BREAKING NEWS!
(One Act)
Reporter:“Today on Breaking News we have the long awaited return of Electric Mayhem Green to writing build threads. However, they still fail to come out at the scheduled time.
In other news we have an analysis of robotics from our very own reporter Captain Obvious. Captain the floor is yours”
Captain Obvious: “Thank you. Today, using my expert skills of analysis, here is my analysis of robotics, more specifically FTC. Robotics is hard!”
Reporter: “Thank you Captain Obvious”
Where We’ve Been
Cast your minds back to a time where we didn’t miss weekly posts, in fact go back as far as when these posts still came out on Saturdays. Back then there was an optimism that by CADing the entire robot before putting a single part of it together we could build the majority of the robot in one weekend and have it finished by the end of the week. Now three weeks after the robot speedrun the robot is kinda done. Now what do I mean by that? Well, there’s an important time in each build season where you have to adjust the expectations of your robot until it’s done. For example we had to scrap and redesign our climber multiple times because we couldn’t find a design that worked. We eventually realized we had run out of time and going for the max 30 point climb would not be possible for our first competition. (For context, we compete first at the Finger Lakes Qualifier on December 8th)
After the robot speedrun (described in the last post, and streamed on our YouTube Channel), we had a drivetrain and the carriage built. The intake slide and elevators were about ready to go on as well. That’s when the problems started. First up, we had bought the wrong motors from GoBilda, we have never really used GoBilda parts before so we don’t quite know our way around the website, so when we bought faster motors for the slides, we didn’t realize we had bought the D output shaft motors. This was an expense and time consuming mistake as we had to wait until the correct motors came in. Once they did this required taking off both elevators, replacing the motors then reattaching them. After this, we went to attach the intake, surprise! We don’t actually own bolts long enough to do so, now we wait until more bolts come in. Once they do we have to reprint the intake base as the holes didn’t line up. But despite all this we were able to get the intake and elevator on the robot. But wait, there’s more, Swyft slides as it turns out have a lot of play in them, they wiggle. So we had to put a wheel on one side of the intake and a ramp on the robot for it to ride on so that the intake actually makes it into the robot.
More Details on the Intake
So before the intake or carriage were built, we actually hadn’t had tested them. But we did before we attached them (and again after we attached them, but there was no recording of it). Below is a video of said test.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fhhC59y8Fvs
This intake has an open back so that we can outtake into our carriage mechanism, but we have a color sensor on the intake so we can choose the type of block we want to intake from the submersible. If we intake the wrong color it will be spat out the back in less than 3 seconds so that it isn’t in our way when we go to reattempt.
The “Pooper” Problem
The pooper was the system that was at the back of the robot which was the final set of wheels that “pooped” out the block into human player station. Now remember what I said about how there comes a time where you have to reduce the expectations of your robot until it’s done. This was the first one of those occasions. In order to fix our climber problems (which will be described next) we needed an extra motor. So we took the one that was driving the pooper and swapped it out for servos. This worked out because the gears in the pooper were also in the way of the block. But then we realized oh wait there’s actually no room for servos, and then we realized it would be inefficient to turn around and back into the human player station when we could instead extend the intake into it and outtake that way. So we took it off.
Climbers Galore
Originally we had another set of towers on the robot that would hold us on the bottom bar before we climbed to the top bar. But once they were built we realized that those towers got super in the way of our second climb, and that our hooks were too long and the robot would lean like crazy once we were up. So we considered scrapping the climb until we came up with a plan. The new climb would use two additional towers and hooks, these hooks would rotate down and pinch the robot off the ground, then we would extend the slides up to climb to the top. Geometry, geometry is hard. The hooks were too large and stuck out of the 18x18 box, and even if we did get it to fit it was untested and we didn’t know if it would work. So we settled for attaching long hooks to the slides and climbing a couple inches off the ground for 15 points.
Where Does That Leave Us?
The Robot as it Stands on 11/25/24
Here, that leaves us here, and there, there it is.
The Robot Sporting Some Very Stylish (Non-Competition Legal) Name Plates
There comes a time in each build season where you have to adjust the expectations of your robot until it’s done. Robotics is hard, and integration is harder, so when you’re out of time you have to be able to cut back and leave only the most critical parts to compete with. We have every intention of coming back after December 8th and getting this robot up to where we envisioned it to be, but we are out of time now and we need to get code on it before we compete, along with that we need to prepare for the judging room which is even more behind schedule than the robot.
Where did we go Wrong?
At some point, probably after our first competition, I want to write a whole post talking about what exactly went wrong with our plans for this season. But for now, the short answer, and to be honest, we don’t know. A slightly longer answer to that is, we don’t know, but we have ideas. Our grand plan this season was to CAD everything before putting anything together, with a CAD deadline of November 1st. We hit that deadline, which was the first time we ever have hit a CAD deadline. We went in with a completed CAD and went to build the robot in a weekend.
First problem, we hadn’t manufactured any of the parts yet, this meant we spent the whole first day doing that. Then when we went to put it together we had lost a lot of manpower to other weekend activities making progress slow as only two people could make progress on it. That combined with other issues with the supplies we had (wrong motors, wrong sized bolts, etc.) made it hard to actually make progress over that weekend. We could solve this in the future by taking through inventory before a build weekend and keeping a list of what we need,
The second problem was that we had to iterate entire systems after the CAD was already done, most notably the climber and pooper. This was because they didn’t work how we intended them to. In hindsight a lot of systems on the robot, even now, were designed with how we assumed things would work. Not how we knew things would work. More prototyping before and during the CAD process would probably solve this problem as we would have a deeper understanding of how elements of the game actually worked.
If you or your team have experienced what we’re going through and have any suggestions for how we can improve for the future, please feel free to respond with them below.
What’s Next?
This week is for our programmers. This week we also have off from school. Today the programmers were in the lab and working on getting basic code on the robot and testing systems. I wasn’t able to join them so I can’t speak on what progress they made but hopefully by the end of the week we have some drivecode and autos together so we can start driving practice this weekend. If we could be driving this week and next week, that is more drive practice than we’ve ever had as a team, and would be ideal. There’s probably some more mechanical problems to work out throughout the week however.
It’s been a hard couple of weeks, and getting the robot done or to state where it could compete took a lot of time and will power, and there were moments where we thought we couldn’t do it. Our grand plan of CADing the perfect robot on the first try was obviously far-fetched but we all got caught up in the idea of doing it, which led to a painful realization that we didn’t, and that you can’t. Regardless, it was a learning experience for all, and we’re working on getting better for next time.
That’s the whole point.
