We are super excited to announce the return of our Build Thread marking our second year participating in Open Alliance. We are proud to continue sharing our highs and lows. Our is hope to be a helpful source of information for other teams while learning a lot along the way.
If you wish to learn more about our team, you can visit our 2023 thread or visit our website for our game and team history!
Like many teams we faced a tough decision in the summer of 2023 with the sunsetting of GrabCAD; switch to Onshape or find substitute file sharing software. After much consideration, testing, and speaking with others in the community we came to the conclusion that Onshape was our best path forward.
For the 2023 - 2024 season, we relied on existing resources to train our team and couldn’t be happier with the results. You can find the general outline below, but overall we found that after the first 3 Steps, letting the kids learn Onshape and FRC design by designing single subsystems worked extremely well and we hope to refine our examples for next year:
KrayonCAD is a project I worked on with other members of the community to simplify the Crayola CAD process. This project would not be possible without using Onshape and following in the steps of projects such as MKCAD. If you haven’t tried out KrayonCAD and you use Onshape, give it a try! We’ll be posting about it soon after kickoff as we explore various types of robot architectures.
This is going to our kick-off recap post that will be sharing some of our highlights and key takeaways from the event. We even have some information on where we are at with prototyping, as well as place we got inspiration from.
Our team started off with some breakfast (made from the help of great parents!), watched the game video, and had our students break down the rules, restrictions, and scoring of this game. Once we were able to get the nitty-gritty about the game down, we started on our Robot archetypes!
Once we chose our everything bot, we wanted to break down our priorities, so we know what to focus our attention on as we are designing and prototyping. We approached it from the mindset of “what do we think we need on our robot to make to worlds?”. Because of that, lots of our focus on important scoring methods, as well as having ease of use for our team from repairs to lining up to score on the team.
Overall, our kick-off taught us a lot about the game and what strategy we will be taking this season!
Our team has been faster paced with our prototyping this year, but we still are on the planning + figuring our approach on building our sub-systems
As we have been prototyping, we encourage our students to find as much inspiration as possible through other teams or Ri3D, but these teams in particular have really inspired us during our prototyping process!
For the rest of the week, we plan on continuing prototyping. It’s been busy so far, but our team has made great strides and I can’t wait to see what they will continue to improve on!
This year we wanted to examine how we build bumpers and see where we can improve over previous years.
Last year we used a 3D printed housing that indexed over a chassis mounted post to mount our bumpers. While this system worked, it had several key drawbacks:
With this in mind, we shopped around Chief Delphi and found the Citrus mounts which addressed the issues we had with our 2023 mounts. The system uses threaded studs mounted to the bumper wood, flanged nuts, and grooved plates mounted to the chassis which provides a rigid and low cost solution.
Here’s some pictures of the setup, components, and links:
In addition to mounts, we also wanted to explore how we make our bumper frame to see if improvements can be made. We started with the wood. Since we only make bumpers a few times a year and they don’t require that much wood, we decided to purchase better plywood than what we use normally. While I don’t have a specific recommendation, we opted this year for a 7-Layer ACX from Lowe’s which at our local store was around $55 a sheet.
To stiffen up the corners, we will be using these iron brackets from Amazon thanks to a recommendation from our friends on 1339:
By this Saturday we should have our first bumper completed and mounted to a chassis! You can check our Onshape CAD for the complete chassis and bumper assemblies.
This is the progress we’ve made on our prototyping groups! we’ve been picking up the pace hoping to finalize our design faster than last year and we have been on track to do so.
The shooter prototyping group has been hard at work and has tested a few versions of it. Some of these include: one wheel on each side of the shooter, two wheels on one side of the robot (Similar to the kitbots shooter this year), and two wheels on both sides of the shooter. They have found that the kitbot configuration is pretty accurate but has much less speed and distance than the other two. We have also just gotten some fairlane wheels for them to expirement on.
The climber prototyping group has been working on a few very creative designs ranging from a type of chain lift hook to a gas strut/spring powered pivoting arm that has a winch to pull it down. These ideas will help package the climbers better than an average telescoping climber as they require less parts and are easier to fix
The Conveyor prototype has been expirementing with how notes react to certain compressions, carrying types, and if the note can travel across a conveyor with a plate of polycarbonate on the bottom. They’ve found that having a combination of wheels and belts works somewhat well, but they will be testing how well it travels with just wheels.
