Hello everyone! Welcome to the 342 The Burning Magnetos 2024 Build Thread, part of the openalliance.
About Team 342
We are the second oldest team in South Carolina and got our start at the Bosch Plant in Charleston. Initially, we were the only team in the Lowcountry region and took students from all over said region. Ever since 2011, when we helped form some other teams, we’ve been based out of Fort Dorchester High School (FDHS) in North Charleston. In recent years, we’ve been working on rebuilding our capabilities, and have seen marked performance improvements recently. This year, our team consists mainly of upperclassmen, who have been hard at work training our newer members. This is our second year participating in the Open Alliance.
Offseason Updates
During the offseason, our primary project was developing a functional swerve drivebase using SDS MK4 Modules. We are proud to say that after about a year of on-and-off work (the project began in 2022), we have a functioning Swerve Drive (a first for us since 2017)!
We also competed at two off-season events: the South Carolina Robotics and Practical (SCRAP) and the South Carolina Robotics Invitational and Workshop (SCRIW).
We ranked first in qualifications at SCRAP and finished with a finalist performance.
At SCRIW, we brought both our competition robot and the aforementioned swerve drive.
Our competition robot earned a finalist performance at that event.
Recently our Team Captain and Design Captain have been hard at work to mathematically standardize our design decision process, based on the factors we consider important to our designs.
C represents cost.
E represents ease of use for the drive team.
EM stands for mechanism efficiency.
D represents design time.
P represents programming complexity.
ME represents mechanical complexity.
Each of these values is bound between 0-10, with 0 being the worst for a particular category and 10 being the best.
The higher the mechanism score, the better it is.
The general form of the equation does the same thing, just with unknown ratings expressed by some constant X, and a number of inputs bound between values a and b. N represents the priority level (or index) of that current constant and is bound between a and b.
Preferred Equipment
This season, we will be leaning further into the REV Ecosystem as we continue our use of NEO motors and incorporate the REV PDH into our robot for the season. We will also make more effective use of our CNC Router this year for in-house manufacturing.
We will be hosting an FTC Qualifier at FDHS and supporting local FLL events through volunteering.
We are also scheduled to participate in our local Christmas parade!
This year will we be competing at PCH Anderson, PCH North Charleston, and hopefully both the PCH DCMP and World Championships! We hope to see you all there!
And for those who have seen our previous post with our new design methodology, we decided to put the information into a document to make it more readable: A New Design Method_ Mathematical Standardization.pdf (345.9 KB)
As always, this is by no means a “one size fits all” solution, but we hope that it can help some people with a little bit of adjustments here and there!
Edit: Updated Team Organization document with a better graphic.
Happy kickoff day everyone! Prior to the reveal video, our team had plenty of
time to kill, so we decided to take a different approach to how we do things.
There was the obligatory season information presentation (especially important
for our rookie members), but we also decided to incorporate some fun team
bonding games to start the season off right! Pictures of the games can be found
below:
After watching the reveal video, our team divided ourselves to read the game
manual for 30 minutes. We read some general rules like Game Play and how to
score points. Then, we took a short break and divided ourselves by subteam
(Mechanical, Electrical, Programming, and Drive Team/Scouting) to read rules
that they needed. For example, mechanical read about robot rules and design,
electrical read rules about electrical and pneumatics, and so on. This was
followed by another short break.
After our team went over the rules, we decided to move on to determining the
wants, needs, and stretch goals for our season robot. The first step in doing so
was listing all potential point values and ranking points on a large whiteboard.
Moving down the board, we decided on how much to prioritize certain
opportunities such as earning the Onstage points. We eventually ran into a
conflict over the value of the Amp and Speaker scoring locations, that spiraled
into a debate about whether we should adopt a generalized robot (which can
perform most, if not all, game tasks) or have a specialized robot that
accomplishes a few things very well. After hearing commentary from all team
members and taking votes, the generalized strategy won out. From there, we
had to decide to what scoring element to prioritize should our design require a
compromise for feasibility; this caused significant debate as well, but we
eventually decided upon the Amp. The reason for this is quite simple – we
recognized the speaker as the big, shiny scoring opportunity (partially due to
the KitBot configuration) and noted the important support capabilities that the
Amp provides for teams that focus on the Speaker. We also noted the open
field and decided to adopt a Swerve Drive system (this will be our first time using it in competition season). You can check out photos of the whiteboard below:
a slight correction, we have used swerve before in 2017, but only a few mentors have experience with it. no students do. so its kinda our first time but not really.
So we dont meet on Sunday, but a few things our design team has discussed based on some Ri3D stuff we have been watching, and some krayon cad to go with it.
Under bumper intake, potentially double sided. This would require some conveyor or other mechanism to move it to a shooter or something
Ive also messed with xrc a little just to see what a match might look like for a single robot.
Granted theres no other robots on the field so take it with a grain of salt.
Found something i hadn’t considered yet that you can shoot from the sides of the speaker
Today was our first “real” day of build season, and we started digging into prototyping.
We began the meeting by discussing ideas for intakes, divided into the “floor intake”, “source intake”, and “both” categories. Then, we consolidated the prototypes based on similar features. Here’s how that discussion looked:
After we consolidated the ideas, we sent our members to work on prototypes in groups. It definitely gave our rookie members some valuable experience and invited some meaningful discussions!
Unfortunately, we won’t be able to meet tomorrow because of adverse weather conditions, but we’re excited to get back in the shop and continue making progress!
Hello everyone! We hope your build season is going well. Yesterday was largely dedicated to prototyping, and we’re certainly moving towards a final design direction. The biggest development from yesterday were the prototypes that our design team introduced to the whole team near the end of the meeting yesterday.
