Late Kickoff Recap
We had a chill kickoff this year. After the livestream and lunch (with a generous pizza donation from SQ Pizza) we split into small groups to read the manual and think about mechanisms. Some team members went into the side rooms to brainstorm and draw up potential designs on the whiteboards. Notable initial ideas included:
- Robot inspired by Robonauts’ 2018 robot with a 1dof arm and over-the-bumper floor pickup
- Mecanum chassis for sideways movement for easier automatic gamepiece scoring
- A pneumatic “pincher” intake and a 2018-esque compliant intake
Early Week 1
Chassis subteam:
- After a couple discussions [1] [2] and team discussions about mecanum, decided to build a normal tank kitbot chassis for higher traction on the field and charge station
- Assembly began immediately as chassis team members split off from major mechanism brainstorming
- Magnetic shafts with encoder pins were salvaged from the 2022 robot and everything except wheels and outer plates was fully assembled by Day 4
Mechanical subteam:
- The first meeting, broke off into side rooms to brainstorm ideas for arms and end effectors
- Limited design decisions down to 2 options with hinge mechanism or up and down crane system
- Ended up settling on a system similar to the Cranberry Alarm design
- Decided that this year’s game is software- and strategy-heavy, which means that mechanicals design should be as simple and efficient as possible to maximize the time programmers and drivers spend with the robot
- The goal is to get the scoring of cones and cube as precise as possible with just the push of a button
- To further simplify our design, we chose to skip L3 and focus on L1 and L2 scoring
- In our next couple meetings, we started to brainstorm and prototype intakes (shoutout to 7461 and 1339 for their fantastic designs!)
- Continued to disassemble our 2022 robot, Swiss
Programming subteam:
- Updated all our programming laptops to 2023 software
- Installed PhotonVision on all laptops to use with our Beelink Mini PC (nicknamed “Greggy”)
- Purchased OV9281 camera for better vision performance
- Reviewed fundamentals of Java programming
- Introduced autonomous code and practiced with our test chassis-only bot (nicknamed “Gregory”)
- Started to do power draw calculations and an electrical budget