2025 Ri3D @ Purdue Build Thread

[AdamB]

Hello Chief!
Ri3D @ Purdue is excited to be back for a second year! We’ve got plenty to cover from our plans, our preparation, and much more so I’ll try to make this as readable as possible.

First however, MASSIVE thank you to our donors! We have avoided charging our members for more than food and housing cost thanks to the incredibly supportive community surrounding us. We’d love to give massive thanks to:

AndyMark
Penn Robotics (FRC 135 & 328)
Adambots (FRC 245)
Harrison Boiler Robotics (FRC 1747)
Maverick Robotics (FRC 4272)
suPURDUEper Robotics (FRC 7457)
These organizations have donated so many things from stock materials, to motors, to tools, even swerve modules. We will be sure to giving thanks as we show our work during the 3 days, but this is the first of many thank yous!

Moving onto the 3 days, I’ll try to divide this into dropdowns so it’s easy for everyone to find the section they want easier.

How to Watch

We try to make our content very accessible, and reach as wide of an audience as possible. To see the most out of our 3 days, tune in to our Twitch for the livestream, YouTube for highlights and recaps, this CD thread, and our Instagram account. Instagram often takes a more backseat role as we focus on long form content, so we’d recommend the other options to get the best experience. Lastly, we’ll be checking socials for questions, but if you’d like to directly submit a question feel free to do so through our Google Form!2. 2. 3.

Stream Schedule

Our schedule will go as roughly as follows:
2025-01-04T12:30:00Z→2025-01-05T03:30:00Z
2025-01-05T14:00:00Z→2025-01-06T02:00:00Z
2025-01-06T12:30:00Z→2025-01-06T18:00:00Z
Of course, this is subject to change but expect these rough hours! We will release more detailed schedules throughout the 3 days, but we currently plan to talk through our plans in the morning, work, answer any questions from stream chat or the google form over food breaks, and wrap up towards the end of the day. for those that were a fan of our stream last year, we will have a fairly similar setup and it will be managed by the same great individual (Thanks Daniel!). Our goal is to have better audio and a bit more collaboration with the stream, but highlights will still be uploaded to the youtube channel and should remain similar.

Our Goals

We have 3 main goals:

1. Last year we were a bit… disorganized. We made some kinda crazy decisions, switched our design a little late into the game, and did some things that in the glorious 20/20 of hindsight weren’t the best ideas. This year with our bit of experience in the tighter time frame, we’re planning things far greater. As part of our prep we have held a lesson over basic parts and wiring so everyone understood motors, gears, electronics, and other basics. We also will be creating a rough hierarchy so that as we divide and conquer projects we know who to turn to for advice as questions arise. Last, we are setting soft time limits for projects to avoid becoming hyper focused and Icarusing into a worse overall design.
2. Live on past the 3 days! As college students who mentor, volunteer, and hold various other roles within our FIRST community, it’s not like we give up FRC after the 3 days. We’d like to continue past the 3 days to go over various topics such as what we view as important for scouting, attend preseason events, and contribute as best we can.
3. Build a better robot! From having better code, to more refined designs, to more precisely machined parts, we want to try new things and create a stronger robot overall. Ranking 5th last year and being the second highest ranked college was a wonderful start, but our eyes are on the podium this year!

As we add resources, plans change, and the season begins, we’ll be sure to add all that info here amongst other socials. On behalf of Ri3D @ Purdue, We’re excited to dive in to Reefscape with all of you!

[RSimpson]

Love to see Purdue Ri3D back and ANOTHER Indiana team! Best of luck this weekend, and hope you guys have fun!

[AdamB]

Get ready for kickoff!
We had a final meeting tonight to get some things prepared, so I’ll detail that, our future plans, and a rough schedule below:

Last Prep

Today was the first day we could get into our workspace for the 3 days. This meant a lot of preparing tools, carrying over materials, and a lot of things that are simple but invaluable. We also smoothed out some silly bumps and little mistakes we needed to prepare.

We also talked about some Ri3D Prep! With such little time and people from over 10 FRC teams, everyone has different knowledge, but also has less experience with their Ri3D teammates. To fix this, we made a simple chart where everyone could rank their skills so we know roughly how much you know, and who would be a good resource if you needed help.

For example, if you need help with a tool or how to fabricate something, Rhett, Kaia, or any of the other people in the 1 category feel very comfortable with tools.

Future Plans

With Ri3D having more lax rules about prep being done, our goal is to go into Reefscape with a working swerve chassis and rough ideas on what to plan after that. The purpose of this is for a final tool check, and also so we know early on if it is a good idea to pursue our robot on swerve, or due to our lower programming knowledge in comparison to other areas we should go KOP to make things a bit easier.

