3544 Spartiates 2024 Build Thread

Bienvenue! Welcome to the 3544 Spartiates 2024 Build Thread!

On behalf of FRC Team 3544 Spartiates from Montréal, Québec, I am happy to announce we will be participating in openalliance again this season! We loved sharing our experience and our progress with you last year and it’s thanks to your comments, feedback and support that we decided to keep doing it this season. Merci à notre communauté!

RESSOURCES (updated January 1st)

Onshape: Onshape
Github: Spartiates 3544 · GitHub
Our 2023-2024 Action Plan (in french only):
Plan d’action FTC&FRC 3544 - 2023-2024 V1.04 (1).pdf (5.2 MB)

This season, we’ll be competing:

Week 1 at the Montreal Festival de Robotique Regional
&
Week 4 at the New York Tech Valley Regional

OUR PRE-SEASON

This season was already special for us, but it is even more now due to unplanned strikes in the public sector that have lasted since November 21st. It means we haven’t been able to meet at our school since then, but it seems the strikes are over and we’ll be able to go back this week. It’s a setback in our original plans, but we remain motivated and already started replanning for our return right before kickoff.

Some of the main things we worked on during this pre-season were:
-Swerve drivetrain
-Restructuring our team leadership
-Local Betabots challenge
-Designing and building an enclosure for our CNC
-Upgrading our robot cart
-Reorganization of our workspace
-Disassembly of our 2023 robot and field elements
-Updating our partnership plan
-Finding sponsors
-Presentating during our school’s open house
-Organizing and leading a Robotics discovery activity with elementary students
-Organizing a conference at our school

Good luck to everyone this season, we can’t wait for Kickoff now!

-MartinSV

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HAPPY KICKOFF DAY!

It’s been a while, but we’re finally here. As we’re preparing for kickoff we wanted to share how we’ll procede for week 1.

To do so, we prepared a Strategic Design Guide, offering both explainations for less experienced members, but most importantly a structure on how to analyse the game and strategically make design decisions early that are logical for us. This guide is an update to what we had in the past, but it’s the best version so far. The only caveat for most of the community is that the guide is in french only, as is all of our documentation so far (except our Github). If you happen to be a francophone team or are simply curious, here is our guide in it’s current state:

FRC 3544 Guide design stratégique - 2023-2024 V1.00.pdf (10.4 MB)

We will be sharing all of our results once we’re done with all the analyzing and decision making, hopefully by the end of week 1. For everyone else, here is a summary of what our strategic design guide contains:

  • Our season objectives
  • Our strategic design vision
  • General tips and tricks
  • A summarized build season calendar
  • Game and cycle analysis
  • Defining our robot strategy
  • Weighted objectives tables and priorty lists
  • Establishing our deadlines
  • Design goals and equivalents on our robot table
  • Prototyping and revision table
  • Strategy summary

I wish you all a great kickoff day and good luck! Bonne chance!

Martin SV

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DAY 3 STRATEGY ANALYSIS RECAP

Bonjour! We’ve done our initial brainstorming and game analysis. We’re now diving deeper into understanding how the game will be played and what our team’s role can be in potential alliances.

We typically estimate a number of different potential cycles per robot, but we figured that the influence of the AMPLIFY mechanic was so significant, that we couldn’t accurately estimate a score for a single robot. That’s when we decided to estimate the score of an average alliance with a set approximate amount of cycles for each robot. We developed 5 different scenarios and the only thing that changes is what robot scores where and when. Here is the result:

We understand it’s approximate and that a 120-second Teleop is generous, but the results still highlight some key points on how the game can be played. Those scores also ignore Auton and Endgame. Here are our main takeaways from this analysis:

  • Only scoring in the SPEAKER is the least efficient way to rack up points fast

  • Having a robot, slow or fast, able to score only in the AMP and AMPLIFY gives the alliance a significant advantage in Match Points, as well as the possibility to achieve the Coopertition bonus, or even cancel the opposing alliance’s AMPLIFY progression.

