4573 Rambotics | 2024 Build Thread | Open Alliance

[Skeller]

Welcome to the 2024 Rambotics openalliance thread! This is our first year being a part of the open alliance group as we look to expand our program beyond our usual capabilities. The goal of this thread is to document the progress of our team and show off our creative solutions and failures during the upcoming year.

About us
Team 4573, Rambotics, is from South River, New Jersey. For this upcoming season we currently have 58 students signed up as well as 12 consistent mentors. Of the 58 students, we have: 23 Seniors, 10 Juniors, 11 Sophomores, and 14 Freshmen. Of the mentors, 4 are 4573 alumni.

This is the 11th year that Rambotics will be competing in the FMA/MAR district. Of these 11 seasons we have had some success but we have not won a banner yet. We have qualified for the District championships 3 times but have yet to make playoffs (lets hope this is the year)! We are looking to compete this year Week 2 in Allentown and Week 4 in Warren Hills.

What we do
For this year, we are looking to strengthen our community involvement as well as secure long term sponsorships! We are affiliated with South River High School, a title 1 school district for a town of 16,000 people. Ever since our beginnings in first, we have participated and helped the community around us, for example

• We have had a plot in the community garden that all crops go towards the food shelter.
• We have held clothing drives for those in need.
• We have come together with Adopt-A-Family during the Holiday season for families in need.
• We have held a food drive for those in Ukraine since ~5% of our students are of Ukrainian heritage or refuges of the war.
• We have held tutoring hours after school for those who need.
• We have participated with the Haunted High School, where kids have a safe place to trick or treat.
• We are always a part of the town parades for Homecoming and Memorial Day
• We are planning to showcase the robot to the other schools in our district to get them interested in STEAM and Robotics.

Schedule
As of now, we meet once a week to discuss ongoing projects but our captains will call smaller meetings for their devoted service projects. Shop time is limited to days where the school is open and a teacher is present/available.

Open Alliance
We plan on updating this thread once a week during build season as well as when any non robot projects are completed.

Team Links

• Github
• Instagram
• TikTok @sr.rambotics

Keller

[Skeller]

Charged Up - Year in Review

Working with our Scouting Team, Drive Team, Coach, and all returning members, we thought it would be a good way to start our Crescendo year with a look back at Charged Up. We took a look into all aspects of our year and noted some spots for improvement and spots where we excelled. With us starting our Open Alliance thread we figured it was a good spot to put it.

Build Season

Hand
During build season we took inspiration from RI3D and went with a double piston grabbing mechanism. The pistons faced away from each other and we aligned it so that there was enough stroke to grab a cube without popping it and a cone to not fall out. We also attached this to our arm mechanism using a hex bearing so that the hands could spin freely, since we were looking to pick up from the front and score from the back. So in theory we could pick up any cone in any orientation and then score it using gravity to our advantage.
Hand Inspiration

Arm
Beyond the hand mechanism, our arm was a climber in a box single stage with a piston on top since the string was not strong enough to pull our hands up. We also already had pneumatics for the hands so one more piston on top was not going to mess with our setup.

Scoring
We scored pieces by rotating our arm from the floor in a cutout of the from frame, overtop the robot and facing behind where our arm extended for scoring on all levels. This was a neo straight onto a hex rod at 1:25 gearing. We noticed late in the year that we should have ran a chain to a sprocket since the neo was getting beat up.

Strategy
In previous years we have not had complex autonomous routines, only score and move. Since we were able to finalize our design early in the season we had plenty of driver practice and auto testing. Going into Mount Olive (Week 2) we wanted to score a piece, exit the community and pick up another piece. We had thought that auto balance would be done by most teams so we focused on game pieces. We all agreed that we should have flipped those and prioritized auto balance. During teleop we would pick up cones from the double substation or cubes on the floor. We could pick up floor cones but the alignment took too long and was challenging when testing. During week 1, our scouts watched competitions to develop their scouting log while the drive team was able to score 9 pieces in 2 minutes in our mock field (the library of our school is large and carpeted). We were hopeful to be a top 10 team exiting Saturday (day 2 of comp).

Mount Olive
Quals
As discussed in strategy, we thought we had good practice and a good enough design to be competitive every match in Mount Olive, we were very wrong. Inspection went fine, our working pressure was at the max so we had the best grip we could for our hands. During our practice match our auto worked fine where we scored our cone on the mid node and left the community but we were on the bump side and missed our second piece. We then spent the rest of the match struggling to pick up a cone and hold onto it when going across the field. We added more grip tape to the hands but nothing seemed to be better for our next 8 matches. After every match we looked at the hands and we could not figure out what was wrong. They would either not be strong enough to hold or would not spin to drop the cone. We ended up 1-7-0 for Saturday and we were the last ranked robot. Spirits were down but we had a plan for Sunday that would hopefully work out. We thought that if we were to shorten the hands and not have them rotate we could get a better grip on cubes and cones. This means though that we can only score our auto cone since it had to be upside down to score properly but if we can then score cubes anywhere we could at least maybe be a second pick for someone. Our second match on Sunday was with the number 1 and 2 ranked teams at that point 11 Mount Olive Robotics Team and 1676 Pascack PI-oneers. We went into that match that if we could impress them then we could have a chance at making playoffs. We talked before the match in the pits and since they were both amazing robots that we could play a feeder role and bring game pieces for Pascack to score. This way MORT could keep taking short cycles and Pascack would score 2 pieces in their one cycle since we brought them another. It worked out great and we finally got our second win of the weekend. We would then split our last two matches and we ended up 4-8-0 rank 32. We knew we were far from playoffs but we may have impressed some teams on Sunday that we might get a chance.

