2974 Walton Robotics- Build Blog 2024

FIRST Robot Showcase
, ,
21

Here’s what we worked on this week after discussing improvement points from last weekend’s competition.

Climber:

  • We tested the winch climber by installing it on our defense practice drive base. We’re planning to switch from fiberglass rods for the hooks to slide on to polycarb sheets like 5987’s climber has to keep hook movement more stable along one plane. We’re also changing the 3D printed hooks to polycarb for more strength.

Intake:

  • We created a full intake replica and swapped it for our old intake, which we’re repairing the bent stock and replacing the rubber tubing on to become a spare for competition.
  • We also swapped out the guide above the intake for one with TPU brackets instead of PLA and polycarb instead of HDPE, since we had a couple of splits in the plate and some damage to the PLA brackets at Anderson.

Shooter:

  • We made the spacing between the wheels more uniform and used single custom spacers instead of stacking multiple to simplify maintenance and replaced a couple of worn out belts.
  • We also added a dampener to the shooter pivot to have less slop in our rotation, since we were having to consistently wait a couple of seconds after adjusting angle for the shooter to stop moving and be ready to fire, which adds up in cycle time. For this, we used the box below around the lower pivot axle to hold tread against the axle and increase friction against the movement of the shooter.

5 Likes
22

Amp! Amp! Amp!
Speaker! Speaker! Speaker!

2 Likes
23

25.3.24 Team (Mostly Programming) Update

This weekend, we attended the PCH Carrollton District Qualifier and won two new blue banners (Event Winners and Impact)! We are all super excited to be going to the PCH DCMP next week!!! In the meantime, we have several cool new changes to Shosty:

In between our last programming update and Carrollton, we focused on finalizing our robot for the competition. We created several new midline autons, and we made the autons we already had more accurate. Furthermore, we fixed several state machine logic issues, and we added state machine documentation.

During Carrollton, we made several code changes. Throughout the competition, we had to do several adjustments, such as updating our amp shot and loosening the tolerance for our shooter angle. On one of our matches, the drivers accidentally re-zeroed the shooter, so we locked it behind three layers of buttons instead of two. During elims, we created a new auton that complemented our alliance partner’s (7451 <3) auton. Furthermore, we had to counter the (super impressive) counter autons created by other alliances. Lastly, we added more logging to make future debugging easier. We are now logging the time between the driver’s shoot request and when the note leaves the shooter/the shoot request is cancelled. We also created an out-of-range detector to let us know when certain values are out of range for a specified time.

Currently, we hope to add and program a climber before DCMP! Furthermore, we plan on implementing a camera for faster and more accurate aiming. Stay tuned for a build post coming soon :D.

6 Likes
24

I talked to someone about this at y’all’s pit at Carrollton but don’t remember all the specifics. But is your team planning on implementing any sort of vision systems either for DCMPs or for Worlds?

Iirc I was told not Limelight specifically but some other form of vision was a potentiality. I’m curious if it be considered for autos, shooting from anywhere, and greater consistency as the competition gets more intense at DCMPs/Worlds. With such a solid bot already I think a vision system could really take it to the next level.

That being said code and electrical is not an area I have much experience in, I was just curious since it was a big topic in my and other teams this year.

2 Likes
25

we’re going to be adding a camera before dcmp :3

2 Likes
26

We actually just added a camera (See3CAM_24CUG) last night with a center of shooter mount (picture below) based on Wildstang’s. It’s doubling both as a camera mount and as a part of the structure of the top end of the shooter, since it replaced the aluminum bars that were there between our sets of flywheels. We’re planning on using it for both autons and teleop, since it will help lower our cycle time to rely less on aligning the drive base at distances that go with only our preset angles.

Screenshot 2024-03-26 at 09.07.54
Screenshot 2024-03-26 at 09.07.54880×734 105 KB

3 Likes
27

Here’s what we’ve been working on since Carrollton last week:

  • Disassembly! It’s hard to get into our pivot much without taking… quite a bit off. At Carrollton and since then we’ve been having to skip the right belt while the robot is off to get it to rest evenly on the hard stops, so we replaced our 100T HTD pivot belts with GT2 ones to last us the rest of the season to prevent skipping and reduce some of the slop in our pivot movement further. We also changed our pivot gear ratio from 125:1 to 100:1 for faster rotation.

  • While the shooter was off we swapped out the 1x2s under the flywheels for hex axles for weight reduction. We also got our finalized camera mount between the top wheels of the shooter, and put a second (camera-less) camera mount on the bottom to have symmetrical square support/structure for the end of the shooter.

  • For climber- we tested TPU hook supports because the PLA ones we were using broke, and we added the supports above the outer plates of the intake. We also are CNCing a new plate for the climber on the side of the mini PC since the main electrical panel interferes with easy inserting and removal of the winch module.
  • We’re working on a mechanism to push open trap so we can shoot into it while climbed. We’ll mount a poly arm to the shooter that gets wound down parallel to the shooter with a torsion spring, then gets released before climb by an end piece on a linear actuator sliding off the hook on the arm.

5 Likes
28

We won DCMP with our partners 1771 and 8575! We also got clean scores of 158 in playoffs match 1 (a particularly interesting one) and 164 in finals 1, both breaking the world clean score records at the time! We also had the first perfect auton of the season so far with 61 points for our alliance.