The first design strictly relies on a conveyor belt. Essentially, it would make use of an under-the-bumper intake to feed game pieces into a variable speed shooter to score in both locations. We decided not flesh it out because we can tell how it will work based on the CAD.
The 2nd design that includes both an elevator and a shooter. The over-the-bumper intake is capable of feeding both the shooter and the elevator to ensure optimal scoring potential and versatility.
This third design is the epitome of one of the golden rules of FRC design: “steal from the best, invent the rest”, and is codenamed “The Secret Sauce”; it takes heavy inspiration from Team 254’s 2018 robot. It is equipped with both an elevator mechanism with a wristed intake for the amp and a wheeled shooter for the speaker. Additionally, it comes in at under 2 feet tall in starting configuration and will be capable of using the elevator to climb. It’s incredibly compact, and will make great use of the speed provided by our swerve drive.
We capped off today’s meeting be engaging in discussion and committing to a design direction for our season robot! In summation, we agreed on an over-the-bumper intake and an elevator mechanism for the amp. We also decided on a shooter for the speaker (this wasn’t on the board because there wasn’t any contention surrounding that) and potentially using our elevator to climb!
(@RedLeader342 has the JVN calculations to prove this can work).
We’re really excited to see how this turns out! Coming off a 4-time finalist season, we’re ready to push ourselves mechanically and programmatically to hopefully break into that “event winner” spot at least once this season!
Awesome work guys!
What made you choose an over-the-bumper intake instead of an inside-the-bumper intake? Just curious about what you think the pros and cons are.
A few things were involved there, of course the possibility of a wider intake, and the chance of game pieces getting stuck in corners of the field.
But it also allows is to merge our mechanism for intake, the amp, and feeding the shooter, all into one.
We took a good bit of inspiration from 254’s 2018 robot where they could spit a cube through their elevator. That meshed with similar ideas we had that happened to be almost exactly the same as cranberry alarm as far as intake and shooter loading
Hello everyone! Our last meeting wasn’t too eventful, so this post will be brief.
The design team worked on finalizing some designs and researching other options on Chief Delphi, and the programming team on installing software, test projects, and swerve code. The marketing team is also hard at work on T-shirt designs and both the Impact and Woodie Flowers essays.
We also worked on testing to find out the ideal compression for a shooter mechanism!
Our human player also got practice for throwing a “high note”, which eventually turned into the mechanical team getting a break and trying their hand at throwing.
To say finalized designs is a little ambitious lol.
We did finalize design directions though.
We’ve decided,
Based on our own capabilities design and manufacturing wise, that we will go for speaker, amp, and climbing. If we can get the trap in there somehow, we will, but it will be after we have the rest of the robot going, or using an already existing mechanism.
We’re using an over the bumper intake. We decided the pros outweighed the cons. Pros being wider range of intaking and being able to get into corners for game pieces, as well as being able to use said intake to score in the amp and feed our shooter.
We went with a previously discussed design that we had called “the secret sauce” (because it seemed like an ambitious design for us and we kept confidential from the rest of the team until we figured out if it would work or not)
The intake and shooter works much like cranberry alarms, (which to be fair, we kinda came up with independently of them, but it was nice to see it validated) except the intake is on an elevator like 254 in 2018, And can shoot downwards into the amp as well. Also the elevator should be able to double as a climber. However that may change slightly in the end to accommodate the idea of also doing the trap.
We got the chassis cad’d and have been working on the elevator. No one currently on the team has designed an elevator from scratch so having a lot of open alliance and available cads of other elevators has been really handy so far.
We’ll keep you posted!
Also keep an eye out for us on the OA Show on January 30th at FIRST Updates Now.
Here you can see them taking measurements so our human player can get practice throwing the high note from an accurate distance.
Our programming team is hard at work getting our swerve code drive ready! We’re taking a bit of a different control approach from our off-season chassis, as we’re using an Xbox controller instead of a joystick, so the logic for that has been the main roadblock so far.
Our Design team is dedicated to figuring out the logic for our elevator and climb systems. The elevator itself is done, so now they’re working on figuring out the shelf and wrist mechanisms. Taking inspiration from a Chief Delphi thread, we’re also considering using the elevator as a deployment mechanism for the climber hooks instead of using it to climb (@RedLeader342 will know what exact team this comes from). This would require an independent winch system, which no one on the team has done before, so it would be a nice challenge for us. The main reason we are considering this is so that it opens the possibility of using our elevator mechanism to score in the trap.
Our marketing team is still hard at work producing button and t-shirt designs, while also making progress on our Impact Award submission! They are currently editing our Executive Summaries!
Our mechanical team worked on disassembling our off-season swerve chassis so we can clean/rebuild the modules and get them ready for use on the season robot! We also cut our first chassis rail, and decided on the final robot size (29”x29”).
Our programming team is also working hard on implementing pathplanner and scaling up our vision usage for the first time!
The marketing team finished our executive summaries, and will be moving on to the impact award next. They’ve also made good progress on button designs, the season banner, and the animation, which we can hopefully unveil soon!
Today, our design team was working on getting our chassis design finalized and ready for fabrication! We even started cutting the tubing on our CNC router. The custom tube jig we produced last year has really come in handy so far.
Our mechanical team is working on preparing our SDS MK4 modules for use on the competition robot by taking them apart, cleaning them, and rebuilding them. They will also construct our two new modules!
The programming team worked on implementing PathPlanner and Limelight code! We hope to use it heavily for autonomous this season because we know it will up our performance significantly.
