3588 The Talon Build Thread | Open Alliance 2024

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Welcome to Team 3588’s 2024 Open Alliance Build Thread! We are excited for our return to Open Alliance for our second year.

Post Schedule
We are planning on posting by the end of each week. We originally posted once a month, but we realized that it would be more helpful to the community if we posted more frequently.

About Us
We are a team from Lindbergh High School based in Renton, Washington, and have roughly 30 active members, 5 advisors, and 3 mentors. We originally joined FRC in 2011, and in our long history, we have qualified for worlds twice and won Chairmans in 2014. After the 2019-2020 season got cut in half, we struggled due to the lack of experience on our team. Combine that with us being unable to meet because of the pandemic, and we lost knowledge.
Recently, we have been working towards rebuilding and strengthening the knowledge of our team. There has been large strides of progress in terms of creating new processes and organization. After the last year, we gained 2 new advisors and have been expanding our member count. Currently, we have planned to attend both Glacier Peak and Auburn.

We hope to get more help with all aspects of our team. Being able to see other teams and their processes has helped us to grow more as a team, and we would love to contribute by sharing our information as well.

If you’d like to see more from our team, please visit our 2023 Open Alliance build thread.

We wish you all good luck for this season!

Links
Team Website
The Blue Alliance

Jasmine A.
Project Manager

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2023 Off-Season Recap

End of the 2023 Season

We had an amazing 2023 season which you can read all about in our 2023 Build Thread! As a brief recap, we ranked 9th place at Bonney Lake and became captain of Seed 6. We then ranked 17th place at Auburn and was picked by Seed 6.

Summer

During the summer, we attended many local events. Those being Seattle Pride Parade, Renton River Days, United Way Annual Community BBQ accompanied by 4131 Iron Patriots and FTC 8693 Hazen Scarabs, and KingCon NW accompanied by 3786 Charger Robotics and FTC 8693 Hazen Scarabs.

In these events, we showcased Orion, our 2023 season robot, taught families about FIRST and its various programs, and provided a fun robot coloring page for the kids. During KingCon NW, we hosted a panel with the Chargers and the Scarabs to introduce our community to FIRST and the work that we do within the community. We had a blast representing STEM in our community throughout all of these events.

The events that we attended opened eyes from not only our community, but also our members. Bridging the gap between our team and our community has revived one of our core values as an FRC team, giving back to the community. In all of our events, we’ve been dedicated towards getting kids introduced and interested in the world of STEAM. In the photos below, you will notice that we taught kids how to drive our robot, printed out our own “Draw Your Own Robot” coloring page for the younger kids, and played our season recap video to give an inside look of what we do in Robotics.

Welcoming and Training New Members

To start our school-year off, we welcomed 29 new members to the team! The Leads and Project Managers that have been working since the summer to prepare the team for our Minibuild season. We continued to utilize the rest of our off-season as training for both members and Leads.

Minibuild

This off-season, we decided to keep the structure of our previous training season. The Project Manager team worked over the summer to curate a mock game and competition using elements from past seasons. We took the concept of scaling a set of stairs inspired by the 2019 season, the balance board from the 2023 season, and a goalpost to shoot foam balls into.

Winter Banquet

To end off our Minibuild season, we wanted to emphasize the importance of community building with everything that we have learned over the summer.

Unfortunately, we were unable to finish our robot, but we accomplished as much as we could to achieve our vision. On the bright side, we did manage to complete our swerve bot! This was the first year that our team has ever worked with swerve, so it definitely was quite a hurdle to get through. From the code (of course) not working to completely starting from scratch on our showcase day, we were able to present a functioning robot at the end. Even though we were unable to achieve our full vision, our team has learned so much from this experience as we experimented with a plethora of designs and methods. Now that our team has become familiar with the process of creating a robot, we’ve become prepared to dive into this season’s challenge.

What’s Next?

Our next post will be covering our process as we move through Kickoff and our prototyping phases.

Jasmine A.
Project Manager

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Week 1 Recap

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Kickoff

Happy Kickoff week! We started our kickoff morning with some donuts, registered on FIRST, and checked into the livestream. After the livestream, we began our general discussion and analyzed the game manual. We set up three groups to discuss and create a list of important notes to present to the rest of the team.

Strategizing

We began strategizing for the game and decided that we would be prioritizing floor acquisition, speaker shooting, and climb. Afterward, we started discussing our general strategy for robot design, following the criteria for determining the mechanisms wanted, what drivetrain we should use, and the sizing we wanted.