  • The best way to achieve the most Match Points is for all 3 robots to have the ability to score in the AMP and the SPEAKER so that the alliance coordinates to AMPLIFY as often as possible to profit the most from bonus points.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE

We still have a lot of work to do to decide what subsystems our robot will have, but we narrowed down what we think our robot will do into 2 strategies based on our analysis so far. Wednesday, we’ll decide if we go with one of those 2 strategies and then start our weighted objectives tables for potential subsystems.

STRATEGY A

STRATEGY B

BEGINNING OF OUR CAD

We will be starting our CAD today. Participating in a Week 1 event is a lot of pressure, so to be on the safe side, we’ve streamlined the processes of our drivetrain construction. It definitely helps that swerve looks like a very good choice this year, as that’s what we’ve worked on this fall. The goal to finish our drivetrain as soon as possible is of course to have more time for driver practice and autonomous mode development. Driver practice looks particularly crucial this year again as there will be a lot of movement across the field and big distances to travel. In any case, here are the characteristics for our drivetrain so far:

Hoping this helps your team dive further into their own strategy. Never hesitate to ask us anything here or on Discord, we’ll be happy to answer :slight_smile:

À bientôt!

Martin SV

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WEEK 1 RECAP: OUR STRATEGY, PROTOTYPING AND ROBOT CARACTERISTICS

Bonjour!

We had a pretty productive first week! Things are going really fast as we’ll access to our partner, le Cégep du Vieux Montréal’s machine shop. We’re doing our best to keep up with the updates as the situation changes quickly.

STRATEGY DEVELOPMENTS

As we identified in our previous update, being able to score in the SPEAKER and the AMP reliably is very important to optimize AMPLIFIED match points, independently of our alliance’s capability to do fast cycles or not. It’s not like in previous games where one objective might be worth more points than the other, we need both to get the most points this year.

We normally would’ve picked our previously presented Strategy B, but this strategy’s robot concept cannot pick up notes from the ground. We initially thought it would be overreaching to try and build a robot that scores in the AMP and SPEAKER that also had a ground intake, but things changed with, you guessed it, the Unqualified Quokkas Ri3D…

ROBOT CARACTERISTICS

Our robot can launch into the SPEAKER, score in the AMP, and pick up NOTES from the ground.

We did have some initial sketches with an arm with similar geometry to what the Quokkas have, but seeing the reveal changed our perspective on the complexity of building a robot of this type. Seeing them score 3 notes in autonomous worth 15 points also made us realize the importance of having good autonomous capabilities, as teams are getting better each year.

We are still very inclined to make our own decisions, build a unique robot and build something better than what the Quokkas have. While getting inspired from other concepts is a part of the engineering process, there is no true advantage to simply copy someone else’s work.

OUR REVISED STRATEGY

We ended up adjusting our strategy to our new robot capabilities. We are still being somewhat conservative, especially since we don’t know how much we’ll be able to get done before our first event at the end of February. Of course, this strategy can change as the season progresses.

Capture d’écran 2024-01-16 102154

OUR SUBSYSTEMS OBJECTIVES, CONSTRAINTS AND EQUIVALENTS ON THE ROBOT

This section consists of what we want our subsystems to do and how they’ll do it. It allows us to put the elements we analyzed as objectives or constraints on each subsystem. We can also add characteristics that we think will help the subsystem work more competitively. We then try and identify real-life equivalents for each of those objectives or constraints that can include measurements, specific parts, specific mechanisms, or programming features.

It’s important to note that at this juncture, not every characteristic or feature that will be on our final robot will be mentioned, and we are likely to iterate on our current choices throughout the season, but this work still gives our team a solid base to work on our CAD quickly and with confidence.

Our subsystems priority list:

  1. Drivetrain
  2. Intake
  3. AMP and SPEAKER Shooter
  4. Arm
  5. Climber

Capture d’écran 2024-01-16 104640

As you can see, the climber is missing and this is intentional. As it is our lowest priority at the moment, we decided to skip it and integrate it later. Again, this is to make sure we have enough time to build, develop and practice with a good and working robot before our Week 1 event.

