Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Hello Chief Delphi!

'Snow Problem is excited to be returning for our third (!!) season of Robot in Three Days.

We'd like to thank our sponsors, which include University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering/Student Union and Activities/CSE Expo, AndyMark, PHD, and all our friend and family who are supporting the build. We'd also like to thank Rev Robotics and iR3 Creative for their continued support of the Robot in 3 Days program and in particular Rev for offering support that due to a miscommunication we weren't able to take advantage of.

For anyone that wants to follow along live with our build, we'll be live streaming on Twitch at z.umn.edu/snowproblemstream

We'll most likely be starting our strategy session around 3:30 CST and going until we're done for the day. From there, the plan is to start around 9:00 AM and go until we're done for the day. Myself and a few other people will be on the twitch stream to answer questions when we aren't working on the robot.

We'll also be a part of the daily summaries on https://www.youtube.com/Robotin3Days as well as being a part of the Ri3D Team Indiana Show on FUN which you can find at https://www.twitch.tv/firstupdatesnow.

If you want some behind the scenes looks at the build, you can also follow us on Twitter @SnowProblemz, Facebook at /snowproblemz, or on Snap Chat with, you guessed it, snowproblemz. We also have a website at http://snowproblem.org/ which will have our stream and any resources we post.

After the build, we'll take some time to clean up our CAD model and then post that along with (hopefully for real this time) a white paper on our design. We're hoping to get our reveal video out within a few days of our "stop build".

Above all, we can't wait to see what the FRC Community makes of Steamworks. You guys are why we do this!

We'll be taking questions throughout the build in this thread and on Twitch, so feel free to ask about anything you see on the stream. Like I said, we do this for you guys, so we'll try our best to answer any questions you have about our robot or even the equipment you see in our shop.

Best of luck, and we'll see you at the competition!

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

I will not be involved with the 3 day build this year :( but I'm really looking forward to seeing what 'Snow Problem comes up with for this year's game!

Good luck guys!

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Stream is currently down-- we have a small issue where the breaker for our office is in someone else's space. We'll be back on as soon as we can get someone over to let us in.

In the meantime, progress on the gear scorer, shooter, intake, and climber are all proceeding marvelously. It does mean we might not be driving as soon as we thought, since we still had a few frame parts to go and we try not to do things halfway around here!

Let us know if you have any questions-- I'm working on a strategy document that will be up tonight or tomorrow morning that summarizes the direction we're going. Best of luck teams!

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Does your Ri3D build team have a simple text blog somewhere explaining what you are doing, and the design decisions you are making? Perhaps with some still pictures showing your mechanisms?

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Not exactly.

We got a little thrown off last night when all of our computers got power cut off, but I'll be posting a white paper in CD Media later today describing our strategy and the design decisions related to that.

Tomorrow I'll be posting a similar document that includes a breakdown of our prototypes, and when we release our reveal video there will be a white paper describing the robot and mechanisms, with pictures.

The plan was to move a little faster than that, but unfortunately our building isn't cooperating!

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Our strategy summary may be found here. Apologies for the delay.

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Thank you. Reading it now...

Reps to you :)

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Nice job. This is an example for other Ri3D teams to follow.

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Looks like our prototyping paper may be coming out tomorrow. We want to make sure that it contains as few errors as possible, which becomes more difficult the later at night we are working. On the upside, we're aiming to make it as or more thorough as our strategy document, explaining not only what we prototyped, but our prototyping strategy and what we learned from our various prototypes.

In the mean time, we are more than willing to answer any questions that you have!

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Prototype document is up!

You can find it with the rest of our white papers here.

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Have you guys posted your reveal video yet? As of 1/14, I can't seem to find it.

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Not yet but I do know that they are working on it!

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Our robot reveal video is up!

You can check it out here.

You can also check out our white papers here.

Those papers include a description of our strategic analysis of FIRST Steamworks, what our prototyping process looks like, some thoughts from our programmer, and a guide to how to do powder coating in-house like we do.

Without further ado... we present Lelantos.

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

As gorgeous as that robot looks plastered all across my computer screen, this might help.

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Awesome reveal video! Definetly my favorite from the 2017 season! I wish you guys would've shown your robot shooting a bunch of balls all at oncr, instead of just one or two at a time. Im curious to see how accurate your shooter really is. What percent of balls do you guys when you storage is "full"?

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Beat you to it. Sometimes I forget to preview my posts...

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Pardon the spelling errors, im on mobile. That last sentance is supposed to say what percent of balls do you SCORE when your sotrage is "full"?

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Our hopper to shooter transition is very inconsistent. I would say that our shooter, by itself, is quite accurate (when testing hand fed, we had an extremely consistent shot), but unfortunately the shooter is only half of the battle. Loading is paramount, and we unfortunately neglected the design of our loading mechanism, having only three days.