General Questions:

  • Define the Problem (Define what we need to do)
  • Specify Requirements
    • Size and Weight Requirements, Fouls

Strategizing Questions:

  • What scoring do we want to prioritize
    • Primary challenge, secondary, or optional
  • How do we want to score
  • How do we want to interact with the environment
  • How do we want to optimize RP gain

Robot Questions:

  • What mechanisms do we want
    • Name Multiple, don’t just name one
  • What drivetrain do we want
  • What weight do we want to be
  • What size do we want to be
    • Height/Width

Screenshot Sources: Kickoff Spreadsheet

Design

For our design, we decided on doing a floor acquisition inside the robot, sort of like a Roomba:

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For our shooter, we have a modified version of the KitBot shooter that directly attaches to the Roomba. For our drivetrain, we decided on using swerve. Finally, for climb we plan on using two ThriftyBot’s Telescoping arm

Prototyping

We began prototyping after determining what designs we should pursue, using resources like OA and ChiefDelphi to refine and modify our designs for peak efficiency. After a few days, we got our prototypes to work!

What’s Next?

PDR is upcoming next Friday 1/19, so we are currently preparing our stuff to be ready for:

YARN | PRESENTATION! | Megamind | Video gifs by quotes ...
That’s all for Week 1 and we hope that all is going well for everyone else!

Reuel F.
Project Manager

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Week 2 Recap

Prototyping

This week, we continued to finalize our prototypes on Onshape.

Preliminary Design Review

What is PDR?

For those who don’t know, PDR or preliminary design review is a time for mentors and parents to get a look at the prototypes we have made over the past few weeks and give their input. This helps us figure out what direction to go towards in the future and gives us a better understanding of our prototypes, their flaws and their strengths.

Fabrication & Electrical:

We finished making a mock version of the speaker, both intakes and our shooter prototype. Since electrical didn’t have much to work with, they just helped Fabrication out in the meantime. We plan to be fabricating sometime this week or the next week.

CAD:

This week, we worked on finalizing the CAD for PDR and produced drawings for fabrication so they are ready to go, if all goes smoothly. The part tracker was also implemented this week and fabrication is planning to use the same spreadsheet unlike Mini-Build to avoid issues. We also cheesed some panels on the robot yesterday (thank you Victor for your musical cheesing).
Here’s a link to the current version on Onshape: Current CAD

Programming:

For programming, we’ve been working on setting up a system for autonomous. Although, we did come across with a weight distribution issue on our swerve bot, which we fixed temporarily with a counterweight. There’s also an issue with one of the wheels facing the wrong direction because of an error.

Outreach:

Outreach put together the slides for PDR, set up a schedule to follow to apply for awards, and creating content for our socials.

Here’s our chassis:

Our Roomba acquisition:

Our shooter:

And our climb:

Future plans

For the most part, this week has been busy and we look to refine and improve on the feedback we received during our PDR. At the end of this upcoming week, we have our planned CDR, standing for Critical Design Review which we can cover more in the next ChiefDelphi post. That being said, we hope that everyone has been doing well for the 2nd week of Build-Season.
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Reuel F.
Project Manager

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Week 3 Recap

Crescendo

Post-PDR Evaluation

Hope week 3 has been well for everyone! We’ve been spending our week considering the information that we received from our Preliminary Design Review and applying it to our designs. For the most part, there hasn’t been many major issues, besides curving, that has affected the design. So we should be on schedule for CDR!

CDR; Critical Design Review

Now you may be wondering, “What’s CDR?” CDR stands for Critical Design Review and it’s a designated day/set of days to come back together as a team and review what we have done in the past few weeks. It’s the final “checkpoint” in our design phase and proves that we are able to progress forward with that design.

Post-CDR

We had a thorough discussion about each individual mechanism. Throughout this process, we dove into specific issues that needed to be discussed and fixed going into the robot’s fabrication:

Acquisition:

  • During the testing phase of the acquisition prototype, an issue came up that when a note was placed into the acquisition, the note would get stuck under the robot if it ran too long. There was also an issue with the transfer to shooter so we changed the mechanism to connect directly into the shooter which should result in a clean transfer; we also added hex shafts for more guidance into the shooter.

Shooter:

  • While testing the prototype of the shooter, there was a heavy curve to the left when it shot out. We listed two solutions, one that is to add wheels to the opposing side of the shooter which can result in more compression and a decrease in diameter of the wheels that can sacrifice shooting note speed. The other solution was to chop off the top of the shooter which can make the decompression of the note more even and not bounce off the extended side walls/panels. However, once we fix this issue, we will have enough power to shoot so now it’s all about the aim.