WHAT WE’RE DOING THIS WEEK

As I said in the beginning, we are rushing to get our CAD as far as possible before Thursday so we can machine as many parts as possible. We’ll then immediately begin the assembly of our robot’s drivetrain, fabrication of other parts, and buying what we’ll need. Thanks to an awesome job last Saturday on prototyping and building the field, we just might be able to get this far by the end of the weekend. I’ll let Nicolas tell you more about the results of our prototyping.

Let’s keep going :mechanical_arm:

Martin SV

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SATURDAY INTAKE PROTOTYPING

Hello!

Last Saturday we prototyped all day. We started intake prototyping. More specifically our ground intake since we are aiming to at least do a 2 NOTES autonomous.

To facilitate construction, all prototypes used cordless impact drills with a 1/2” socket. We also generally used low power so we could easily visualize if the NOTE could be intaked seamlessly, or if the prototype needed to exert a lot of force.

1ST INTAKE PROTOTYPE

Our first iteration used a row of 2’’ compliant wheels on the top and a sheet of Lexan on the bottom.

Our first few tests seemed promising, however, we quickly realized the angle we tested ( around 22°) wasn’t the same as in the desired geometry ( around 38°) to be coherent with the extension limit and an over-the-bumper intake.

Top roller and bottom plate, 30°

At the right angle, the NOTES first point of contact was the “ramp”. The notes needed a significant force to get in the intake ( such as driving very fast towards a note or squeezing a note against the wall).

Top roller and bottom plate, 38.5°

After modifying the geometry of the ramp ( backing it up so the upper wheels would touch first ) we didn’t find any more success.

Top roller and bottom plate, 38.5°, driving into the NOTE

2ND INTAKE PROTOTYPE

Our second iteration used the plates from our 2023 intake, with 2” compliant wheels on top and 1” sushi rollers on the bottom.

Top and bottom rollers

At similar angles (near 38°) this prototype outperformed the previous one. We tried a wide range of angles and this iteration seemed promising.

Top and bottom rollers driving into it at 38.5

We added a ramp behind the sushi rollers and tried this prototype on a FRC carpet. Once again this prototype seemed promising.

Top and bottom roller, steep angle, driving into it on the carpet

We have found that this geometry can intake notes at a wide range of angles. As soon as the note touches the bottom rollers, it seems to intake the note. You can see more videos on our OA Discord Channel

NOTE CENTERING

We widened the intake to about 20’’ and added two angled 1x1 extrusions to act as funnels. This addition easily funneled notes through a 15’’ opening.

Passive funneling of the note with 1’’ box tube

MAIN TAKEAWAYS

  • Squishy wheels work well for the intake
  • A top roller with a plate underneath doesn’t work well if the angle is too steep
  • A roller on top and the bottom works well, almost all of the time
  • Funneling the NOTE passively with walls works well

Stay tuned for more prototyping soon!

Nicolas H

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WEEK 2 RECAP

Bonjour!

I think we did everything we wanted to do this week, which is surprising, but certainly welcome. It was a very mechanical oriented week with the highlight being our visit to the Cegep du Vieux Montréal where we had the opportunity to visit their mechanical engineering facilities and have help to fabricate our parts with their waterjet machine.

FABRICATION

For the last 3 years, we design aluminum plates that we know we will machine outside our school. We own a small CNC, but it’s only good for lexan or wood, which we do use for some parts, but things like big gussets or custom aluminum plates have to be outsourced. We arrange our design so that every plate can be fabricated in a single operation, this season it was on a spare 0.090’’ auminum plate we had for a while. This means that the fabrication of our plates didn’t generate any extra costs to the team! We owe a big thank you to the Cegep du Vieux Montréal for this opportunity, our students were definitely inspired by their visit.

We did encounter some minor issues on site, like the plate bumping up a bit, making the surface round instead of flat. We were able to solve the issue by placing steel weights in strategic spots. It’s the kind of problem we should’ve expected with a big plate this thin. A few hours later, here was the result:

We are still missing the intake plates, but a this point in time, we were very satisfied with the progress. It was to assembly this Saturday.

