Team 1114: Engineering Notebooks

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by Mike Marandola

What paint-on urethane did you guys use for the intake roller? Did it ever have to be reapplied?

http://www.smooth-on.com/Urethane-Ru...151/index.html

We used the 50A. The rollers were replaced at various points in the season, but not necessarily because of wear. One of our pit crew members can probably give a better response, but in general we've had very little issue with wear when it comes to the paint on urethane.

[thatprogrammer]

All this love for the mechanical side of things. No code for us programmers?

[RKazmer]

Originally Posted by thatprogrammer

All this love for the mechanical side of things. No code for us programmers?

Or a good picture inside to see the electronics?

[Brandon Ha]

Originally Posted by RKazmer

Or a good picture inside to see the electronics?

I'm with him... We are hungry for inside details...

EDIT: Or her sorry

[DampRobot]

Thanks for posting, especially the 2013 notebook. Your climber absolutely astounded me when I first saw it, it was such an out of the box solution to such a difficult engineering challenge.

[ElvisMom]

NEMO here looking for insights on how you create the notebook, not the robot
--How do you capture the details during build season - frequency of updates, form (google drive, evernote, paper and pencil)
--Who is responsible for capture during season
--Who does the post production
--Etc.

It's a thing of beauty, and the robots are too.

[davepowers]

Awesome stuff, thanks for posting this! There's a ton of useful info in these!

DP

[akoscielski3]

The notebooks contain some specific details we used to program the robot. Such as how controlled the claw and how our auto is/was ran (hot goal).

Also we do specify what type of sensors are used for controlling the robot. Like what we used to control the position of the claw.

Showing a picture of an "electronics board" would be difficult. At least for this year, the electronics weren't designated to a board, theres some of them on the belly pan, some on the back of the super structure of the claw, and in other parts of the robot. We put them where they are accessible and where there is room for them. It's not messy though, we make sure the students learn and understand how to properly wire and organize the wires to keep it all neat. However it's not like we put the Crio in the very front and the side car on the top of the claw. It's organized in a logical way.

Edit: Another thing we do is try to keep the wires for the electrical as short as possible to improve efficiency. The shorter the wire the less resistance there is in it, making the robot more efficient. For example, we kept most of the VEX Pro Victor 888's on the super structure for the claw, close to the drive motors, and close to the claw motors. That way we would be more efficient while driving, moving the claw, and while shooting.

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by ElvisMom

NEMO here looking for insights on how you create the notebook, not the robot
--How do you capture the details during build season - frequency of updates, form (google drive, evernote, paper and pencil)
--Who is responsible for capture during season
--Who does the post production
--Etc.

It's a thing of beauty, and the robots are too.

The "Engineering Notebook" is not a true engineering notebook in the sense that it's almost entirely created after the fact. The students typically go back through our CAD, photo, and video archives, to find the material for the notebook and to reconstruct the full story. This post production process for the past two years had been led by our lead mechanical student, with the assistance of a variety of other students.

[ToddF]

Care to comment on the effectiveness of the drop down omni wheels in negating the T-bone defense? Did the drivers actually use them? Were they worth the trouble?

[BenB]

Originally Posted by Giffgiff27

How much weight do you have in gearboxes? And how much does your robot weigh now after competition with you arm for blocking and everything else you added?

We don't usually weigh sub-systems unless we are bringing them as a part of our withholding allowance to a competition or we are looking to add/remove it from our robot, so we don't have an accurate weight for our gearboxes.

At the end of build season, our robot was about 10lbs underweight, so we added some steel blocks to the base plate to help lower our CoG and bring us up to 120lbs. The goalie stick weighed about 5lbs, so we took out some of the steel blocks when we added it.

Originally Posted by ToddF

Care to comment on the effectiveness of the drop down omni wheels in negating the T-bone defense? Did the drivers actually use them? Were they worth the trouble?

The drop down omni wheels weren't as effective as we were expecting. When we were designing the drivetrain this year, we didn't know exactly what the rest of the robot was going to look like yet, so we made a strategic decision to put them on the back of our robot. The thought was that if we spun out of a t-bone around the front of our robot (since that is where our traction wheels would be), we would be on the offensive side of the defender after getting out the the t-bone, making it more difficult for the defender to re-engage.

Unfortunately our robot's CoG ended up being toward the back, meaning that most of the weight was on the omni wheels instead of our traction wheels, which meant we didn't have much traction when trying to spin out of a t-bone. As a result, that weren't very effective for us, and we rarely used them. I believe there is potential for them to be more effective, so we may try to use them again in the future.

[Giffgiff27]

What was the evolution of your shooter? Did it start out as just a claw, and then worked its way into a shooter and then into a passing robot? Or did you know from the start the basics of what you wanted the entire thing to be able to do? Also, when you were building it, did you ever think about using the height of the robot to block shots, or did you just block shots if you truly needed to, so that you wouldn't risk possible damage to your shooter?

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by Giffgiff27

What was the evolution of your shooter? Did it start out as just a claw, and then worked its way into a shooter and then into a passing robot? Or did you know from the start the basics of what you wanted the entire thing to be able to do? Also, when you were building it, did you ever think about using the height of the robot to block shots, or did you just block shots if you truly needed to, so that you wouldn't risk possible damage to your shooter?

After kickoff weekend, we decided to prototype three different types of scoring mechanisms. In priority order they were:
1. Wheeled Shooter
2. Linear Punch
3. Catapult

The wheeled shooter and linear punch both appealed to us because they lent themselves to geometry such that we could integrate them right into the intake/claw, similar to what we did in 2008 with Simbot SS. The early wheeled shooter prototypes immediately showed a lot of promise, thus we quickly decided to move in that direction. Our early design priorities included scoring from 18' out while standing still and having a deadly accurate shot. We knew distance would be easier to achieve using a stored energy solution (like the linear punch or catapult), however our past stored energy devices (2008 shooter, 2010 kicker) were not particularly consistent, especially when factoring in the wear on the surgical tubing. As such, we ended up sacrificing a bit of distance to gain the consistency that came with the wheeled shooter. Granted, when we made the tradeoff, we were still very confident we could score from a standstill at 18' from the goal. It took us until the second half of build season to fully abandon that goal.

Yes, blocking shots with the height of the claw was always a huge consideration for us. Once we realized that our shooting geometry was going to make us a tall robot, we knew we were going to take advantage of it defensively.

[Michael Hill]

Thanks for posting this, it's a really good read. I'm curious, can you go into how your team decided to approach the game this year? I saw 254 had a spreadsheet that tried to "predict" scores of matches that would happen if certain strategies played out and used that to drive the design. Does 1114 do anything similar? How did your strategy evolve throughout the season? Week 1 competition is obviously different than a week 5, so how do you adapt your strategy to robots that aren't as "polished" in early weeks vs. later weeks?

Thanks