254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

For the last two seasons, Team 254 and our collaboration partners have been keeping blogs of our prototyping, manufacturing and build progress. We update these blogs daily, splitting the responsibility among multiple team members and try to include lots of pictures and videos. The blogs serve multiple purposes, keeping team members, parents, collaboration partners and sponsors up to date on build progress while also allowing us to document our build process.

2011 Team 254 Blog
2010 Team 254/968 Collaboration Blog

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

Wow. That's just amazing. This is like a look at your build season! I can see why you guys won this year!

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

I want a champions shirt so bad. Give me now!

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

Thanks so much for sharing this! It has been a great read!

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

Was this public during the build season?

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

No

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

This explains a lot... Your team seems to have been going a lot faster than our team as far as progress during the season is concerned. Drivers actually had time to practice; I was literally given the controls of the arm during the competition. And your robot was actually finished before shipping; we had to install the arm during the competition. We did not even use it at San Diego; I just never had the go ahead to use it because we were doing fine without it. I had not installed the software updates until literally week 3 or 4; you guys did it on day one. Your electronics were clean and organized; ours was a pile of mess, which was a major part of our downfall at LA. I applaud you guys.

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

Get me one of those shirts at IRI and I will love your team even more (if that's even possible).

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

If you read the 2010 blog in it's entirety you'll notice that on day 2 of build we were testing a 8wd drivebase on the bumps.

This was something we were very proud of and thought was very cool. With about 6-8 hours of work we were able to manufacture frame rails and bolt together a frame to accommodate 8 wheels. We were then able to raid our spare parts bins for bearing housings, wheel shafts, sprockets, tensioner cams, gearboxes from the 08 robot, and 4" wheels.

We spent a lot of time prior to that diagramming out the interference between the bump and frame with various wheel sizes and configurations. We were very concerned about making a decision without empirical evidence that it would work, so being able to do this was invaluable.

At a few points we have considered moving away from a 7/16" hex on the wheel side of the shafts and a 1/2" hex on the sprocket side in favor of using hex bearings and a straight hex shaft all the way through. Every time we've shot it down because it makes everything we've made since 2006 incompatible with any future parts.

Having that supply of parts that has remained functionally (if not perfectly) identical and interchangeable since 2006 allowed us the flexibility to throw together an entire drivebase in under a day and test something critical to the design of our robot. This offers a huge advantage if you have the foresight to keep families of parts common.

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

Thank you! I read them all, they were very informative.

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

This is so insightful. No "magic", just hard, hard work.

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

On the January 9th page, you posted your final drivetrain speed. When I run those calculations through the JVN calculator I only get 100% efficient speeds of 18.92 ft/sec and 6.81 ft/sec, whereas the blog posting shows 19.8 ft/sec and 7.1 ft/sec.

What would explain the difference?

I used CIMs at 5310 rpm free speed and the gearing showed on the blog posting.

Thanks.

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

This is an incredibly huge insight for anyone that it's new to. This is typically how industry moves. Why did XYZ make that inane decision in their latest iteration of product instead of using a blanket 'best practice'? In any complex integrated system (robot, submarine, satellite, cars) it's usually for backwards-compatibility.

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

We used 5550 rpm free speed. Our measured efficiency on the bench ended up being 90-95% with a free speed of about 18.5 ft/sec with no weight on the wheels.

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

BIG Kudos and BIG Thanks to 254 for sharing!
I really appreciate getting a glimpse into your world class program and the building of your BEAUTIFUL machines.

Keep up the fantastic work.

Thanks again!
-John

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

This is very insightful and will definitely impact some of the things we do during our build season.

Thank you for sharing this invaluable resource with us!

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

Will the poofs be posting a 2012 build log? =)

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

Probably not. This year's blog was pretty light and not to our usual standards. We plan to fix that for next year and make it public again.

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

Just so everyone knows, when I tried to visit the website, I got this message from Chrome:

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

I can verify that, I was looking at their site yesterday and had a fun 30 minutes removing the anti-malware scam software it installed, windows defender didn't catch it. Their site has been compromised.

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

Yeah, we realized this morning that our site had been compromised and our webmaster cleaned it up today. Any malware should have been removed from the site and we have alerted Google that we have corrected the issue so they can remove the Chrome alert. If anyone sees any more issues now or in the future, please do let us know as soon as possible at website@team254.com.

Sorry for any inconvenience!

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

Just tried to enter your site and Google Chrome says it has malware.

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

Google has not yet cleared the warning. We are working with them to get it cleared.

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

Since you will not be releasing your build blog this year, I have a question for the poofs. Why did you make a long bot this year? (Not trying to be offensive we made one to)

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

Sorry to revive this post but my team is looking into possibly doing a build blog this season. Instantly I remembered this blog and wanted to show it to members to showcase a great example. I was disappointed to see that the link did not work. Have you guys taken this down permanently?

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

I don't think this was intentional. We did some reorganizing of the website over the summer and something probably got lost in translation.

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

Okay, thanks for the fast update. Can't wait to read through it again when its back up.

That was fast :)

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

They're back up.

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

Where can I find the ones from 2011/2010? Also, will a 2013 version be released?

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

http://www.team254.com/resources/ See "General Resources"

We need to clean up the 2013 blog prior to releasing it.

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

I get a 404 when I click on the blog links. I laughed at the unclogging the tubes reference!

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

Try again. The URLs changed and we updated the Resources page today. Our apologies for the broken links.

http://blog.2010.team254.com
http://blog.2011.team254.com

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

You guys have the best and most useful website in First.

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

+1 to this statement.

There have been so many times that I have gone to the Cheesy Poofs website to get inspiration for website design, team handbook development, and build season suggestions. Thank you so much!

Matt

Re: 254 Presents: Cheesy Poof Build Blogs
 

Just a reminder, on your resources page you have your previous year's code links, but not this years. Might want to update it with 2013's.