Off season projects

[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.

[mklinker]

4485 is experimenting with drive system gear ratios, learning to use encoder data, and gyro/encoder assisted autonomous and tele drive modes. In the Fall we plan to focus on learning to implement vision processing.

[Arpan]

A few of our kids are doing a quadcopter buildoff this summer.

[thisOrrthat]

A few of our students are getting together with your programming mentor and creating a segway like device.

[Mark Sheridan]

We have parts made for a swerve drive. We got more to finish before we start assembly. Now that we are about at the 50 percent completion, I can already tell we won't be using swerve for a competition robot. We are having fun building , and learning a lot. I think this drive will turn into a demo bot or a defense robot for driving practice.

On that note, I have been thinking about restoring our 2011 mecanum robot and build a kit-bot on steroids. So with the 2013 2-speed tank drive practice bot, we could have every drive base covered to practice against.

Also, we might want to convert our 2013 practice bot into a cycler with floor pickup and ten point hang. We debated about a climber+dumper+shooter versus a cycler. Since hindsight is 20/20, it would be fun try the other aspects of the game we missed this season.

[Bneufeld235]

A perfect off-season project to work on would be to experiment with and see the different applications of team 585's Arbitrary Quadrature Encoder.

For this entrepreneurial, we have designed the Arbitrary Quadrature Encoder for other FIRST teams to use. This can just plug straight into the Jaguar and replace the stubborn commercial encoders. With this encoder, a team can place it on motors that cannot normally have encoders (window motors), and a linear application such as an elevator system.

We are now at a point where we can start printing the circuit boards. For more information and a demonstration go to our Kickstarter page at http://kck.st/147OyqI

[sarah_storer]

Our team is working on an encyclopedia on our website of everything a rookie team would need to know about FIRST and building a robot....our programming team is working on vision processing...and our mentors/coach are working on recruiting and building up our underclassmen base

Also there's been talk about:
-re-doing our pit design
-having the programming team learn AutoCAD
-build a new robot cart
-do workshops teaching all of our rookies how to work with tools

[InversePara1325]

Our team is going to make a 2-speed gear box for the first time! We already designed it we just need to see if it works.