2012 FRC Team 1717 Uncut

[jakemochas]

Dear FIRST Community,

We would like to thank all of you for a great season of FIRST Robotics! As you may know, our team is made up of all seniors and we only get to do FIRST once. Thanks for making our experience so awesome! We had a fantastic time competing in the Long Beach and Central Valley Regionals and on the Newton field in St. Louis. From helping us in the pits to competing with gracious professionalism out on the field, everyone really made this season memorable!

Our 2012 robot is named Lindsay Rose in honor of our classmate who passed away during our freshman year. Lindsay would have been a senior in the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy (DPEA) and would have been a member of Team 1717 this year. Her competitive spirit and energetic personality were definitely missed during the late nights of build season. We really cannot express how much her sweet, adventurous, and caring personality impacted everyone around her.

A few weeks before kickoff, the DPEA and Team 1717 were able to move into a brand new facility. In the past, our program resided in a 900 square room. In the new facility, we were able to setup a full size Rebound Rumble practice field. After St. Louis, we decided to take some final videos of Lindsay Rose in action before we dismantled the field. We have included links to the videos (below) along with a brief description of each video. We hope you enjoy watching them.

Thanks again,

2012 FRC Team 1717, the D’Penguineers


Watch the entire playlist here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL51FE6FC40790DD2B

Swerve Drive
This video demonstrates the fluid motion of our swerve drive as well as some of the neat features specifically added by our programming team to aid in playing Rebound Rumble. In order to play a game that has its roots from basketball, we thought it would be advantageous for our robot to spin and pivot like a basketball player.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZHaTGiakZM

Swerve Slalom
This video demonstrates the more complex maneuvering capabilities of our swerve drive.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9WHMssEF4U

Bridge and Barrier Mechanisms
This video demonstrates our robot's ability to drive over the bridge, balance on the bridge, and cross the barrier.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM80DE3dBZk

Single Ball Shoot-Around
This video demonstrates a drill that we used to help our drivers line up for shots more quickly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn4XNM5Q2pQ

Collecting and Shooting
This video demonstrates a drill that we used to help our drivers reduce the amount time it took them to collect and shoot three balls. We also ran variations of the drill, only collecting one or two balls at a time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZsz-EZLI4w

30 Second Endgame Strategy
This video demonstrates a potential way to defeat the triple balance. In the event that we ended up on an alliance without the triple balance capability, we wanted a back-up plan. Rather than have our human player feed us balls throughout the game, we would take and score our opposing alliance’s balls. This would allow our human player to accumulate 6 balls. Typically at 30 seconds, there were still a few balls on our side of the field, and with the human player's 6 balls in hand, thrown properly, we could put up a lot of points. The assumption was that if teams were going to triple balance, we would likely be undefended during the last 30 seconds. We would send our alliance partners to double balance for 20 and we would try to make up the difference. Enjoy the buzzer beater!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCzHHwj2qZo

Shooter Accuracy and Precision
This video demonstrates the accuracy and precision of our shooter. The robot could shoot with this consistency from anywhere in the key and at the fender. The balls used in this demonstration run the gamut and vary in firmness and age. Some are fresh out of the box while others are more than a month old.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg_ssvGBqEs

Speeding up 6-Ball Autonomous for St. Louis
This video demonstrates the minimum time in which 6 balls could be shot by our robot during autonomous. On the night that this video was taken, our programmers successfully tripled our shooter’s rate of fire while maintaining the same accuracy. We needed to speed the process up to make it possible for other robots to feed their balls to us and guarantee that we could score all of them during the 15 second autonomous period.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7fbkfA8Pic

Highlight Reel
This video is shows our robot in action playing the 2012 FRC game, Rebound Rumble.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVDy4-b_hxo