As a way less fun goal, we’ll also outline our schedule and talk over any hiccups we can expect to possibly occur. The main point of this is any challenges are much easier to solve when there has been some preparation and communication in advance, and fires are easier to prevent altogether than put out.

Rough Schedule

Here is a rough schedule for the day:
2025-01-04T13:00:00Z
Stream begins! Morning prep and swerve chassis
2025-01-04T16:00:00Z
Kickoff prep and strategy discussion
2025-01-04T17:00:00Z
Watch kickoff, go into game prep
2025-01-04T18:30:00Z
Begin prototyping/work time
2025-01-04T23:00:00Z
Recap, then dinner and Q&A
2025-01-04T23:30:00Z
Continue prototyping/work time
2025-01-04T15:30:00Z
Day 1 recap and wrap up

Lastly, here’s a photo of our current robot!

[Karaoke]

Our first official decision as an Ri3D team is the notion that, because the max RP is different, a new mythical animal must also be used. Henceforth, we will be terming a 6 RP win an “Alicorn,” (the 4 RP will still retain its honorary title of “Unicorn,”) which is the combination between a unicorn and a pegasus.
Thank you for your consideration.

[AdamB]

Day 1 all wrapped up! We made a lot of good progress, tackled some challenges, and while still very tired are ready for day 2.

Recap

This game has SO much going on. 6 game piece scoring locations, a climb, catchup mechanics, etc that I don’t know that we’ll see many teams do everything rather than specialize in putting up a good score and aiming for specific roles similar to 2024 having a clear shuttler, cleanup, and hybrid role in higher level play. With this in mind, we are primarily focused on scoring L1,L2, and L3, as well as putting algae into the processor. This will allow us to hit enough levels and work towards the coopertition bonus that our robot could #alicorn in a match despite not scoring on L4. We also are working on a shallow climb as due to time constraints we don’t have the time to realistically explore the deep climb and accomplish other goals as well.

Our rough design is a swerve base (since this is probably the single most swerve friendly field ever) with an intake similar to our prototype here. This will allow us to contain coral fully within our bumpers, and maintain reasonable control on algae similar to how many played Breakaway (which I have mistakenly been calling Rack N Roll all day). This intake will be mounted to a wrist for adjustments based on scoring location angle, game piece orientation, and game piece type, and to reach the higher levels we are choosing to use a four bar to have “linear” movement without an elevator. Lastly, to make a shallow climb we’ll simply toss a 3 stage climber in a box on to reach into the center hole of the cage and winch ourselves up.

Future Plans

Tomorrow should be a lot of rewarding work. Our swerve chassis should be running by lunch, our brain pan and cover machined, and geometry finalized so that we can begin to mechanically assemble this robot. Ideally, the sooner that gets done, the sooner we can look into testing code and running through what a potential match may look like. We’ll put a rough schedule down below, but ideally we don’t call it a day until the robot is mechanically assembled and Monday is just for making the electrical and programming magic.

Schedule

2025-01-05T14:30:00Z
Stream starts!
2025-01-05T17:00:00Z
Morning recap and lunch Q&A
2025-01-05T18:00:00Z
afternoon work and robot assembly
2025-01-05T21:30:00Z
Afternoon recap, Dinner Q&A
2025-01-06T00:30:00Z
Evening work, robot mechanically finished

As always, you can catch us live at Twitch, highlights on our YouTube, and contact us through our Q&A or leave a message on CD, YouTube, or Twitch chat. Good luck to everyone and #alicorn!

[Snow417]

Hi all, I’m Daniel with Ri3D @ Purdue. We apologize for the delay in sending out our day 2 updates as things have… not exactly gone to plan yesterday. For those curious, check out our redeye update on YouTube where you can find Adam going through our achievements and setbacks for day 2.

Adam should be back with a proper update post later today. See you then!

[Karaoke]

Hi everyone!

We’d like to give you a little update (and access!) for our CAD!

First and foremost, here is the link to our official robot CAD (as of this post, it is not complete, but it does give insight into our geometry and plans moving forward in case it aids people in understanding our design/thought process).
Please let me know if you have any issues with the link. Again, this is an ongoing document, so we are still refining, re-naming, and making it digestible.

Onshape

In the main folder, we have our in-progress “Main Robot” assembly. This is the most up-to-date visual model we have of our robot.

We also have a layout sketch that includes horizontal borders to indicate maximum extension past the vertical projection of the frame perimeter as well as the chassis and bumper heights. Along with a basic sketch of our mechanism, we can constrain the geometry so that it moves as a real four-bar mechanism would.

In each folder, you’ll find the basic parts that go with each sub-mechanism. For example, the plate supporting our compliant wheel and hex shaft assembly for CORAL pickup would be found in the “Intake” folder, etc.