Climb:

  • There were two primary issues with the current design. Although, the current climb panels are aesthetic and pretty there were concerns that the panels were not structurally sound and would bend under stress from the unique musical cheesing. So we are considering changing this to a different form of cheesing or not cheesing the panel at all. What determines the decision is entirely off of the weight of the robot that we’re currently calculating. Another issue we found was that the gearbox will not fit properly at its current state as the tubing connections is clipping with parts of the bot. So, we decided to shave off that section but it will limit us from attaching the gearbox directly to tubing or a plate in the future.

(Thank you Logan P. [Chief Engineer] for the information :+1:)

Current Issues

So our programming bot dropped a support, resulting in a little bit of parallelogram…
We solved this issue with a whack from our lovely big mallet.

Current Progress

Programming bot is back up and running, we did our Drive Team written test for our drivers, and we decided to go through with the design and finalizing the CAD.

Future Plans

We’ll hopefully start fabricating parts of the robot next week! We should have the robot CAD finalized this week and will be posted here when finished since the previous link we provided does not auto-update with the primary CAD. We also plan to throw some driver practice at our drive team with a final test after a few practices. Looking forward to week 4!

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Reuel F.
Project Manager

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Week 4

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Updates

There hasn’t been much work this week, we ended up pushing a few deadlines due to machines being out of commission and kits not arriving yet.

Bald Guy GIFs | Tenor

Reuel F.
Project Manager

Week 5

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Current Progression

Hope week 4 and 5 has been well for everyone! Sorry for the really short post last week… I’ll be briefly covering the current progression that we have reached:

Fabrication:

  • Robot fabrication is mostly finished besides the telescoping arms which can easily be attached at a later date.
  • Most of the environment pieces have been assembled which are:
    – Speaker
    – AMP
    – Stage climb
  • Our Laser Cutter is back up !!!

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Electrical:

  • Electrical board is 55% finished !!!

Programming:

  • Swerve code has been finished !!!
    – All we need now is QOL coding that can make driving swerve feel better.
  • Currently they are waiting for a finished robot so that they can officially test their code.

Outreach:

CAD:

  • AMP Mechanism implementation
    – Piston being worked on
  • Limelight and Piston Mechanisms are in progress
  • Fixing issues on the fly

Current Issues

  • Our current programming bot is not driving straight and it is not a programming issue. We’ve been struggling to figure out what the issue is, we think it may have to be the actual stability of the chassis.
  • Drive team practice has been delayed because of the issues with the programming bot so yeah…

Future plans

Electrical should be finished on Monday and Programming will have the entire time this upcoming week. Because of all the delays, we are also looking at bleeding into mid-winter break to take two days for more work to be made. Hopefully, we will not have to go into mid-winter break :smiley:.

Cat Dances GIFs | Tenor
Reuel F.
Project Manager

Week 6-7

Fortissimo

Recap

Hoping that week 6 (and 7) have been going smoothly for everyone! Week 6-7 has been a rollercoaster for us, as we stumble onto issues or modifications that can improve our design. We did go into Mid-Winter break :slightly_smiling_face:.

Subteams:

Fabrication

After testing our design a couple times, we realized the way that we designed and fabricated it was not as smooth as it should have been, resulting in some Cheeto dust throughout the bot. We’ve also added another motor for electrical to assist the single motor on acquisition, which we will continue to address later. We currently also do not have climb attached so we will hopefully add it this week or in between week 1 and 2 competition.

Electrical

Wiring up the robot has been incredibly smooth although we came across a few issues alongside Programming such as the magnets moving out of place when we were testing Swerve. A few other issues came up but we quickly resolved them and will be working on that motor once we come back from Mid-Winter break.

Programming

We should have the whole week for Programming to test because of those sudden issues. We had a motor smoking from the single motor powering the entirety of acquisition which we resolved by adding in another motor nearby that will support acquisition further.

Outreach

Week 6 Instagram reel just dropped!!!

Current Issues

The most prominent issue currently is the magnet being out of place for the CANCoders for swerve which we are currently trying to resolve. We also forgot to order the Telescoping Arm gearbox so we have been working on making those parts ourselves (Spacers, Spool, Plates).

Future Plans

Hopefully we can get some Driver Practice in before competition with our own field elements that we made for PDR. Looking forward to Glacier Peak in 6 days!
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