3349 Static | 2024 Build Thread | Open Alliance

FIRST FRC Open Alliance
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Welcome to the 2023-2024 Open Alliance Build Thread for Static! We are a community-based New Veteran team based out of Holly Springs, North Carolina, and this will be our first year as a team and on Open Alliance!

About us
We are a student-led team formed by members of a few local teams, aiming to help enrich the community by providing STEM opportunities to students who may not have easy access to a program like FRC. We operate under an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Throughout this season, we hope to grow our team from our humble beginnings into a program that can fully sustain itself, whilst developing students in their technical and people skills!

Events
FNC Orange County District Event (Week 1)
FNC Mecklenburg Event (Week 4)

Goals
We are aiming to post around 2-3 weeks during preseason, and at least once per week during build season. We hope to provide updates about how our team is performing business-wise, technically, and to shed some insight to our experience as an independent first-year team! We hope to be posting some exciting technical information in the next few weeks as we bring our pre-season into full swing, stay tuned!

Shoutouts
Our endeavor into creating a new team has neither been an easy one nor a cheap one, so we wanted to give a special shoutout to those who have provided us with support as we navigate the challenges that lay ahead, including but not limited to:

Team 4561 Terrorbytes- For parts donations, and a $500 grant

Team 4829 Titanium Tigers- For lending us a robot for our offseason event

Team 9008 G-Force Robotics- For parts donations

Our mentors- for helping guide us and providing us with insight to help make Static as successful as possible!

We couldn’t have made it this far without the support and advice provided by all of these teams and our mentors, so we greatly appreciate it, and look forward to continuing to work with you all!

Conclusion
We are ecSTATIC (haha get it) to be joining the Open Alliance this season, and look forward to documenting everything that happens this season. We hope to be posting some materials in the next few weeks! Thank you for taking some time to read about us! Feel free to ask any questions in the thread, we hope to be as helpful as we possibly can!

Links
Instagram
Twitter
LinkedIn
Facebook
Website
GitHub

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Go Static!!

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WOOO! Let’s go Static!!

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I love static!

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Nice! Excited on what you guys are gonna do this year

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Swerve Drive

It’s been a minute since our last post, so we wanted to provide an update to what we were doing! As a first year team, swerve drive usually isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when creating a successful team, and for us, it wasn’t anywhere near the top of our priority list. But as luck had it, a mentor of another local team donated us 4 unused WCP SS BLDC Swerve modules.

Technical Info

We decided to modify these modules to utilize a 6:1 ratio, with the expectation of using NEOs this upcoming season, with the potential to switch to other motors if necessary. This gives us a lot more flexibility with our options, though it is very unlikely we switch from NEOs to next gen BLDCs, as we believe at the district level the performance difference will more than likely be negligible, and we are more familiar with the NEO ecosystem.

Half of our modules are mechanically complete (with the exception of motors), and we hope to begin programming soon, given we can get access to a control system in that time. (If you have any offers, let us know!)

TPU Wheels

Alongside our venture into Swerve, we also began venturing into experimenting with TPU wheels. For our wheels, we decided to use 30% gyroid infill as suspension so we could utilize FDM printing (due to the lack of access to SLS printing) with 95A TPU. Formerly, it would take nearly 24 hours to print a single wheel, but since this first print, I myself have purchased a new printer which will allow us to increase output substantially, making these wheels more viable.

Unfortunately, we have not been able to test them on our swerve modules due to a lack of a control system, but will be comparing them to our Black Neoprene treads as soon as possible, and as always, feel free to ask any questions!

Misc. updates:

We hope to be provided more updates with more details as we move forward, as we have finally started to transition from our setup period to regular operations. We are aiming to provide around 2-3 more updates (if all goes well) during pre-season!

WE HAVE ALSO CHANGED NUMBERS FROM 9466 TO 3349!!

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Can you rename the thread or does an admin/ mod need to?

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I wasn’t able to rename the thread, likely because it is a wiki, but I just reached out to have it changed.

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Changed!