Cad has been hard at work coming up with designs that incorporate all of the requirements we have set that we want for our robot. Some of these requirements include: the ability to travel under the stage (robot under 2’ 3"), having a robot that is simple and efficient, and having a robot that can score everywhere.
We have made three versions of a robot that has a singular pivoting arm. This would benefit us since the shooting and intaking subsystem would be all the same subsystem (so no handoff mechanism). It would also give room for the robots eletrical board
Archetype A would have a chain climber that has been tested by our climbing prototyping group and would have a passive arm that forces the robot to lean closer to the stage as it rises which would make it easier to score
Archetype B would use the same static arm and pivoted scoring system as A but would use the chain climbing system on the arm. This prototype didnt seem to work when put into the stage file, but its definetly a design that can be improved on.
Archetype C also uses the same static arm and shooting/intaking mechanism, but uses the other prototyped climber idea which is the pivoting climber, this climber adds more height but is slightly harder to package. This design worked when placed in the stage.
This archetype uses the same methods as our archetype A, but uses 2 pivots to leviate stress on the joints, this does make it lose some of its compactness though. This robot would use telescoping arms instead of the prototyped climbers.
The drivetrain for our protobot is in the process of being made! Using the configurable drivetrain assembly that was made during the off season. Our CNC team worked together to cut out all of the tube and plating that would go into our drivetrain and belly pan.
I’m looking to maybe cover the resources and our general process we use for award writing later this week, but until now here are the major business items we have gotten do before Kick-Off!
So, for our business side, our off-season can get super busy because of the planning for Tidal Tumble, our hosting of the FIRST Lego League Tournament, and then our annual Dinner Auction that we host with the Elks!
Additionally, we have been working a lot to improve general life quality items such as a branding document, updating the website, and grant information document, as well as just generally trying to get more involved through demonstration/outreach events.
Our updated website, thanks to our Outreach Student Hayden (@hayden). He has made so many improvements over the years, and our fresh look reflects his talent!
The Qualifying Lego League, one of biggest ways recruit future students to our team. I was excited to introduce the Women in STEM panel with help from FIRST Ladies resources.
Our Dinner Auction through the Elks is one of the biggest fundraisers of our team- only behind our Fireworks Fundraiser with Phantom Fireworks. Our community always enjoys this, especially the dessert auction. Some cakes go for over $600 dollars!
Have a great day! 
Sorry for the late recap everyone, as I’m sure you all know how busy build season is!
A lot of our information is expanded on in our First Updates Now, so if you want more specifics you look to that for more information!
We were able to decide on a Robot archetype, and have began to expand more into testing it and our prototypes throughout Week 3 to help decide on end focus.
Our team’s Business side has currently been very busy with the writing and editing of awards this year. With our impact question and essay, we made a list of the different events, traits, and qualities of our team. After this we go write the essay/questions, and then go through several different drafts addressing it. If you need help with proofreading head over to @amanda_morrison ‘s thread where you can email her to help with any proofreading of awards! This is very helpful even to get a second pair of eyes who had not seen your previous drafts.
This year we will also be compiling more information for the Engineering Inspiration award, so we will have organized information, pictures, and statistics related to our STEM outreach events. This way we have pictures and information to show judges when in our pits.
We decided on Fiona McGinnis (@fmcginnis) being our Woodie Flower nominee, for her years of dedication and knowledge on our team. We focused on a certain trait we wanted to highlight (Welcoming, Informative, Dedicated) and how she influences the writers, the team, and our county. @amanda_morrison also has great resources about writing woodie flowers at this thread.
For sustainability we tend to not change it much each year, but we review the past documents to see what we might want to add, remove, or remove. This year we wanted to add more visual design, so we are planning to put it into Canva after our design.
Our third week and we are starting to decide on some of our prototypes!
We has made great progress on our prototypes and have narrowed each down to a few designs to fully build and test. Currently, the climber prototyping team is trying to figure out the best of three climber designs and are working to build all three to test.
Each has the shown the ability to lift the robot and tilt the intake/shooter into the trap. Currently our three designs are:
Folding Arm: This design uses two pivoting arms lifted by gas struts to place the hook above the chain. The robot drives forward until the hooks contact the chain. A winch then pulls the hook down, lifting the robot.
