Team 254 Presents: Dropshot Technical Binder 2016

[waialua359]

Travis, I had heard that you are the lead on the technical binder. Is this true?
Kudos to the mentors and the students who worked on this.
The most impressive part besides the actual robot with its features, is that you have it really condensed yet very informative on the whole design process, decision making and explanation of each of the systems.
Cory, our former mentor who was with my alma mater Team 4158 cut a lot of gears with a jet sponsor. Our team needs to get on board with ours soon and I need to research more about different nozzle sizes and what they can cut. Skies the limit.

[Torrance]

Originally Posted by waialua359

Travis, I had heard that you are the lead on the technical binder. Is this true?
Kudos to the mentors and the students who worked on this.
The most impressive part besides the actual robot with its features, is that you have it really condensed yet very informative on the whole design process, decision making and explanation of each of the systems.

The technical binder has always been a student led and written project as the students who compose it use it as practice for their presentation in the pits to Technical Award Judges. I wrote the binder in 2014 and 2015 and Travis did some editing to keep it concise and relevant. In 2016, Technical Director Alex Cherry and Documentation and Submissions Director Matt McDonald wrote it with me (now 1st-year mentor) serving as the editor.

The binder also required a lot of work from our Media Director Peter Feghali to do the renders, layout, and aesthetics.

[Travis Covington]

Originally Posted by waialua359

Travis, I had heard that you are the lead on the technical binder. Is this true?
Kudos to the mentors and the students who worked on this.
The most impressive part besides the actual robot with its features, is that you have it really condensed yet very informative on the whole design process, decision making and explanation of each of the systems.
Cory, our former mentor who was with my alma mater Team 4158 cut a lot of gears with a jet sponsor. Our team needs to get on board with ours soon and I need to research more about different nozzle sizes and what they can cut. Skies the limit.

Glenn,

As Andrew explained, the mentors typically have very little involvement in the technical binder other than helping edit content towards the end. This has been the students project from its inception.

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Torrance

The technical binder has always been a student led and written project as the students who compose it use it as practice for their presentation in the pits to Technical Award Judges. I wrote the binder in 2014 and 2015 and Travis did some editing to keep it concise and relevant. In 2016, Technical Director Alex Cherry and Documentation and Submissions Director Matt McDonald wrote it with me (now 1st-year mentor) serving as the editor.

The binder also required a lot of work from our Media Director Peter Feghali to do the renders, layout, and aesthetics.

Thank you to you and Travis for sharing. You mentioned some other mentors who helped who I never heard of or met.
Teams like yours are an inspiration to many, including us. As a follow up, it would be cool to hear about the team structure and the mentors that support both the robot (many who we know) and the non-robot technical support that you folks have.
I'm sure many others would like to have something similar, but cant do so because of lack of support/expertise or mentors who wear too many hats. Sounds like Team 254 has the right mix of mentors to do the other parts as well besides dedicated and highly intelligent students.

I hope this is a project you folks continue to do and share post-season annually.

[Torrance]

Originally Posted by waialua359

Thank you to you and Travis for sharing. You mentioned some other mentors who helped who I never heard of or met.
Teams like yours are an inspiration to many, including us. As a follow up, it would be cool to hear about the team structure and the mentors that support both the robot (many who we know) and the non-robot technical support that you folks have.

Of the people I mentioned, only Travis (and sorta me) are mentors. Alex, Matt, and Peter are Directors on our student leadership team.

The team leadership structure is divided amongst the mentors and student leadership team which consists of Directors that lead sub-teams of other students and Captains that serve as project managers on particularly large tasks.

The team certainly has a lot of mentors, but this is essential for managing the 100+ students working on multiple projects. Our mentorship is unofficially divided into technical and non-technical mentors.
Going off of our Mentor Page, the following are technical:
Travis Covington, Pat Fairbank, Cory McBridge, Tom Bottigleiri, Leigh Pauls, Kevin Sheridan, Paul Ventimiglia, Dan Judnick (mostly VEX), Kenneth Lloren, Jared Russel, Colin Wilson, Nick Eyre, Trevor Kearse. Also myself and fellow SCU student Mani Gnanasivam.

Nontechnical mentors include: Esteban Parker, David Wilson, Nick Hammes, and faculty Peng Yav and Brad Lindemann.

Not all of the mentors attend every build or every competition.


The student leadership team breakdown (recently updated for 2016-2017) is also on our website. As you can see, 1/2 of the positions are non-technical in nature.

The Directors closely collaborate on a lot of projects. For example, this technical binder was written by the FRC Technical Director with the help of a technical mentor (me or Travis). Then the Documentations and Submissions Director and a nontechnical mentor or 2 helped edit and clean up the bullets before giving it to the Media Director who's sub-team did the renders and formatted it using Word into the final document.

Originally Posted by waialua359

I hope this is a project you folks continue to do and share post-season annually.

We plan to! Creating the technical binder is a great learning experience for all the students involved, in addition to being a useful resource for judges or other teams.

[Michael Hill]

How do you guys do project management? Do you have design/concept reviews? What tools do you guys use to keep organized?

Also, somewhat off topic, we used a modified version of the 254 part management tool (cheesy parts) this year and it was fantastic. It really helped us especially get orders put together. Instead of writing orders down on a marker board or a piece of paper that can get lost, it was great to have everything organized the way it was.

[DinerKid]

Awesome write up.

I'm very intrigued by the safety wire that you used on the flywheel.
Would you mind elaborating on the reason you use it, process for installing it, and perhaps a picture?

Thanks
~DK

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

How do you guys do project management? Do you have design/concept reviews? What tools do you guys use to keep organized?

