4504 BC Robotics | 2024 Build Thread | Open Alliance

FIRST FRC Open Alliance
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BC Robotics has returned for another build blog. We are a community team that operates in Blount County, TN which allows students from 3 different school districts to collaborate together. We are excited to share our season’s progress with the FRC community!

Team Resources

Team Organization:

  • Our student leadership consists of a Team Captain, Technical Captain, Non-technical Captain, and Project Manager.
  • We decided to have a smaller leadership team this year compared to last season where we had a captain for each of our subteams with one central Team Captain.
  • Our subteams: Mechanical, Electrical, Programming, Design, Safety, and Impact/Outreach.

Meeting Schedule:

  • Our off-season meeting are held every other Saturday from 10am to 2pm
  • Season meetings will be Monday-Friday (except Wednesday) from 4pm to 8pm. Saturday meetings will be from 10am to 4pm.
  • Our first season meeting will be on Kickoff.
  • We are planning on implementing subteam specific meetings so students know when to show up depending on the subteam they want to work with. This will hopefully limit days where for example we have lots of programming students show up on days where our programming mentor and veteran programmers are not there.
  • We are also planning on including one required build day where everyone must show up for a weekly recap and to plan goals for the week.

Regional Competitions:

  • We will be competing at Smoky Mountains Regional (Knoxville, TN) and Buckeye Regional (Cleveland, OH).
  • With Smoky Mountains Regional being in between Week 1 and Week 2, we will have to have a stricter build schedule in order to have a completed robot for competition.
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Offseason Recap

RoboRodeo

  • On Sept. 16th and 17th, we competed at RoboRodeo, a local off-season event hosted in Knoxville, TN.
  • Luckily, we did not face any major breaks or difficulties at competition. Our team experienced a pretty chill competition for the first time in a while.
  • We placed 6th overall out of 16 total robots at the end of quals which was very surprising as we switched drivers between every match. Our match record was 6-4-0.
  • Sadly, we are the first alliance eliminated in playoffs. However, we are grateful for the opportunity to compete and allow our students to re-engage with FRC again right before our offseason meetings.
  • Thank you to 4265 for hosting this event!

Strategy meetings

  • Instead of traditional off-season training in basic skills, our student leadership focused on preparing new members for the build season by teaching strategic planning and brainstorming for mechanisms.
  • This allowed our students to understand the history of previous FRC games and look into different approaches to the same problem
  • A common theme that was developed from this was that a simpler mechanism is usually better than an overly complex mechanism for FRC robotics.
  • These meetings will hopefully prepare our students for the first week of build season in quickly developing different prototypes as compared to last season’s progress.
  • Off-season Lesson Plan

Swerve Drive

  • 4504 has been using Tank Drive ever since we were founded. Finally with enough funds, we have decided to switch over to Swerve Drive for the upcoming season.

  • After our strategy meetings, we moved onto building a swerve chassis so our new students could work with and see what each subteam does on our team.

  • We are using MK4i swerve modules.

  • We have fully assembled the chassis and electrical system. Our programming team has recently been given the chassis and have not had enough time to get it fully running. They will continue their work with it at the start of the new season.

  • This will become our main chassis for the season once we cut our box tubing to the length, add supports and a proper battery mount, and replace the proto electrical belly-pan with a machined one.

  • We have decided to switch to Colson wheels after speaking to one of 2393’s mentors about their experience using billet wheels with treads.

Community Outreach Events

  • A majority of our offseason consisted of going out to the community and showcasing our 2023 robot to K-12th graders at different schools. Since we are a community team, we have 3 different school districts we cover. Which means a lot of future robotics enthusiasts!​​
  • We ended up visiting a total of 6 different schools this offseason.

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Week One Recap

What Our Robot Will Do?

  • Intake: Ground Intake as a primary method to collect notes with source pickup being a backup method.
  • Scoring Notes: We will score in both the Speaker and Amp. But our primary focus will be scoring into the Speaker.
  • Endgame: We only plan to climb on the chain. We have decided not to focus on scoring a note in the Trap or trying to achieve Harmony.

Shooter

  • Starting with inspiration from the kitbot’s shooter, we built a mockup of a shooter with flywheels on one side.
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  • We wanted to be able to eject the note into the amp, so we decided to add a second set of wheels so it would fully leave the shooter.
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Ground Intake

  • With a compression of ⅜ in, we spaced two rows of complaint wheels to pick up notes.
  • We attached the shooter prototype onto the ground intake to see if it can fully cycle the game piece.
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Testing Prototypes

  • We have not received a game piece yet which has heavily delayed our progress in iterating and testing our prototypes. Hopefully we get them by Week 2 so we can move on to our final versions of mechanism prototypes.