ASSEMBLY

Our goal was to assemble our drivetrain and our arm triangle plates, and that’s exactly what we did. After a lot of filing and deburring and metal shavings, we started to assemble our frame, our bellypan, and attach our swerve modules, and our bellypan. Instead of describing what we did exactly, let me present some neat features and design decisions from our frame so far.

-Almost full bellypan to increase weight and allow a lower center of gravity
-Use of 1/8’’ thick 2x1 aluminum tubes for a sturdier and heavier frame


-Fastening the center 2x1 MAXtubes directly on the bellypan and with aluminum endcaps to be directly attached to the outside frame and allow the surface of the tube to be unobstructed for the arm triangle.

-So far, every bolt and nut has easy tool access to allow fast maintenance

-Flat battery that will also act as a counter-weight for our arm when it’ll be in the AMP scoring position
-Separate CAN bus through a CANivore for our drivetrain to free some bandwith and be able to wire our drivetrain’s CAN bus without having to open it to install our subsystems

This is our progress so far. Once again, we are very satisfied that everything is going according to plan, but we know things may not keep going this smoothly. We still feel a lot of pressure from having to compete at a Week 1 event and that’s what carried us so far.

WHAT TO EXPECT FOR WEEK 3

If we want to keep this pace, next week we’ll have to assemble our arm, wire everything and start testing the drivetrain and arm controls. We would also need to fabricate our intake/shooter before the end of the week, and maybe even install it on the robot before the end of the weekend. This basically means having a functional robot by the end of Week 3. Very ambitious if you ask me, but at this point, why not?

Ah by the way, I think we’ll give up on paint this season. Maybe we’ll put some polycarbonate panels or vynil later to help with the esthetics. Paint is time consuming and we have mitigated results with it.

Hoping you’ll find something helpful for your team!

À bientôt,

Martin SV

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WEEK 3 RECAP: GREAT PROGRESS, REDESIGN AND SAD NEWS

Let’s begin with the unfortunate news. Regrettably, we’ve had to cancel our participation for the New York Tech Valley Regional. This decision wasn’t due to a lack of determination or funds. Rather, it was the result of encountering more administrative hurdles than we initially anticipated, along with policies on international travel imposed by our Ministry of Education of which we were unaware. Coupled with a teacher’s strike that lasted from November until the Kickoff, we found ourselves unable to rectify the situation in time. Our message to Quebec-based teams in public schools is to ensure early communication with your administration, understanding every policy and administrative requirement to avoid encountering the challenges we faced. Nonetheless, we’ve certainly gained valuable lessons from this experience.

As hard-hitting as this announcement may be for our team, I feel our determination to excel has only intensified. With just one remaining opportunity to vie for awards and potentially qualify for Worlds, it’s as if everyone comprehends what needs to be done. As we highlight in our Impact Award submission, this embodies the warrior spirit that defines our team through every hardship we encounter. I can proudly say that I’m honored to be part of a team with such unwavering drive and inspiring attitude.

INTAKE AND SHOOTER REDESIGN

We initially planned to integrate an over-the-bumper intake with our shooter arm. However, even before commencing fabrication, we recognized numerous flaws in the design that increasingly concerned us. The primary issue was that the arm had to begin nearly upright to conform to the starting configuration and likely needed to remain in this position for much of the match to minimize the risk of damaging the intake or incurring penalties by entering other robots’ frame perimeters. Here’s how it would have appeared.

So, we went back to the drawing board to address those issues, and our solution was to separate our intake and our shooter. We now have an under-the-bumper intake and a separate shooter mounted on the arm. Consequently, our frame perimeter increased from 26’‘x26’’ to 26’‘x33’'.

The process of shooting into the SPEAKER and the AMP remains largely the same, but we now boast a significantly larger intake that is also securely housed within the bumpers. With our new setup, we can ensure that we always remain within our frame perimeter during gameplay, except when we elevate the arm to score in the AMP. The enhanced low center of gravity is particularly advantageous for traversing long distances between the scoring area and the human player chute, offering improved control and speed confidence. We’re truly fond of this new design. Although we’re still missing some hardware in CAD, the geometry of the plates should function effectively. We plan to finalize the CAD and commence fabrication of the plates this week.

