Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

While we anxiously await January 9th, I'm sure teams have created some adventurous, unique, or even silly offseason projects. For example, we (Team 1073) are trying swerve drive for the first time (I think). If anyone has anything they want to share on behalf of their team, post it here!

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

Triple Helix borrowed 2028's swerve drive from 2014 and made some modifications and rewrote the code. Learned some good lessons from their design and also some things that w would have done differently.

We're also working on making up the drop down omni modules that were designed over the summer which can be seen here. The intent is to allow the front and back wheels to be dropped independently. This setup gives us the following setups: 6wd traction, 4wd omni, and 2x2 w/ omnis in the front or back.

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

1339 and 2240 have designed a simple game of capture the flag, and are building new bots to play the game against each other. 6 week build, also retasking old bots to play D. The flags are in the top center of a 3' cube. Should be fun!

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

In hope of stronghold being a capture the flag game? ;)

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That sounds awesome! Could you explain the specific rules you guys made?

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Team 240 is designing an universal chassis for multiple (not all) types of drive trains: 6-wheel Omni, 4-wheel Mecanum, and H-Drive are some examples.

We will then build some kind of mechanism off the design, and have the Drive Team practice.

This shows many of the new students to the team the process of building a robot: design, build, wiring, coding, and finalizing the robot.

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

We built a new 2015 robot... Not very unique but it was cool.

Now we are working on outreach and gaining more sponsors.

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

Nothing fancy field wise. standard size field, a 3 ft by 3ft by 3ft cube is placed on each teams side. In the middle on the top is a 1.5 pvc pipe it sits in a hole ontop of the box that is 4 inches deep. Upon contact with the box robot is safe and upon returning to your respective side robot is safe. Flags get reset after capture, robot must start within frame perimeter and at maximum can reach 2ft outside of its frame. Bumper rules are pulled from 2014. The rules were loosely agreed on by both teams but nothing is written down yet.

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

This isn't as much fun or cool but quite practical. This fall over the next few meetings, we have discussed different parts of the team in the form of presentations. Basically, we have to do PowerPoints over the projects we chose to do. There are more new members this year than veteran members so each project must have at least one new member and one veteran member. Basically, the powerpoints we make then need to be presented in front of the whole team. Our projects range from teaching kids how to use Chief Delphi to talking about our business plan.

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

1086 has been working on a cleaner version of our 8 motor octocanum. We think our driver has a good way to prevent the robot from brownout by adjusting the way he plays defense. The new drive system uses a .09 inch frame with a double flange, but we found out that the double flange .09 was actually heavier than the .125 single flange frame, so we might switch back to get a little bit more ground clearance.

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

We designed and built our new linkage steering drive system for our fall totebot race competition entry (already posted photos in other threads). That was a fun preseason project!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma-68cYoQ-o

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

The team I was on last year is taking a break from FRC so we started a new community team in the neighborhood. Possibly the biggest off-season project ever :eek:

The new team is starting from scratch so our current projects are to disassemble and reassemble a 2014 KoP drive frame borrowed from another team (they want it back in one piece :p ) and also assembling and driving a "Cheap and Dirty RCU" I bought from AndyMark. Was actually hoping to build a few of those to race around and practice driving but of course sponsorship and fundraising is another big ongoing project.

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

Over on Team 166, we are building a new 2013 robot, combining different chassis designs that we haven't tried before. The chassis is a West Coast drive with Texas Tubing. We are going to use the Frisbee shooter for demo purposes.

We are also remodeling our mascot car (see logo) so that it is better made, as the last one was hastily made for a town parade.

Our last project is remodeling a small cart that the Special Education dept in our school gave us. They have been having issues with some of the students not being able to push it, so we are building them a robotic cart!

All the projects are being used for training exercises for new and old team members, and they are all coming along quite well!

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

?Que es eso?

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

The Devastastors built a robot that shoots footballs. Turned out pretty well.

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

We're in the middle of our regular November/December project: refurbishing and reprogramming the light ball that the TechnoKats team drops in downtown Kokomo each December 31. Since we do it every year I don't think it counts as unique, but it's definitely cool.

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

Texas Tube - To run chain inside of 2x1 extrusion. By no means actually developed in Texas (to my knowledge) but was adapted by several top Texas teams last season. (118, 624, etc)

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After we stripped our practice bot down to the base we reprogrammed it to run on a game-pad and put a new frame on it. We are now making a cover for that frame that looks like a sleigh to drive in Christmas parades. In addition we are making a "snowman" that sits on a tote for our 2015 robot to hold and move around during the parades.

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

Team 2823 built a ping pong shooting robot over the summer. We needed something fun for demonstrations, and something durable and simple enough to be driven with little training. As a bonus, custom ping pong balls are pretty cheap, and the backspin makes it very fun. It still breaks far more often than we want, but it turned out pretty well.

Also, some of our older students are mentoring a new FTC team during the "offseason".

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

Team 2194 decided to use the 2014 robot chassis we didn't use to make a rubber-band shooter. It's still being made (this is what happens when we don't have a six week dead line :p ), but there has been a lot of cool progress.

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

Our team was also thinking of making a ping pong ball shooter for an off season project. How did you launch the ping pong balls and how fast were you able to accelerate them to? I was just curious.

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

We used a wheel to fire them. It works pretty well. They go about halfway across the width of a gym, and we can make them slower if needed (so as not to harm little kids). A couple of notes: a single wheel creates massive backspin. It was really fun when we had it horizontal, but vertical is better for the bot. Also, the system will vibrate because of the wheel. Our wooden prototype from 2 years ago would vibrate so much that the ping pong balls wouldn't get sucked down into the shooter. The switch to a metal frame fixed it. We still don't have a great indexer working, so no advice there, but we are trying.

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

Thanks, It is a project i would really like to do. Did your team think about using pneumatics as that is what we are considering. I originally got the idea from popular science herehttp://www.popsci.com/build-300-mph-pingpong-cannon. The video at the bottom of the article is pretty cool. If our team ever made a pneumatic ping pong ball shooter for a robot we would reduce the air pressure for safety reasons of course. Thanks for the response.

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

854 has stripped our 2014 robot and is building a semi-accurate Dozer as well as possibly prototyping a new Octacanum drive.

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

We did consider using pneumatics. They would definitely work, and would certainly shoot farther if powered up fully. However, they have some challenges with making them safe using FIRST legal parts. We wanted our bot to be driveable by first graders (in fact, we recently brought it to a children's museum), and in close quarters (we once demoed our frisbee shooter in a hallway). Having a wheel makes it easier for us to control the speed, and allows for rapid fire, which is always fun.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with using pneumatics, and I'm certain that the challenges won't really be a problem, so I'd say go for it!

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

Currently working on designing a new robot cart to build in the coming weeks for build season.

Annual VEX robots.

There's also a special little project we will be sharing later. :)

I'm also heading CAD classes for underclassmen so we have some more experience for build season.

Re: Cool/Unique Offseason Projects
 

Thanks, I was just curious. It makes sense to use the wheel in that case, easy to control the speed and rapid fire. Firing rapidly is a lot harder with pneumatics.