  • However, we made our own game piece from a pool noodle and duct tape. While it is not perfect, it allowed us to test our shooter prototype.

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  • Speaker scoring: We had no problems getting the note into the speaker.

  • Video
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  • Amp scoring: We wanted to try the approach to getting the note into the amp by using a passive ramp. It worked some of the time. This could be an approach to scoring we might revisit next week.

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  • Source Intake:

  • Video
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Climbing

  • We have decided to use two telescoping arms to climb onto the chain. We will be pulling these arms off our 2022 robot (Atlas) and repurposing them for this season.

Other progress

  • Swerve Drive: Programming is still working on getting our chassis moving around. We should be able to start driver practice with swerve by the end of next week.
  • Electrical protoboard: As a training for electrical members, we constructed a small electrical board for testing our upcoming prototypes.
  • CAD / Design Team: A design subteam is something we have always struggled with. A focus for this season is to integrate CAD into our build process by designing our V2 prototypes in CAD before moving onto new iterations. This will be a main focus for us during Week 2.
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Week Two Recap

Snowed Out :frowning:

  • Due to being snowed out, we have not been able to enter our shop at all last week.
  • We began working on designing our chassis and V2 prototypes on Onshape. Our designs will be released in our Week 3 recap once we have them machined and assembled.
  • We hope we can return back to the shop sometime soon this week.
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Week 3 Recap

Ground Intake

  • Our largest focus this week was to develop a working ground intake.
  • We decided to have two sets of rollers that deploy out of the robot off a pivot and bring the note back by handing it off into our shooter.

V1

  • A quick proof of concept design we constructed during Week 1
  • We were finally able to test this design since our game pieces finally arrived!!
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V2

  • This version was primarily for us to see how over the bumper ground intake would situate on our chassis.
  • We have a relatively small chassis this year: 26in x 26in
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  • We also started to map out where our pulleys and motor mounts would be placed.

V3

  • We used this version to test motor placement on our intake.
  • We will be using Neo 550s to run each roller bar. We are planning on directly driving these rollers with no gear ratio. We will test this configuration once programming is able to write and deploy code for this prototype.

Shooter Placement

  • Using our V1 shooter prototype, we mounted it on our chassis to get a rough idea of what our robot will look like.
  • Shooter Placement will be one of our biggest focuses next week.
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Code Update

  • This week programming was able to successfully connect to the robot and get motors spinning. We are still not able to completely control the bots movement, and we have narrowed down the issue to be with the encoders. Next week we plan on continuing our development of the swerve drive and fixing the issues with the encoders. We also worked on a little protoboard for testing motors on different prototypes.
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Week 4 & 5 Recap (It’s all coming together)

Ground Intake

  • We are currently on V6 on our ground intake, Our final version is currently in development and will be our 7th iteration.

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  • We are planning to score notes into the amp using our ground intake. We wanted the ground intake to reach all the way to the bottom lip of the amp, but after messing around with the dimensions in CAD, we found that we weren’t able to get it to reach all the way up with the 1 foot extension limit this season. We will try to shoot it into the amp instead of rolling it in.

Shooter

  • We are going to stick to a single horizontal flywheel set-up since it has been shooting pretty accurately into the speaker in our tests. This will allow us for a faster spin up time rather than having multiple wheels on our shooter. Each flywheel will be directly driven by a Neo motor.

Climbing

  • We will be using two Telescoping arms to climb onto the chain. We have built our arms and will work on mounting them with their motors next.

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Swerve

  • Programming has been developing our swerve code for this season and it is finally ready for the build team to transfer our modules onto our robot. We will be putting together our mechanism during this next build week.

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Battery Cart

  • We love carrying our batteries to competition in totes and struggling to lift them. So to take the fun out of it, we finally built a battery cart. There is also some space for drill batteries and chargers. We will add some 3D-printed drill battery mounts onto it later.

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CAD

  • We are close to finalizing our cad for the robot this season. After our CAD is finalized, we will move from our laser-cut wooden plates to manufactured parts for our final mechanisms.

  • This is the first season our team has had a consistent CAD team and we have been able to progress much faster throughout the build season than in previous seasons.

Some pics of current progress:

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