IMG_4545
IMG_45451170×757 169 KB

Our robot had no mechanical problems during matches; we were able to catch everything in pit fairly well. We had to swap out a few faulty bearings on our shooter that were making strange noises during an ops check, and are planning to take a look at the shooter motors that they were near this week.

We also took a hit in one of our later quals that cracked our intake side plates, but the damage was relatively limited by the stress relief that the bolt holes in the plate provided so we left them on until the day was over and swapped them out for spares on Saturday with no apparent further breakage.

Between now and packing for Worlds on Sunday, we plan to work on our trap mechanism. We switched from one pivot point to two to give us the length we needed to make sure we were putting pressure on the trap door, and have a rotational servo instead of a linear actuator as a release mechanism that we’ll be testing this week. We have done some angle testing in what we set up as “ideal” conditions- with robot fully climbed and not swinging (we’re adding stabilizers to the robot, which the pool noodles in the video are in place of right now) and trap mechanism actuated- and have gotten numbers to start programming off on.

*edited to make the YouTube link actually work

17 Likes
29

PXL_20240405_160651952
PXL_20240405_1606519521920×1446 381 KB

9 Likes
30

I love this robot! Its pretty fast and elite. The more elite teams in Newton, the better everyone’s chances are to get out of this division.

12 Likes
31

As we go into worlds I’m posting our Engineering Summary, which we share with technical judges at events to go through our entire design process.
Worlds Engineering Summary.pdf (36.0 MB)

Also, here is our pit checklist. This is a guideline of our process to verify that our robot is at its 100% before matches. The highlighted items are prioritized in short match turn arounds. After the pit check, we do a final ops check in which we validate general robot functions. This also allows us to see if there are any unforeseen issues past the pit check by analyzing motor current for specific subsystems and running the subsystems as they would during a match.
Worlds Crescendo Pit Checklist.pdf (54.0 KB)

2 Likes
32

Final Programming Update

We attended the FRC World Championship in Houston a couple of weeks ago, where we competed in the Newton division. We ended up as 1st pick of the 5th alliance (shoutout to our alliance partners 359, 3937, and 316!) and made it to match 13 of the playoffs.

We have a couple of highlights we wanted to share post-CMP.

Lots of Notes

Before CMP, we added a log that would tell us how many notes we’ve shot, and we found that we shot a total of 193 notes during official matches in Houston, ~40 of which were shot into the amp.

Log Everything

Speaking of logging…

During one of our quals matches on Newton, our drivers complained about our amp shot suddenly not aiming properly. Luckily, we had logs to reference so we could figure out exactly what was going on.

We put everything we could think of on a graph in AdvantageScope to see if there was anything that looked off, and we found this:

The graph of CANCoder position and motor position in our pivot are supposed to have pretty much the same shape (albeit the CANCoder one is stretched), but, at the point I marked, their shapes are vastly different. As it turns out, the jumps in motor position were due to our pivot belt skipping when we extended the arm. We found out we had to tighten this belt, which we wouldn’t have known had we not had logs to look at.

Anyway, we’re going to be talking about our plans for the off-season in an upcoming blog post, so look out for that!

3 Likes
33

Could you post the CAD to your Pigeon 2.0 mount? I am unable to find it in your CAD.

34

Here’s the mount as a STEP. It has a ledge on it to go over an edge to help set it to the right place for VHBing but it’s pretty easy to customize.

3 Likes
35

Final Post of the Season!

We won GRITS 2024 with our alliance partners 1771 and 6705! We won in a tight 2-1 Finals victory 99-88. We had a blast with all of the new alliance partners we had throughout the competition, and enjoyed seeing some familiar faces!

Build

Our robot had few mechanical problems throughout the entire qualification process, thanks to the arduous effort of our chief engineers and pit crew. However, when it came to the playoffs, some problems started to emerge closing in on the finals. In our second Finals match, one side of our intake plate completely cracked down the middle during our autonomous period. When we took it off the field, this is how our intake looked:

Nevertheless, pit crew worked their magic in the 8 minutes they were provided, and through the sheer detail and quality of our competition bumpers, they were able to hold the intake together for one last match. The entire front intake bar was essentially contained by the bumpers, and Alliance 1 brought home the win in Finals 3.

Also, shoutout to our 3 freshmen who were on pit crew for this competition, all of them did an amazing job and we look forward to working with them more in the future.

Programming

On the programming side of things, not much of our robot code has changed because we wanted to keep things similar to what worked during the regular season. At GRITS, we were very committed to helping other teams with their code, helping 8575 and others to keep their robot at their peak performance. We also had a new member in our pit for this competition, our new technician, Hrehaan! It was his first time in this position at a FIRST competition, and did amazing.

GRITS Recap

Here is our 2024 GRITS video recap, produced by WRT, edited by Dev Ramani:

We ended the season 74-7-0, a 91% win percentage. Thank you to all of our sponsors and mentors, see you next season!

P.S. Shoutout to Automation Direct for these amazing Crescendo themed trophies! We will be using this for many drive practices to come :grin:

~ Derek

4 Likes