I would say that we were probably 60% accurate, maybe more, when we were able to shoot. Unfortunately jams or mispositioned balls made that rarer than any of us would have liked. This also made it somewhat difficult to actually gauge how accurate our shot was.

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Totally understandable, thanks for answering! Awesome robot!

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Great video and a great robot. I was wonder what gearbox, ratio and motor you were using on the intake/climber. The intake seemed fast for how much weight you had to pull up.

Thanks in advance.

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

How many fuel balls can it hold at once?

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

The gearbox powering our intake/climber is an AM Sonic Shifter with a 14.8:1 low gear and a 3.7:1 high gear. There are two CIM motors powering it. It's a little bit slow as an intake on high gear, but is quite sufficient in low gear for our climb.

Not nearly enough. We are planning to add some more polycarbonate to make it better at keeping balls inside and increasing capacity for future demonstration events. Right now I would estimate we're around 10-15 balls maximum "stay in the robot" amount.

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

What are you using for your shooter wheel?

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

We are using 4 of the 4" Andymark compliant wheels. They are powered by 2 775pro motors on a 3:1 VersaPlanetary.

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

How much did your powder coating setup cost as well as material costs? Do you have a link to what you used?

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

I would direct you to our powder coating white paper. Alex did a pretty good job explaining our setup. To completely replicate our setup, you are looking at between $200 and $600, depending on what you have on hand.

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

To expand on what Nick stated, we currently don't have any feedback on the shooter. Adding a feedback mechanism (such as an optical encoder), and implementing a basic closed-loop control (PID loop anyone?) could vastly improve the accuracy. Given only 3 days and a limited budget, we typically don't worry about these nitty-gritty details.

The hopper could additionally use a "blending" mechanism to shuffle balls so that they find their way into the shooter (many of the other Ri3D teams implemented such mechanisms). Our hopper was finalized on the last day, and we did not have ample time to construct/install such a mechanism.

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Interesting design and a great looking robot.

The intake climber is a very interesting idea. Do you believe it would actually work on the real field? You are using a small rope on a small roller. It looks like you would jam the roller against the davit channel before you could consistently move the pressure plate. I've noticed a lot of these Ri3D designs don't seem to consider the channel.

David

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Correct, we designed our climber without knowledge of the channel.

I'm pretty confident that an enterprising team could modify the concept to be competition-ready. We did have a small amount of room to work with on the final robot that could feasibly fit the modifications necessary.

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Beautiful bot and extremely impressive all around. Thank you for all your time and dedication!

May I ask what motor and gear reduction you used for your intake/climber? You're using a CIM correct? I was really impressed with how fast the lift pulled your bot.

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Glad you liked our robot! We really wanted to push ourselves to raise the bar on Ri3D this year. I leave whether we succeeded in that up to the community :)

I did answer the same question earlier in this thread, if you'd like more details than that, let me know!

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

My mistake, thanks for the info!

I would say you definitely succeeded on that front; this is only the second year I've kept up with RI3D, but your bot is probably the most impressive RI3D I've seen. I can easily imagine your bot winning a regional or district event and contending in World's (theoretically of course ).

Before I saw your reveal, I was pretty content with my team's progress, but now I'm anxious to make changes to our gear manipulator so it's perfect, and modify our climber so it climbs faster. I guess that's kinda the point of RI3D huh? To make us push our teams to the extent of their capabilities. So thanks for that! Haha

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

I have to ask about the wheels haha. To me they look like 6" Plaction Wheel with Blue Nitrile Tread (am-3316) if they are, how do you feel the wheels compare to the stock 6" white wheels?

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

When do you plan on having the CAD available for viewing?

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

They do use blue nitrile tread, but are actually 4" wheels.

Personally, I love blue nitrile. Always used it when I was on a team. That being said, it's definitely one of those marginal gains things. I would say that I feel it is better than the stock wheels in any way other than maintenance, but I don't really have any numbers to back that up. We used it on Lelantos because it matched our color scheme!

I'm aiming for next weekend or so. Our CAD was split up among about half a dozen people using all three of the main CAD packages available to teams, so I need to do a bit more cleanup than I've needed to do in the past. We're also still workibg on that technical walkthrough, which I'm hoping to get out tonight, but no promises on that.

Re: Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017
 

Quick update: CAD is still coming, but school takes precedence over robotics stuff, so it'll be a few.

Due to a little bit of a communications mixup, we finished the technical walkthrough about a week ago and then promptly forgot to post it... sorry.

We've posted it now to our white papers . Best of luck to teams as you enter the home stretch, and if you have any further questions, feel free to reach out!