Off season projects

[kuraikou]

I was wondering what off season projects other teams are doing now that FRC is over. I know that 4183 is making a NURC robot. What are your teams doing?

[seg9585]

4276 discussed working on a swerve drive, various pneumatic applications, and onboard vision tracking techniques.

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by kuraikou

I was wondering what off season projects other teams are doing now that FRC is over. I know that 4183 is making a NURC robot. What are your teams doing?

Have a meeting to discuss the successes and shortcomings of your season with all team members and mentors present. I can attest to the fact that 15 year old teams are still finding new and exciting ways to fail and therefore are always seeking to improve after every season. Maybe you should formalize training, draft an official business plan, start or add functionality to your website, rebuild parts of last year's robot, connect with local teams at offseason events, draft legislation for a local or state official to sponsor for FIRST, talk to radio and TV stations about broadcasting your team or local events, try out different drive trains or game piece manipulators to learn more about the advantages and disadvantages of core functions you can apply to actual future competitions...

You need to play to your strengths and eliminate weaknesses, and it's best to uncover and target necessary change specific to your team.

I wish you success.

[Chadfrom308]

We have arduinos that we might start experimenting with, especially because we are switching to labview next year from C++ and you can use labview with the arduinos

And I know that I want to lay out a robot guideline for next year like
-whether or not we really need floor pickup
-Transmissions
-Drivetrain
-Height
-Electronics and wire routing (something we have never done ever.)
-practice designs in AutoCAD

We are also going to code last years robot and this years robot in labview for practice

I also hope we do fun projects like making a go-cart with first materials and making a quad-rotor with arduinos

[Zuelu562]

3623 is planning a few offseason activities (into the school year). We have only 3 students who did not graduate returning, but we already have 10 or more joining the Boys and Girls Club JUST to do Robotics next year!

We want to build something (ideally a new drive system, maybe a mechanism), do a few thought excercises (give them an old game manual, give us the first thoughts; go over an old robot and give us negatives) and obviously training.

[Gdeaver]

We need to work with our returning and new students to make sure that they can take over for our seniors. A couple off season events should help. I would like to see our programming team take on field centric robot control for our swerve drive. Can an inexpensive IMU give accurate heading for an entire match? This is a big challenge. Are they up to it. We have used carbon fiber cloth laminated on .25" birch plywood for many things along with pultrusions. Do foam core composites and honeycomb composite panels have a place on the robots. Can we master the fabrication methods? I have a few students in mind for this project. Can buss looks to be taking on a significant role in the future. May be it's time to play with can. We have avoided it til now. There are always more robot studies than time and we don't want to burn everyone out.

[ehochstein]

Team wise we will be doing the following;

• 2470 is working on a summer sheet metal chassis for off-season events
• 3081 is designing and building a outreach robot that can shoot tshirts, basketballs and frisbees
• 2470 is creating a sponsorship packet to hand out to local businesses
• FTC #5943 is working on recruiting sponsors to start 2 additional teams

Personally my tasks after the season have grown;

• Recruiting and Training new mentors for 2470
• Working with FTC in MN
• Growing GOFIRST at Dunwoody
• Running/planning outreach events for 2470/3081
• Creating team infastructure with 3081 mentors
• Helping out other local teams with programming and recruitment
• Wishing for districts in MN so we can have more matches

[Koko Ed]

I'm trying to get my team some more stick time at a few off season events (Beantown Blitz, MARC and Rah Cha Cha Ruckus). I would like to take some of my kids on some of my off season volunteering events so they too can get a passion for volunteering directly for FIRST (every team should do this. The community needs us especially if were gonna make districts work. Let's all step up and do our part for the cause). We need to fundraise so we can go to a second regional next year (the drives team had alot of practice time waiting since week one and it showed on Newton but all the time in the shop is nowhere near as critical as time spent on a field taking on live competition). I would like to add new blood to the Rah Cha Cha Rucks planning committee and try to lure some of my team members there, especially if the event ends up at Edison Tech and I am sure there are community projects to do as well (I know Rolling Thunder has a big demo they do at the Monroe County Fair we like to participate in and we also go to the New York State fair as well.

[Tungrus]

We have arduinos that we might start experimenting with, especially because we are switching to labview next year from C++ and you can use labview with the arduinos

As far as I remember LabView program cannot run stand alone on Arduino, per LabView guys. One should be able to interface cRIO with Arduino and send/receive data and do the processing in Aduino, it will be interesting. It will be interesting to see if Vision processing can be done this way.

[lorem3k]

We're planning on rebuilding Spooky IV, our "aircraft carrier" from 2007.

[ToddF]

To save space I'll just point you here:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...25&postcount=8

[fb39ca4]

A fleet of homemade segways for the team!

[Igreenman]

team 3572 builds and races an eletric car with NECA.

[cadandcookies]

Our team has a large amount of summer/offseason projects currently in the works or in discussion. Amongst these are:

-CAD Training/Design Competitions
Fairly self explanatory, we want to continue to improve our team's design process, and one of the best ways to do this is more practice.

-Rebuilding the Showbot
We created an old showbot which still has all the old parts intact-- one of our offseason plans might involve redesigning a "showbot platform" for all types of situations.

-Branding/Imagery
Branding and imagery have historically been a problem for our team, and we'd like to formulate a good set of guidelines and standard vector logos for team and public use.

-Offseason competitions
We'll be helping to host or hosting a number of off-season events, some of which are still in the works

-Electronics refinement
Probably coming a bit late, but we'd like to make our electronics systems much more compact and easier to manage, so we'll be doing some planning on the offseason for this. Might be merged with the showbot redesign.

-Drive train testing
Testing various drive trains for CoF, maneuverability, etc. Might be integrated into the showbot platform. This is only possible because of the lower cost parts of VexPro.

Our team is fairly large (80+ students and 30+ mentors), so we can probably get a good chunk of these done. Honestly I'll be happy if we can get even one or two of these things done. This is also sort of a preliminary sum of all the ideas and confirmed activities that have been floating around the team since kickoff. The best source of ideas is always the team's membership!

[Clayton Yocom]

45's season truly never stops, so while we prepare for IRI and relay for life we will also be giving cad lessons and working on an off season swerve drive 'bot. We're also working on advanced telemetry in code and perfecting autonomous recording in teleop.