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Pre-Kickoff update
As we near kickoff, we wanted to provide a brief update into what the team has been doing.
We have had two priorities in pre-season: finishing our swerve drive and secure fundraising.

Build Update
Our swerve drive has come a long way from our last post - with all 4 of our modules being built and mounted to the chassis after delays with getting parts. We have also printed a full set of TPU 95A wheels, which we will begin testing after we tune swerve this upcoming week.

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We have also sourced all of the necessary electrical components for the season, alongside a large quantity of bolts, fasteners, and aluminum tubing stock.

While this update was relatively short compared to our others, we wanted to provide a quick update before kickoff!! We are very excited for this coming season, with a team size of nearly 20 students!! Attached is our 2024 Onshape CAD document, which we wanted to provide so teams could view our progress. We hope to provide a lot more updates in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!!

2024 CAD

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Week 1 & 2 Recap

Kickoff:
After kickoff, we initially began analyzing the game and planning out objectives for our robot. We put together a priority list of what we deemed important for our robot.
We found that trap, while useful for the Ranking Point, ultimately was out of our reach as a team and would not be worth the effort to design and build a robot around the trap. We also determined that adding a mechanism later on would likely not be possible, due to the requirements to score the trap. We also finished quickly wiring our swerve to hand over to programming in order to get working before we cut down our chassis size.
(radio missing from the picture, we have added it since then)

Week 1
During week 1, we began prototyping different aspects of the robot with the limited resources we had, primarily our shooter. But without bearings in stock and an unfortunate error when ordering bearings caused us a major delay in being able to prototype effectively. We will post some of our prototyping videos in our week 3 update.

Robot Archetypes
During week 1, we also developed 3 distinct robot archetypes that we wanted to look into pursuing. Throughout all of our archetypes, we are aiming for at most a 26x26 chassis and must work around the PDP we are running off of

Unqualified Quokkas style arm:

Pros:
Relatively simple to build
Allows amp dumping
Adjustable angle
Can fit under stage
Potential to fit climb into elevator

Cons:
Requires joint or under the bumper intake to be able to score from the podium
All in one intake/shooter could result in a broken shooter after intake impact
Large arms are annoying

Vertical Elevator:

Pros:

  • Allows for climber to be integrated into elevator
  • Quick and easy amp dumping
  • Potential to add trap capabilities later in the season
  • Full width intake

Cons:

  • Extra DoF from elevator
  • Tight packaging
  • Two stage required for climbing
  • Fitting under the stage is questionable, depends on elevator extension goals

Shooter handoff

Pros:

  • Removes the elevator from the previous concept
  • Allow easy amp scoring
  • Easy to package on a smaller chassis
  • Can make the podium shot

Cons:

  • May not fit under the stage
  • Packaging is easier, but not as tight as elevator - may require larger FP
  • Uses all of our motor slots, minimal flexibility to add mechanisms

Main takeaways:
We ultimately are leaning towards the shooter handoff, as it gives us the ability to score and hit the podium shot (which we believe will be important due to easier defense this year) without adding extra complexities. We have been since developing the concept into our V1 CAD.

Week 2
Week 2 was rather uneventful for Static, as we ordered a large amount of parts in order to prototype more components of our robot. We also worked to iron out some kinks in our swerve drive, having it fully functional by the end of the week.

(peak swerve /s)

We also finally received bearings needed to properly prototype our shooter and intake, which allowed us to collect more accurate data. While I currently don’t have any videos (they will be posted with the week 3 update) here are some of our takeaways:

.5” of compression is more than enough for intakes
Vertical (side roller) gain more range and a bit more consistency with an increase of compression (5” vs 8”), but it’s very marginal and likely not very impactful
Top and bottom roller intakes are great at intaking

We also assembled our Thrifty Bot telescoping tube kits, and will mount them to tubing and to the robot after our main scoring mechanisms are completed.

I apologize for the delay in getting this post out, I hope to proceed with weekly updates moving forward. We have also begun working on our CAD, which at the time of posting is about halfway complete. We are very excited about the 2024 Crescendo season, and are excited to be participating as an Open Alliance team!!