Also, somewhat off topic, we used a modified version of the 254 part management tool (cheesy parts) this year and it was fantastic. It really helped us especially get orders put together. Instead of writing orders down on a marker board or a piece of paper that can get lost, it was great to have everything organized the way it was.

I vaguely remember seeing this previously. Can you share the link?

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Torrance

Of the people I mentioned, only Travis (and sorta me) are mentors. Alex, Matt, and Peter are Directors on our student leadership team.

The team leadership structure is divided amongst the mentors and student leadership team which consists of Directors that lead sub-teams of other students and Captains that serve as project managers on particularly large tasks.

The team certainly has a lot of mentors, but this is essential for managing the 100+ students working on multiple projects. Our mentorship is unofficially divided into technical and non-technical mentors.
Going off of our Mentor Page, the following are technical:
Travis Covington, Pat Fairbank, Cory McBridge, Tom Bottigleiri, Leigh Pauls, Kevin Sheridan, Paul Ventimiglia, Dan Judnick (mostly VEX), Kenneth Lloren, Jared Russel, Colin Wilson, Nick Eyre, Trevor Kearse. Also myself and fellow SCU student Mani Gnanasivam.

Nontechnical mentors include: Esteban Parker, David Wilson, Nick Hammes, and faculty Peng Yav and Brad Lindemann.

Not all of the mentors attend every build or every competition.


The student leadership team breakdown (recently updated for 2016-2017) is also on our website. As you can see, 1/2 of the positions are non-technical in nature.

The Directors closely collaborate on a lot of projects. For example, this technical binder was written by the FRC Technical Director with the help of a technical mentor (me or Travis). Then the Documentations and Submissions Director and a nontechnical mentor or 2 helped edit and clean up the bullets before giving it to the Media Director who's sub-team did the renders and formatted it using Word into the final document.




We plan to! Creating the technical binder is a great learning experience for all the students involved, in addition to being a useful resource for judges or other teams.

Thanks for the info. Half of the info, I should have just looked on your website, but very helpful with the explanations.

That is one impressive list of mentors, where many have come from other teams originally.

I noticed seeing Leigh Pauls. I had just asked about him at VEX Worlds and heard from Karthik that he was with you folks. I met him at 2010 VEX Worlds when we teamed up to get to the World's Finals matches, ironically, with a 3rd team partner deemed the "Chinese Poof Clone" robot.

[Michael Hill]

Originally Posted by waialua359

I vaguely remember seeing this previously. Can you share the link?

Info page: https://www.team254.com/documents/cheesyparts/

Github page: https://github.com/Team254/cheesy-parts

I modified it for my team to accept our part numbering scheme (IRYY-AA-SPP)

IR = Innovators Robotics
YY = 2-Digit Year
AA = 1-up Assembly #
S = 1-up Subassembly #
PP = 1-up Part #

[Torrance]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

How do you guys do project management? Do you have design/concept reviews? What tools do you guys use to keep organized?

Also, somewhat off topic, we used a modified version of the 254 part management tool (cheesy parts) this year and it was fantastic. It really helped us especially get orders put together. Instead of writing orders down on a marker board or a piece of paper that can get lost, it was great to have everything organized the way it was.

Our team's project management is still not as clean and organized as we'd like it to be. We do still use Cheesy Parts but only really as a method of generating part numbers so we can label CAD files according to their assembly and not overlap file names. For example: "254-16-P-0308" is a shaft in the 0300 drive gearbox assembly.

Project management is largely run by a team of core technical mentors (Travis, Cory, Colin, Nick, Pat) and the student FRC Technical Director. We'll sometimes write a To-Do List on a whiteboard and have a brief meeting at the beginning of the build during dinner to cover what we want to accomplish that night.

Other than Cheesy Parts and whiteboards, a big portion of the project management relies on mentors and upperclassmen being in constant attendance so they can manage what they're working on. By only having builds Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday this year we got higher attendance at each and that helped ensure there was always an available project leader.

Design reviews often occur unofficially, late at night, or just with relevant students and mentors. By not having "too many cooks in the kitchen" we can keep them concise and on topic. However, we notably had a team-wide discussion a few days after kickoff to finalize our decision to go with the "Steph Curry" robot (see Tech Binder pg 5).

In the past we tried project management softwares like Trello but gave it up because the hassle of constantly entering and editing meant our students didn't keep it up to date.

Finally, we have an Action Items project management page that our student Leaders use for mostly non-technical action items assigned to them as weekly leader meetings. An example might be "Call welding sponsor and ask if they will sponsor us again".

[Jay O'Donnell]

Andrew (or other 254 members), would you mind giving a general timeline of your season? Such as when certain robot decisions and milestones occurred?

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Jay O'Donnell

Andrew (or other 254 members), would you mind giving a general timeline of your season? Such as when certain robot decisions and milestones occurred?

I recall they had this also? Or I might be confusing it with some other team.

[Ashwin Adulla]

Originally Posted by DinerKid

Awesome write up.

I'm very intrigued by the safety wire that you used on the flywheel.
Would you mind elaborating on the reason you use it, process for installing it, and perhaps a picture?

Thanks
~DK

The main purpose of the safety wire, as suggested by Team 1678, was to prevent our fairlane flywheel from expanding a significant amount past 5000 rpm. During prototyping, the fairlane wheels expanded to the extent that we were fearful of testing them out. As a result, the safety wire constrained the expansion of the wheels to a certain diameter which allowed us to ramp up to around 6000 rpm at Champs for taking shots. As for the process of installing them, the safety wire was wrapped once around the wheel, cut to its length, and then two ends were twisted together and then stuck inside the neoprene so as to prevent it from contacting the boulder. I have attached a picture of the flywheel below.

[sanddrag]

Andrew, you say you had build days on MWF and Sat. Did the team still meet on the other three days of the week or did you really meet only 4 days per week?