GREAT PROGRESS WITH ARM AND PROGRAMMING

Progress on the intake and shooter fronts was limited this week, except for CAD. However, we proceeded with assembling our arm to the frame and rewiring everything to facilitate programming. Since we completed our frame last week, we encountered no issues moving forward. Our arm features 2 Falcon 500 motors on a MAXplanetary gearbox with a 125:1 gear ratio. It’s driven by a chain on 15T #35 sprockets on the gearbox shafts and 48T #35 sprockets bolted on the arm, resulting in a total reduction of 400:1 for both motors. Needless to say, the arm is exceptionally robust and, thanks to a well-designed structure, remarkably stable. Aside from the typical chain backlash, there’s no noticeable play anywhere on the arm.

We also promptly proceeded to configure our swerve drive and attempted to make Pathplanner function. Although I don’t have all the specifics, we had to adjust our rotation speed in the configuration to a higher value than the translation speed. Additionally, we programmed our arm position control using Motion Magic and tested its integration into an autonomous routine. With more exciting programming tasks ahead, I believe we’re on track for a comprehensive programming update very soon!

WHAT TO EXPECT FOR WEEK 4

We’ve initiated driver training sessions with around three students, aiming to select our official driver by Friday and intensify training drills thereafter. Our weekend meetings, scheduled to start at 10 am, have seen us arriving at 9 am, and sometimes even earlier, to accommodate driver practice. This practice not only enhances our driving skills but also fosters punctuality for meetings.

The primary focus will be validating and possibly finalizing our CAD designs, along with fabricating our intake and shooter plates. These will be produced on our CNC machine using 1/4’’ lexan. This week, we’ve set up our CNC, installed a new enclosure, and begun learning MasterCAM with the guidance of a mechanical mentor to ensure readiness for operation this week.

In addition, we’re aiming to incorporate Apriltag detection for auto-alignment this week, if time permits. If we successfully complete these tasks and assemble our intake by the end of week 4, only the assembly and testing of our shooter will remain for week 5. This timeline optimizes our schedule, allowing ample time to integrate all programming features and, most importantly, conduct sufficient driver practice and address any issues that may arise with the robot.

That’s about it for this update.

À bientôt!

Martin SV

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WEEK 4 RECAP: OUR FIRST MAJOR SETBACK

Bonjour!

So this week was really wild. We were supposed to complete our intake and start fabricating our last parts on our CNC, but we couldn’t. First came the shipping issue of our 1/4’’ sheet of polycarbonate that we had to go get ourselves from the transporter because it wouldn’t have shipped before Monday or Tuesday. Then came the CNC issues. In short, our CNC kept turning off after a few minutes, and it took us a while to figure out the main issue. We were able to prolong the time it took for the CNC to turn off by changing the power supply, but the main problem looks to be static as our CNC is apparently not grounded. We need to find a fix soon, but for now, we’ll fabricate our parts at 296 Northern Knights’ shop with their CNC which they graciously let us use. Still, we had to make some progress elsewhere, so here’s what we did.

FINAL INTAKE TESTING

Using the actual robot, 3D printed plates, and the motors we’ll be using, we tested our intake in the most accurate way we could to validate our design before going ahead with it. This 3 roller setup looks to work very well, with sushi rollers on the bottom. We don’t have it on video, but we also tested the intake with sawdust on the wheels and its efficiency drastically dropped, to the point it didn’t work anymore. It was an important lesson for us as we’ll add the step to clean our intake wheels before every match at a competition to get the maximum efficiency we can out of our intake.

MORE PROGRAMMING

We received our Google Coral for the note detection we’ll use with our Limelight V2, but for now, we delved into Apriltags detection and odometry. It’s still rough, but we’re now able to integrate Apriltag data into our odometry and even create on-the-fly path generation to move the robot autonomously to a desired position and angle from a random spot on the field. I don’t know all the details about this, so I think we’re due for a programming post really soon now. What’s sure is that our automation capabilities this season will be very exciting!

