Side Project Ideas?

[nbetik]

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.

[viggy96]

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.

[CMBrandon]

Create some cool lighting effects!

https://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/s...ht=calling+all

[Chief Hedgehog]

Originally Posted by RoboChair

We are going to be making a belt grinder as one of our training projects this fall.

For a team with your capabilities, you probably need little help - but Team 3023 made an incredibly robust belt grinder and it works magic!

As for the other ideas on this thread, there were many great ones:

1. Update the Pit: Tool storage, material storage, etc.
2. Build a t-shirt cannon robot (or w/o the robot to save time)
3. Robot Cart (with much needed storage)
4. Battery Bank/Battery Hauler (optimize a dolly so that you can use it to load in other items)
5. Team Storage
6. New Drive Train
7. Analyze previous games and how the world champs from each game operated!
   

Good luck and keep CD posted!

[GeeTwo]

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.

[Mr. Ackroyd]

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.

[Hazelhoff]

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.

[Thayer McCollum]

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.

[EmilyG]

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.

[mgreene]

Originally Posted by EmilyG

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.

Picture of the completed project attached.

[DaveL]

For a quick and easy project try a coat rack/pack rack.
Before we had one, personal items got in the way.

Dave

[samthesnake]

We are looking into building a few cheap PVC quadcopters. A nice engineering challenge. We are trying to keep them under $20 each.