We are still working on keeping the assembly up-to-date and in accordance with real-world physics, so keep checking in to see a more detailed robot outline!

The design overall features a square (24") frame perimeter with four NEO-powered SDS MK4n swerve modules. The mechanism is a four-bar with a wrist attached to the end to actuate our end effector. The end effector consists of two “forks” (18" hex shafts) to corral ALGAE with one fork having a compliant wheel to grip CORAL against the fork.

Please feel free to reply with questions, and good luck to all FRC teams beginning their design process this week!

(Hashtag Alicorn)

[Snow417]

Daniel again - while I do not bring with me the promised update post, I do bring two pieces of good news.

Firstly, we have finally identified the root cause of our swerve module issues and are closer than ever to finally resolving it. As my specialty area is pointing cameras at people, I’ll instead let Adam explain the fix in detail in today’s lunch recap.

Secondly, and also covered in the recap, we will be extending our build period from 4pm EST today to sometime around tomorrow noon, allowing us to complete a full Ri3D instead of a Ri2.5D. The early cutoff was due to scheduling conflicts that meant we only had our build space reserved until today 4pm, however thanks to the generosity of parents and family friends, we have been able to secure new workspaces to allow us to see our robot (now named Alicorn) to its full potential.

We will still be ending the livestream around 4pm to allow for us to begin the transition to our new workspaces. We hope to see you again there!

[AdamB]

Hey everyone! It is very late and we covered everything pretty good in our recap videos today, so I’ll keep this short.

We have managed to track down a solution to our drive problems and now have a working swerve chassis, as well as all other parts to quickly assemble the robot. Tomorrow will likely be split between assembling the robot and trying to find set points for quick and precise movements at different scoring locations.

We’re super happy to show off our final robot! With #Alicorn not requiring any tools fancier than maybe a drill press,band saw, or jigsaw. When we started we aimed to stay within our means for a more polished product and to create something that would be helpful for teams with lower resources or less experience. While there’s still a final push to make, #Alicorn is coming along nicely!

[AdamB]

Time’s up! We have finished our build and have plenty of info to share. We’d like to give one final thanks to all of our donors. Without gearboxes from AndyMark, we might have not been able to gear our mechanisms appropriately. Without the supplies from Penn Robotics, Adambots, Maverick Robotics, and suPURDUEper Robotics, we wouldn’t have had the components we needed to assemble our robot. Without the tools and access to Harrison Boiler Robotics and Westside Boiler Invasion’s CNC, we wouldn’t have been able to rapidly prototype and make this robot as quick as we could. And finally, thanks to all of our community. When we had issues people reached out with help, some came in and looked at code and sensors, and countless other small things. If you look at the donors listed above, you see a direct connection and want to help their community and I’m glad we could receive their support.

First of all, Here are all our helpful links:

Links

Github
Onshape
Robot explanation/Wrap-up
2025 Playlist

Now the less fun part, we did not finish. It is very important to build within your means and make sure everything gets done, so this was a fairly brutal realization that even a few extra hours yesterday was unlikely to get us into working condition. With our mechanisms not really being designed to fit onto our KOP chassis, the silly encoder issue we faced took a lot of time. Then having an invisible CAN bus due to having firmware updated and then being unrecognized to revert was also an absolutely insane time killer. We ended up cannibalizing our drive train in the hopes we could perfectly wire the upper mechanisms with the old CAN IDs and zero visibility on if anything was right to try and show our arm, wrist, and intake powered. When this did not work, we had to call it and hope that in the future we can update the Rev hardware client and fix things. We also worked in three separate workshops and thus did not set our work hours cutting the potential crunch time opportunity over the last day.

I do not say all of this to complain or say anything was unfair, but to be upfront to anyone new to FRC that one of the single most valuable skills is adaptability. If we had not found a way to use relative encoders, we would have never driven. If we had not been willing to move workspaces, we would have lost about a full day. Lastly, if we had not tried to wire our mechanisms with the motor controllers we knew CAN IDs for, we absolutely would have had zero chance at showing mechanisms yesterday.

This may be unorthodox, but we aren’t done. There was an insane amount of time, blood, sweat, and tears devoted into this robot and making it work. We showed every success, every finding, and every loss we had to the public to be as real as possible and show that oftentimes FRC is really hard and you won’t know the answer. I do not know that it will be before the rankings, but the robot will run at least 1 full cycle powered by FRC equipment. Until that day, we will work to release any footage we currently have including individual mechanism overviews and a 1 for 1 recreation of the lion king opening scene. Thank you all for joining us on this journey, and #Alicorn.

(BTW any questions anyone may still have, feel free to keep asking we’ve got way too much time on our hands and enjoy helping when we can. lol)