WHAT’S TO COME FOR WEEK 5

First of all, we have to catch up on our setback last week. To do so, we have to complete our intake AND our shooter this week, but apart from our plates that we’ll fabricate this week, we have everything else or are in orders that are arriving this week. We only did a very small meeting with a few students on Sunday, so most of the team should be rested, and ready for the last few weeks of build season. We could in theory finish our robot this week, so to motivate our team, we’re organizing a potluck on Saturday.

We also selected our drivetrain driver, so we’ll be intensifying our training from now on to figure out our robot issues and give our driver experience in various situations. As every team is getting better each year, we also have to get the edge in driver skills and experience and there is only one way to do it. We’ll continue to start our weekend meetings earlier for the driver to get some interrupted practice before the rest of the team comes into work on the robot.

That’s about it,

À bientôt!

Martin SV

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WEEK 5 RECAP: ALMOST THERE

At the beginning of the week, we thought that completing the fabrication and assembly of out intake and shooter would be out of reach. We usually try to calculate for unexpected issues when setting goals, but thanks to team’s hard work, we solved almost all of the issues we faced. We caught up from last week’s setback, and seeing the robot in action with all of it’s main subsystems is certainly motivating for the whole. But we know that simply having a functional robot is not enough, and we’ll keep working harder to build the most competitive robot we can.

FABRICATION

Our CNC still has static issues and we couldn’t really use it to fabricate the parts we had to make. So we asked our friends at 296 Northern Knights if we could use their CNC in a rush, and they graciously accepted. It’s the second year in a row that they help us in this way and we are extremely grateful to them! Since all the parts were 1/4’’ lexan plates, the process of fabrication wasn’t too long or difficult after finding the right fit fot the bearing holes.

Machining

The parts

ASSEMBLY

The assembly of our intake and shooter definitely didn’t go as smooth as it could, but every issue we faced could be resolved with solutions found on the spot. We found that it’s always best to expect a lot of those issues than not, simply to be mentally ready to face the challenges. Getting discouraged after the first assembly attempt doesn’t get us anywhere. We had to rebuild a lot due to broken parts of spacers we forgot to put. We also found out that lexan cracks really well if it touches loctite, even a little bit. So after all of this, at the end of the week, the robot was finally functionally ready.

WHAT’S TO COME FOR WEEK 6

We still have a lot of rough edges to polish. Wether it’s bumper mounts, electronics and cameras placement, cable management, fabricating spare or iterated parts, designing and building a climber, programming or automating the robot, we are very aware that we still have a lot of work to do. However, we can celebrate the fact that we are actually still right on schedule, even with week 4’s setback. Having a functional robot right now is so great for developing autonomous modes, tuning programs and driver practice. There will be a lot more for the weeks to come.

À bientôt!

Martin SV

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WEEK 6 RECAP

Bonjour,

With a somewhat functioning robot, it’s harder to see the difference week after week. but we definitely made some progress and small modifications. More and more time was also dedicated to tuning automatic processes and of course, driver practice. Our confidence is high and our motivation to work hard is even higher.

Last week was also the Impact award deadline, so were quite busy making sure we submitted the best essay and answers we could. Not to mention we also held a conference on AI and a ‘‘Women in STEM’’ evening event. Two great events that both received very good feedback. We’re happy to share our passion for sciences and technologies with other students from our school and our community through means different than robotics thanks to FIRST.

SOME ADJUSTMENTS

We mainly made adjustments on our rollers, including the addition of vectored intake wheels on our intake to be even more efficient with our intake. Funneling is a bit challenging as the note tends to deform rather than move to the center, but at this point, we already have an almost perfect intake.

We also did a lot of cable management and worked on permanent mounts for our electronics and limelights. We had to redo some connections to make them stronger and replace a gyro that probably got shorted from a bad connection.