Detaching Hook: This design has two hooks attached to the intake/shooter support arm by magnets or Velcro. The arm is raised, and the robot drives forward until the hooks are over the chain. The elevator on the arm drops, setting the hooks. A winch then reels in a cable attached to the hooks, detaching the hooks from the intake/shooter arm. The arm is repositioned to the trap position, and the winch raises the robot.
Chain Lift: This design uses chain-driven hooks running on 1 X 2 struts. The struts can pivot forward to allow the robot to drive under the stage. When approaching the trap, the hooks are raised, and the robot drives forward until the struts contact the chain on the stage. Two interconnected motors pull the hooks down, raising the robot.
Our CAD is currently working on making technical designs for all the major robot mechanisms, so our teams can manufacturer parts for our different mechanisms.
Electrical was able to finish the electrical board, a huge step in making the robot for this season.
Software continued to troubleshoot during this past week as well as made upgrades to other aspects like vision, which is used as a camera to track specific elements on the field.
Deeply sorry for the delay everyone! We have been very busy, especially since we had to make up for days of heavy rain and flood that impacted our ability to go to our team.
We were able to finish the climber, we had 3 main choices to pick from, which we have outlined in our previous post. Our final design, the Chain hook, is a set of hooks on a chain, where we can move them up and down pull the robot up, as well as to be able to unhook. The big pro to this design is that we can go multiple times, along with the fact that we are going to have less consistency issues in the match. We will have to build a separate assembly however, along with the use of chains.
We went with this due to criteria of consistency and reusability in a match, and while it may need more work than the first design, it will perform better in a competition setting.
Our CAD team is working hard to finish all CAD modules of the robot, so our CNC team can keep producing.
The first main feature that we have coded in vision is an April tag alignment feature. We use PhotonVision to set up our camera to work with vision, and we use a PID loop to determine how the robot needs to turn to be facing the April tag. What is nice about how we implemented it is that because we have a swerve, we can plug in the rotation that we need directly into the rotation of the swerve drive without having to worry about how our robot moves around the field. This allows us to orbit around the April tag and vary our distance closer and further from the April tag, while staying in line with it which you can view here. The next feature we are developing currently is a distance estimator, which looks at where the tag is placed on the camera view, along with how small/large the tag is, to determine how far away we are from the tag.
Software has been working very hard, with our Auton issue being with PathPlanner. Since it was an issue with the robot knowing where it is and how it’s angled, we worked on configuring our gyro to make sure our rotation was proper, our drive motors were set up to follow our paths, and that our PathPlanner configuration was set to properly flip the autonomous modes, we eventually got it all our Auton working.
Hello! I haven’t posted in this thread before, but I’m Jonathan, the Software lead. I’ll give a recap of what happened at the Week 1 Port Hueneme Competition we had last weekend, and I’ll share what we learned throughout the post.
I didn’t directly help the impact team, but they did a great job of preparing as well as they could for this week 1 competition. I think that from the cast of people we picked, they did the best that they could with answering the questions that we were asked.
This year I think that we had a good idea going into the design phase of the season, but parts of it didn’t work out because we competed in a week 1. We had some parts that worked well, and some that didn’t just because we didn’t have enough development time to get everything working the way we wanted it to. I think that many of these issues will be resolved going into our week 4 competition, and we learned a lot about where we can improve.
Another part that worked better than expected was our climber design. It didn’t have any many major issues when used properly, and while we couldn’t score the trap at this competition, our climbers are going to stay roughly the same. The Elevator and Shooter/Intake worked as well as it could have, and while we might make some minor tweaks, it should stay about the same. ‘Don’t fix what isn’t broken’ kind of thing.
I think a lot of these issues came from the fact that we have a newer team this year, so we had a lot of struggles with getting students able to help and to properly stage tasks to move our robot forward. I also think that at some points while preparing, we went too fast and neglected to properly quality check. If I could only point out one take away, is that you always need to quality check your work, because we lost a lot of time on this robot by making mistakes that would have been found in 5 minutes that took us hours to resolve.
Again, a lot of this was just needing more time to work on the robot in order to find and fix issues, and we’ll get that between competitions. I’m personally very excited to see how teams improve over the next couple of weeks, and I hope that we can fix many of these issues and perform well at our next competition. Our arm redesign is going to be a more in depth post, and I also am going to make a software post talking about some of the features we are planning to add in the hopes of improving our driver experience and performance.
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