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Side Project Ideas?
I'm trying think of some project for our team to build before build season to train the freshman for build season.
Any ideas on something that would actually be worthwhile to build and also not incredibly difficult or expensive? |
Re: Side Project Ideas?
A hockey puck launcher. I'm sure there are several ways to approach this, and we actually tried this once during our offseason which went well.
EDIT: Just thought of something else: a custom driver station would be cool to have. Custom buttons, joystick holders, etc. |
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Other thoughts: a display stand for an old robot, an FLL table for a team to adopt, a new boulder intake, 4-bar arm, a couple cardboard combat robots*... (*full disclosure: I work at AndyMark, but that was so much fun) |
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We are going to try this. You know just in case. ..
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Definitely think about making a custom robot cart. It can add a lot of value if you make it right, and can give students more training on whatever machines/design/assembly techniques are used to make it. If you design it to have tool storage, space for batteries/bumpers, and more stuff like that it can be a very efficient use of pit space as well, and it would be a very valuable investment to a team looking for an offseason project that directly realtes to FRC.
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A t-shirt cannon robot is a great side project. It helps bring a lot of publicity to the team when you shoot of shirts at the football games :)
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A t-shirt cannon or a custom driver station
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Making a new pit could be helpful depending on what your pit looks like from year to year. Maybe do a small project first like a battery cart, then use that knowledge to plan out and create a nice pit.
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Reprogam your robot. I'm sure there are some new capabilities you would like, especially if you go to off season events. Consider any improvements to the current design as well.
Also, look at prototyping things you haven't done before. A shooter, catapult, or alternative drive system (Kiwi, H, other). Just remember, you don't necessarily have to have everything FRC sized. For a lot of things, you could use FTC motors and battery but the FRC RoboRIO & motor controllers. |
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This past season, my team made a motorized cart for the special education program to deliver soup to teachers.
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Our team did a football kicker and we are also are building a new pit cart, safety cart, and side cart.
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Depending on how many new kids you have, you could split the team into groups (e.g. a few new kids with a couple of more experienced students) and have a sumo bot tournament. Has all the general ideas of the FRC games, but less money and less effort needed.
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I just thought of this a few days ago, so bear with me.
I was thinking of having the students build a sonar system of sorts for autonomous navigation. Using a servo spinning around, with two ultrasonic sensors, (one at a greater angle, for short range, and another at a more shallow angle for long range.), create a "map" of directions that are clear for the robot to drive. I was also thinking of linking this to vision, (w/ OpenCV), to identify the colour of the flat areas (i.e floor) to make better decisions about where to drive. I was inspired by the LIDAR sensors which are used by pretty much every self-driving car these days. |
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As for the other ideas on this thread, there were many great ones:
Good luck and keep CD posted! |
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What a strange problem to have - a lack of ideas for what to do. We have always had many more ideas floating around than resources to do them.
To date, the build ideas we have brought to completion (excluding the annual competition) include purchasing and building out a trailer ($9,000+ grant), the air cannon (totally redesigned, torn down to nano tubes and rebuilt an average of every 18 months), storage solutions (6 or 7 over 5 years), pits (5 different designs over 5 years, though the Stronghold Castle was definitely our best yet, both in terms of cool factor and speed of construction at competition), the "infinity sprockets" (which we finally displayed in this, our fifth year, though without a Moebeus - style crossover), and an H-drive chassis. Uncompleted projects include: an automatic shifter progra, a remarkable plethora of autonomous routines; an off season drive train. Never-begun projects are an even longer list, but all I can think of right now are variations on the ones we have done or started. |
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We host a Robot Rumble for the captial region in NY in which we have teams from NYS and CT join for a day of off season fun. This year our plan is to loan our robot from last year to a rookie team. In the mean time we are working on creating a full defensive robot that our team will use.
The skills we are working on are complete BOM's, CAD, programming, electrical, fabrication and pneumatic's. We have a lot of parts in house to use so ordering should not be a problem. We also have some fun new toys to work with in our shop. New CNC router, new CNC plasma cutter and a new CNC lathe. This is on top of the two mills, two smaller JET lathe's and a large industrial lathe. Oh, and our welding space to work on aluminum welds. Our plan is for the students to gain skills on CAD so we can hand the drawings off to the fabrication team to build the parts. We are also working with my tech department to incorporate building parts during class time and finish the parts when the team comes in at night. Should be interesting to see how this works. I really want to work out the kinks pre-season so we are ready to go for build season. |
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Build a custom chassis. You can make the frame out of wood to keep the cost down. You could get programmers to get it moving and put some auton on it. And maybe make it so you could add some "attachments" if you wanted to test out some concepts and get some drivers practice. Then part it out when the season starts.
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I would suggest something that we have been doing. We are an old team and as such have random parts of old robots lying around. We have cobbled them together to make something new. It was pretty easy because we had a number of systems that were close to working and we just put them all together. It was good because it helped teach integration of systems but also basic skills.
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This year we have implemented a new rookie project for our team. Since our school has iPads, we are building iPad stands which is a fun project that not only lets them use all of the tools but also lets them build something useful. We have basic instructions for the new members but they are highly encouraged to improve upon those.
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For a quick and easy project try a coat rack/pack rack.
Before we had one, personal items got in the way. Dave |
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We are looking into building a few cheap PVC quadcopters. A nice engineering challenge. We are trying to keep them under $20 each.
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