PROGRAMMING

We started our shooter tuning and are getting really consistent. We have a nearly perfect shooter when shooting against the subwoofer. For now, we’re attributing most of the small inconsistencies to the variation between notes. We have a note that is half duck tape right now that we’ll stop using since it’s broken in several spots already and can barely be called a note.

We also worked on our note detection and alignment with the Limelight 3 and Google Coral. It’s officially functional, but still needs some tuning to be as smooth as possible for the driver. Same with the on-the-fly path generation. With the more official camera mounting spots, we can go ahead with more in-depth programming.

DRIVER PRACTICE

We’re now spending more and more time with driver practice. At least a couple of hours per meeting. We don’t feel like it’s a lot of hours yet, but the driver is already getting faster and faster and is only limited by the parts of the robot we still have to tune, finish, or iterate, which is a good sign. But we know we can still do better, so we’ll also be using this pair of glasses to simulate a limited field of view. We know that driving around and under the stages at high speeds will make a big difference and it will heavily rely on driver skill, so it’s as useful as it is a silly goofy thing.

We’re obviously very happy to have a robot ready for driver practice at this point!

WHAT’S TO COME FOR THE LAST WEEK OF BUILD SEASON

Driver practice, autonomous modes, finishing the bumpers, and our climber. The most uncertain part is definitely the climber, but we’re working on it. It was truly left out as it was our least important priority, but with the time remaining, we hope we can at least make something simple, at the very least, climb directly with our arm.

Also, lots of driver practice.

Good luck to all teams for this last stretch before the Week 1 events!

À bientôt,

Martin SV

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FESTIVAL DE ROBOTIQUE MONTREAL REGIONAL RECAP

Bonjour!

It was an amazing event at the Regina Assumpta Cultural and Sports Center. First of all, we would like to thank Team 3990, 9406, and all of their school’s administration for saving the Montreal Regional after the original venue, the Olympic Stadium, had to cancel last minute.

We went into the competition with high hopes, bringing our best robot ever: RAWЯ. If you haven’t seen the Reveal yet, here’s the link. It’s dope! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etGKuL7W4fM

COMMUNICATION PROBLEMS
We quickly ran into communication issues. Some were solved, but some were not. The first one was due to our PDH basically soldering the main black cable into itself. We don’t know how it happened, but we cleaned it and changed the cable. We might want to inspect our PDH further, but that issue was solved for the rest of the competition.

The bit that melted into the PDH


The inside of the PDH

The other issue was simply the connection between the radio power module to the PDH. It was a quick fix with hot glue, and the connection was solid.

Our last problem has to do with the drivetrain’s CAN bus. We use a CANivore to separate the drivetrain and the rest of the robot’s CAN bus. So for some reason, and we still haven’t identified why, our drivetrain stopped working. The CANivore sometimes flashed red for a fraction of a second and caused our drivetrain to disconnect during the playoffs. We looked for the issue and tried some fixes but couldn’t find the real cause.

GOOD PERFORMANCE
It was our best robot performance so far, even with all the issues we had. We still did very fast cycles and had a 3-note autonomous mode that took a note on the center line. That allowed us to seed 8th during qualifications and we became captain of alliance 6 with 6929 and 9234, only to beat the odds and get to round 4 of the playoffs as one of the 4 best alliances.

REGIONAL ENGINEERING INSPIRATION AWARD
Thanks to all of our efforts in the last seasons, and especially this one, we were recognized as the Engineering Inspiration award winners. This is a huge honor, and a dream come true for us. This award grants us a spot for Worlds. This will be our team’s first participation at the FIRST Championship. I will summarize in a further post about everything we did to lead to this accomplishment, but for right now, we deserve a little rest.

WHAT’S NEXT??
Well, our season is not over yet. We’re on our spring break right now and we will take this time to rest. We’ll be back on Saturday to do our post-mortem from our Regional and set new and realistic objectives for the Championship. I’ll spare the details about all of the logistics and financing we need, but that’s also one of our next steps.

We’re so grateful and happy to be able to continue this adventure.

À bientôt!

Martin SV

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