[Ri3D] The GreenHorns 2017

[Ginger Power]

Hello Chief Delphi!

The GreenHorns are back and ready to take on our 3rd year of Robot in 3 Days!

This year, we're following FIRST's lead and running our livestream through Twitch. You can find the link to our stream here! We'll be going live about an hour after kickoff at 11:30 AM CST. From the time we start our livestream, we'll be monitoring the chat and answering any questions out there!

We're planning on posting five total videos including our "Meet the Team" video, three daily update videos, and our reveal video. Those can be found on the Ri3D YouTube Channel. Look out for our "Meet the Team" video shortly after kickoff, and our "Day 1 Update" video sometime before midnight tonight.

If you want to get the inside scoop on the GreenHorns, check out our website which has links to all of our social media.

Our goal this year is to inspire as many teams as possible to build the best robot they can and use our successes and failures to help them in their build season.

Our plan is to release the CAD of our robot as well as a white paper that describes our thought processes along with some ideas for how to improve on our design since a six week build season allows for the potential for a lot more design development than our mere 72 hours.

None of this would be possible if it weren't for our extremely generous sponsors which include the following: AndyMark, Rev Robotics, iR3 Creative (the original Ri3D team), NDSU Student Government, CIS 4607, and Becker High School.

We can't wait for kickoff, and we're extremely excited to take on this challenge once again. Good luck to all the teams out there!

[Ginger Power]

The GreenHorns team is now on Day Two of the 72 hour tech trek!

Take a peek at our Meet the Team and Day One Update videos!

If you want live updates, check out The GreenHorns's livestream on Twitch HERE.

If you are interested in what prototypes The GreenHorns crafted yesterday, https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bzg...ew?usp=sharing shows sketches of all of them!

We hope all teams are having a great start to the season! If you have any questions, simply contact us on one of our social media sites, links to which can be found HERE. Thanks for your support!

[zinthorne]

What robot dimensions did you decide on?

[Ginger Power]

Originally Posted by zinthorne

What robot dimensions did you decide on?

We went with 40"x36"x24" the short and wide configuration. Our logic was that we wanted to be able to catch all 50 fuel from the hopper. Make sure you account for your bumpers when deciding your frame perimeter! They need to be inside of the max robot dimensions this year.

[zinthorne]

Thank you! I was trying to understand how you managed to fit the intake inside the volume dimensions. Makes sense now.

[Ginger Power]

Originally Posted by zinthorne

Thank you! I was trying to understand how you managed to fit the intake inside the volume dimensions. Makes sense now.

We attempted to maximize the size of the intake while making sure our bumpers still covered 6 inches. It's a similar challenge as doing an open bumper last year, which many teams struggled with.

[Ginger Power]

The GreenHorns have posted our Day One and Day Two update videos!

We've attempted to maximize the number of action shots in our videos while also describing our thought process on each mechanism. Please post here if you have any questions about our robot, our videos, or the game! Look out for our Day Three update video coming later tonight. It'll be a longer video that shows a lot of robot action. Let us know if you have any requests for our final videos.


(Running on 2 hours of sleep + sick... this can't be healthy...)

[Ether]

Hi Ryan,

Do the Greenhorns have an Ri3D journal or blog posted somewhere, summarizing your progress and design rationale?

[Ginger Power]

Originally Posted by Ether

Hi Ryan,

Do the Greenhorns have an Ri3D journal or blog posted somewhere, summarizing your progress and design rationale?

Hi Ether, I really appreciate you asking all the Ri3D teams for insight into our design/thought processes. The videos are great, but you can learn a lot more from reading a white paper than you can from a video. I learned this last year when the white paper for our Ri3D robot generated a long discussion thread while our videos did not.

Our plan is to release a number of white papers shortly after Ri3D (when we get back to college). We'll detail all of our different designs, the specs on each, the effectiveness of each, and how we would improve them given more time. If you have specifics that you want included in those papers, I would love to hear them.

Unless requested, we won't discuss our thoughts on strategy, because due to the nature of Ri3D we need to rush through the rules. We basically just said let's prototype for everything so teams can see it.

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Ginger Power

Our plan is to release a number of white papers shortly after Ri3D (when we get back to college). We'll detail all of our different designs, the specs on each, the effectiveness of each, and how we would improve them given more time.

Thank you !!

[Ginger Power]

We finished our robot around 5AM this morning!!! We've been driving and filming our reveal video since then. A number of The GreenHorns pulled all nighters to finish things up in time, but our hard work paid off!

We decided to completely change our intake mechanism with only 12 hours left, and despite my initial frustration/concern it turned out to be one of the best decisions we made during this event. Our new intake is much faster, easier maintenance, lighter and just better in every way.

Another one of the best decisions we made was deciding to attempt every aspect of the game on one robot. We have successfully done so, and this robot is sweet. Can't wait to share the results of our reveal video with you all! We'll write up white papers after we recover from the lack of sleep... I'm running on 2.5 hours over the last 60 hours.

[onenerdyguy]

Super excited to see how our local Ri3D team reveals. It's great to check the videos, and see you guys coming up with close to the same ideas as our kids!

[Ginger Power]

Here is the link to our day 3 update video! Was show our old intake, so the one in the reveal will be different. We'll make sure to show all the functionality of this thing in the reveal video. Let us know if you have any questions about it!

[onenerdyguy]

For the dreaded question: after you're all properly caffeinated, when could we expect the reveal?

[Ginger Power]

Originally Posted by onenerdyguy

For the dreaded question: after you're all properly caffeinated, when could we expect the reveal?

We've been caffeinated for days... I think what we really need some detox time. We also need to get through this snowstorm back up to Fargo in one piece! With that said, filming the reveal went well, so you can expect the reveal to come sometime tomorrow afternoon. I'm also currently in the process of writing a comprehensive white paper about our robot which will be released around the same time.