1561 CAD and Season Overview
2023 Charged Up Season
1561 - Final Robot CAD
1561 Final Robot Code
1561 - The Blue Alliance
This year was 1561’s best season yet! We went to worlds and competed in multiple regionals, a first for our team since 2009. This was a big change for us but we all loved it.
Week 1 - Arkansas Regional
Going into the season, we knew that we wanted to do both cones and cubes. After lots of thought, we decided the best way forward would be a tower with an arm. We also wanted to do ground pickup of cones and cubes.
With this in mind, we got to work. We saw the intake on RI3D and used this for inspiration. Our first iteration had a gigantic, full width intake. We opted for a four bar intake with a floating roller made entirely out of aluminum. Our arm for grabbing intaked pieces was a WCP telescoping arm. Shockingly, the all aluminum intake ended up being over 20 lbs /s! In total, the robot ended up being over 135 lbs. It had taken us a long time to CAD and make but we had to scrap it with only days left before competition. We got too ambitious with the intake and auto alignment of cones and overestimated our ability.
Initial week one version. Intake, Conveyor, and Arm (Not pictured)
So with the little time we had, we decided to simplify designs and move to just an arm. We quickly made a ramp that would funnel cubes into our bot from the single substation and we could ideally grab cones like this too.
JimBob
Here is our robot seen in its most common state.
Our highest scoring match at Arkansas!
The scheduling gods were very favorable this week and we somehow managed to seed rank 10. Well above what we should have been. We partnered with the great people from 1997 and 3931 and made it to semifinals.
Week 2 - Oklahoma Regional
After seeing the expected poor performance from our week one robot, we knew we had to change things up. Because we only had 3 days in between week 1 and week 2, we decided to narrow our focus and only do one game-piece really well. We originally were leaning towards becoming a cone only robot and making a design that would pick up cones from the single substation. This would give us a high theoretical max score. We tried for a day to figure out how to make our arm faster and fit within our frame perimeter. Everyone else that did what we were going for had a direct drive arm as opposed to our winch arm.
Knowing we could not outscore these bots and would not have time to program this, we eventually looked at a cube only robot. We saw that a theoretical max score of 75 points was possible if we did every cube spot (not including cone links). We decided this was the most feasible plan and got to work.
We knew we wanted to be low to the ground so we could make fast cycles. This lead us to a pivoting arm with a shooter/intake. We were not able to CAD it in time so the entire robot was jankily put together in 2 long nights. We scrapped the tower and only used the drivetrain from Arkansas.
Duck N’ Cover
Using a peice of poly carb and two aluminum rods, we were able to make the bulk of our shooter arm. Falcons were attached directly to the shooter and everything was manually driven with joysticks. The robot had issues with popping cubes and breaking chain. This gave us a lot of tech fowls that hurt us in alliance selection.
This robot showed us the potential for a cube only robot. The strategy ended up winning us the semi finals. We were picked by 5889 Commandobots who we played with last year in the playoffs. Our alliance was strong and with our newly made balance, and 2718 and 5889’s autos we did really well and were a strong alliance.
Unfortunately, due to a red card, we did not advance to the finals but we were excited at the potential this strategy showed.
Week 6 - Tulsa Regional
Now with much more time, a viable strategy, and a working prototype, we got to work on making a final design that would hopefully take us to worlds. This robot would be very similar to week 2 but with more refinement and a smaller drivebase. Even with all this time, we still had to rush coding in the end and we weren’t able to get any driver practice. Luckily, we were able to go into Tulsa with a working balance auto (finally) and preset positions for our arm. This would hopefully increase our reliability and speed.
With pre-scouting from our team, we were very nervous going into the competition. Previous winners 4613, 1339, and 6424 would all be at the event and were fierce competitors.
Duck N’ Cover V2
Version two of our cube design proved very reliable. We ended up ranking 2nd at Tulsa which is the highest rank our team has ever acheived. We were happy with our rank and decided that any of the top three alliance partners would give us a good chance at winning the competition. 4613 had incredible speed and cycle times, 1339 had an amazing auto and amazing precision and 6424 never seemed to miss and was incredibly reliable at getting cone after cone.
After a wild first pick with 4613 declining ranked 1, 5013. Trobots chose 1339 Anglebotics. This left us with 6424 as our first pick.
Coming back to us for our second pick we were shocked to find that 2333 was not picked. They had an everybot design with swerve that made them great at cones and very maneuverable.
We were pretty confident with our first match up and we were predicted to get around 140 points. Our strategy initially was to do every cube starting with the bottom to get the links. This obviously did not work since we needed to get points. We won the first match with a much lower than predicted score of 129 to 121. We changed up our strategy to maximize our score and did high and mid cones first.
The second round was much scarier because we would be going up against two jugernauts. Team Titanium and Barker Redbacks. We ended up winning by one penalty point with a score of 169 to 168.
Every other match leading up to the finals ended really close with everyone putting up a good fight but we managed to get into the finals!
For the first finals match, we won with a pretty good margin and we felt pretty good for the next match. We had a voltage drop that caused us to stop moving during the last part of the match but we fixed that quickly. It turned out that the match needed to be replayed because of a field fault.
Right before the match we saw that we had a CAN fault. This was terrifying and ultimately led us to having leave the match. We were unable to get a backup for this match because of the rules of replays. If we got the robot working, we would have two more matches to win to win the finals.
We ended up winning both and won Tulsa! Our season wasn’t over and we got to go to worlds.
Everyone on our team, including mentors have never been to worlds so it was an exciting experience for us all.
Archimedes
Like many teams, we were thrilled to see we would be playing with and against some of the best teams in the world. We were also terrified.
We ended off with a record of 9-2 in quals and we were very excited to potentially be playing in the playoffs.
After Tulsa, we perfected our autos and were able to get a three piece on the bump side working really well. We believed that we would be a great second pick for any team, with our auto and ability to score a lot of cubes.
When it came down for alliance selections, everything went about as we expected. When it came time for 111 to pick their first alliance partner, we were shocked when we heard our name called out.
I wont get into our strategy here but @DohertyBilly goes into great detail in his post here. Ultimately, we broke down due to a CAN wire coming lose (very similar to Tulsa 
when will we learn). We were very sad and the what if game is not fun to play, but overall we are thrilled with how this year went.
We couldn’t have asked for better teammates and everyone at worlds was incredibly nice. We all freaked out when we found out we won the creativity award.
Also, thanks team 27! You guys are awesome!