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Week 3-5 Update

CAD

After finalizing our concept in week 2, we moved onto the V1 CAD of the robot. After some time modeling geometry and ensuring everything works, this is our current progress:

Shooter

Main features of the shooter includes:

  • Top/Bottom Shooter configuration powered by 2 1:1 Krakens
  • Feeder powered by 1 NEO 550 at a 3:1 ratio
  • Herringbone gears to provide encoder data
  • Beam Break sensors to automatically stop note during handoff (will allow for easier variable angle shooting)
  • Pivot powered by 1 NEO at a 72:1 ratio to allow for variable angle shooting and amp dumping

Intake

Main features of the intake includes:

  • Full width intake ran via 775pro at 5:1 ratio
  • Potential to swap 775pro to a NEO if needed
  • Dead Axle Pivot (unfortunately on hex, originally intended to be a zombie axle)
  • Physical Vectoring
  • Pivot powered via 1 NEO on a 54:1 ratio

Climber

Our climber is using 2 Thrifty Bot Telescoping Tube Kits, features include:

  • Slotted hooks to prevent slipping on chain
  • 2 NEOs on a 20:1 ratio (subject to change)
  • Compact packaging

Chassis

Our primary goals for our chassis this year was to be small and fast, which we managed to pull off while still providing some space for potential growth on the robot. Features include:

  • 26x26 Frame (26.5x26.5 Frame perimeter when additional plates considered)
  • 6:1 ratio on 4 NEO motors with a theoretical top speed of ~16.5 ft/s
  • Bellypan with electrical mounting built in
  • Pocketing to allow for electrical flexibility (and because it looks cool)
  • Space to lay battery on its side to reduce CoG

Note

The CAD at the moment isn’t in fully complete, with minor details such as 3DP parts and support missing (as we are hoping to experiment with steel cable as support instead of using tubing)

Overall

Our design is incredibly ambitious for a first-year team, especially with the amount of machining that is required (which has already resulted in delays, perhaps not the best decision). But we have also tons of experienced members in which to pull from, and an excellent lineup of mentors who have been nothing short of supportive in our endeavor.

Other Progress

Programming

We have made huge leaps in our Swerve Code, as we shifted towards utilizing YAGSL. This has allowed us to easily tune our swerve and integrate Pathplanner, so our programmers can focus their time on other projects. One of these projects is PhotoVision. After Limelight lasted a whole 5 minutes in stock, we made the decision to use PhotoVision for the season so we could utilize multiple cameras on the robot.

Build

Build hasn’t had much to do as we worked through sourcing machining, outside of resizing our chassis and beginning work on bumpers. Week 6 is looking to be a massive week for build, as we aim to have the robot 100% built by the end of the week, so stay tuned!

Machining

As a first-year team, we have very minimal in-house machining, so we have had to heavily rely on the goodwill of local teams, companies, and our own mentors. Teams such as 5190 and 2059 have been a huge help in preparing our robot, with one of our sponsors cutting our climber hooks. The largest amount of machining, however, was done by our resident college student, who generously offered to help us with his school’s Waterjet, machining not only our bellypan but most of our major components such as intake mounts and the shooter. Huge thanks to everyone who has contributed meaningful amounts of machining, it’s been essential in preparing us for the season!

Goals

Over the next few weeks, we hope to achieve a few major goals, including but not limited to:

  • Mechanically complete the robot
  • Wire the robot WELL (no more rats nest swerve)
  • 4 Piece Auto
  • At minimum, fixed angle shooting (viable during week 1)
  • PhotoVision
  • Be able to score (most important)

We hope to be able to share more as we go, unfortunately I have been incredibly busy and haven’t been able to keep up with everything! Stay tuned!!

Robot CAD (it’s rather messy, haven’t cleaned it up yet)

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Very cool looking bot!
Love it!
Keep up the amazing work!
(I am definitely not a part of this team! :wink: )

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