressive.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

im blown away by the fact that they don't have the practice field they built the spec field

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

I think they must buy/rent it from FIRST because it is accurate down to the FIRST logos and the accidentally power coated corners of the goals.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

NASA supports us with official field elements for the use of the three Ames House Teams, as well as local FRC teams, through a pre-ship scrimmage event and the ability to come practice here throughout the year.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Why, oh why, is Moffet so far from Elk Grove?? :D

Great job again this year Cory.
See you at CVR this weekend!

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Scotch Brite. Lots and lots of scotch brite

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Three? I thought it was just the poofs and cookies?

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Thanks :) That was a fun one to package into a tight space. Mechanical rigidity is very important in my mind.

There may be a future addition you would enjoy too.

-Paul Ventimiglia

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

971 is a house team, they just don't do much of their fab and assy there.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

They are now, they haven't always been. That's why some people might be confused.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Absolutely an Awesome job there Poofs! The "sealing can't holdja"...A great whittling and varnish job on that wooden monstrosity there too....Am Blue w/ envy here!

And a perfect (and now much needed after week 1) "triple threat auto" (X2 even), "0-65 in 10.0"....Now, if you could only get that to 9.90 you could enter it into an NHRA Super Gas competition right up the road a bit too. (But, what's a tenth of a second between friends, except probably very doable in a pinch for Team 254, I'm sure). "Barrage" is a perfect name for that finely detailed matching pr. too.

In auto you can posess multiple balls?

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

There no rules governing how many BALLs a ROBOT can POSSESS at any one time, regardless of whether its in AUTO or TELEOP.

Additionally, there are no rules governing how many ROBOTs can POSSESS the same BALL simultaneously.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

There is no rule banning that. So yes.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

The incredible foresight in this machine is outstanding.

I look forward to seeing you guys playing late in the day on April 26, 2014.

-Nick

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Looks amazing, performs amazingly well. I am in awe.

The sensor on the shooter wheel. It looks to be a photoelectric sensor, so far as I can see it is used to gather data about the shooter wheel. What am I missing? I don't see a paired sensor nor any way for it to use diffuse mode or anything to detect rotation on the wheel. Anyone figure this out?

I also see two of a very similar if not identical sensor by the shooter wall, I would assume these are in opposed mode as a beam break from the shooter.

~DK

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

As is standard with 118 and 254 videos:

First there's shock, as I can just go "This is the most amazing thing I've seen".
Then a little bit of depression sits in: "How can we even compete with this thing?"
Then i get hyped, when I realize I'll be able to see this beast on webcasts.
Then I slowly understand how it works, and get inspired, learning more and more every time I watch the video.

What an outstanding robot. Just watching a reveal video makes me inspired. I hope to one day make it to championships and see a Poofs robot in person.

-Anupam

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

The design work on this machine is incredible. I haven't been more in awe of a robot since 148's reveal video in 2010. The double intakes, the linkage design, the shooter... This is a machine that has found "the simplicity on the other side of complexity".

In a very brutal game, what on this robot is going to break? They clearly have the weight for a very strong set of intakes - I would not be surprised if that was 1/8" wall tube. If they break one, they can still pick up a ball. Their shooter is never going to jam, fail to release, or otherwise wear out the same way stored energy shooters might. The CG of that robot has to be so low too. We'll have to see how it does on the field but 254 absolutely knocked it out of the park this year.

I hate to hype for the sake of hype, but I'm stunned at how beautiful, elegant, and functional this machine is.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

I am going to go on the record and say, this is probably the closest 254 has gotten to making their robot a transformer, the whole shooter back-wall opening up to catch is pretty epic.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

After we figured out what those pneumatics were for going through the video frame-by-frame, the group of us huddled around the computer at our meeting last night were sufficiently mindblown.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

I think you mean decepticon.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

65 MPH = 95 feet per sec is there a flux capacitor in there I'm not seeing?

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

... 65 points

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

65 points.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

I wouldn't put it past them.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

I hope somebody codes an autonomous blocking robot to stop this

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

Considering they move and shoot over the 1 point goal, it would be pretty hard to block this (6-inch rule). Combined with the fact that I don't see blocking in autonomous ever being very effective. But hey, I'm sure someone will prove me wrong.

Re: Team 254 Presents: Barrage
 

There is one legal way for a driver to send commands to a robot during Autonomous mode, but I don't see any goalie teams implementing that particular device.