Alliance Selection
Our president always goes on the field for Alliance Selection and she was very nervous. She knew the place we were in and we would be lucky to even get picked at a filled event (37 teams). For first selections MORT picked Pascack for Alliance 1 and then 125 NUTRONs pick 1923 Midnight Inventors for Alliance 2. At this point I though we were screwed since Alliance 2 already had a cube bot so we would not get picked by them and our only hope was MORT and Pascack, which thankfully happened! This was the first time we have every been on Alliance 1 and we wanted to contribute the best we could.

Playoffs
MORT and Pascack agreed that our feeder role was the best situation for our alliance’s success. Before match 1 we were able to get time on the practice field where we practiced our triple balance where MORT pushed us on the charge station since our back was heavier than our front we could balance together and Pascack could fit with the remaining charge station.

Match 1 - went well and we only needed two to balance in the end due to the lead we had built up.

Match 7 - was a win where we did pull off the triple balance that we practiced.

Match 11- would be the faceoff between Alliance 1 and Alliance 2. Pre match it was decided that we would be playing defense on NUTRONs since they seemed to contribute the most points to that alliance. However 484 Roboforce was their third pick and also played defense so most of the match we were gridlocked in the middle of the field making the cycles longer for everyone else. We should have been able to our teleop Alliance 2 but one of MORT’s swerve module died mid match so they were significantly slower. We then tried to do our triple balance but we slightly overshot the side of the charge station so we backed off and then died in the middle of the floor. We never figured out why but even if we could balance we would not have won.

Match 13 - was now win or go home and luckily MORT swapped out their swerve module before the next match. We went back to our usual setup of us feeding in the beginning but switched to defense in the middle of the match. We were bumping with 1279 Cold Fusion and they ended up getting under us and drove us into their substation area. We could not move and they could not get separated from them. Luckily we won that match but it was a close match.

Finals 1 - we again went to play defense but wanted to focus on herding pieces back in the beginning of teleop. The issue was that 484 flew right onto our side and hit as many pieces as possible while 125 and 1923 cleared the rest of the field. MORT and Pascack then went back to cycling and we were playing defense again. We got slammed right before endgame by 125 and they pushed us into their community where they racked up two penalties against us. We all agreed that the defense was not working so we would go back to feeding for match 2.

Finals 2 - was much closer but in auto we crossed the midline for the first time at the event. Then we traded hits in the midfield and broke our hand system. So we then pushed pieces and tried to win the defensive battle. It was a much closer match but Pascack died right before endgame by the single substation and the alliance 2 triple balance won them the match.

Thoughts
We all agreed that we got the best of a bad situation since we almost did not make playoffs and ended up making it to the finals for the third time ever. We knew we needed to fix our entire scoring system since we were a non factor for scoring at Mount Olive. Luckily though, since we made finals we had a lot of District Points already so we did not need to do amazing at Warren Hills to make District Finals.

Week break
In the week between Mount Olive and Warren Hills we looked at overhauling our scoring system. What we decided was that we wanted to work similar to NUTRON’s where they had a v shaped roller system that they dropped pieces into. What we ended up doing was a handoff system where from the single substation, our human player would drop a cone or a cube and then our existing system would pick up the piece and score it. However we had to get rid of the Climber in a Box arm extended since it did not fit inside our frame with the new bucket. Thus we could only score middle and low but we would do a good job at doing it. In practice we were able to get around 6-7 pieces in 2 minutes scored in the middle row.

Warren Hills
We went into Warren Hills knowing that there would be a lot of teams that were at Mount Olive there so we planned to strategize with that. Knowing that there were a few very good cube only robots we would do 80% cones and be able to complete the sustainability bonus.

Quals
During Quals our system was working well and we were able to go 6-6-0 and a much improved rank 12. Looking back we had one of the hardest schedules according to statbotics and they had us going rank 12 in the 5% range. In our eyes we were proud of what we did and expected us to be an early second pick. However there was enough inpicking that we ended up the Alliance 8 captain. Our second time ever being an alliance captain. We ended up picking 4652 Ironmen 2 and 56 ROBBE to fill out our alliance.

Alliance Selection
We picked 4652 since they were a mid and low cube bot with an auto balance that also left the community. We then picked 56 with 4652’s data since they could score anywhere so the plan was they would score one high link, we would fill middle cones, and 4652 would fill middle cubes and as many low cubes as possible. Then since 56 was very skinny, we could triple balance easily during endgame.

Match 1 - Since we were Alliance 8 we were up against Alliance 1 which funny enough was MORT and Pascack again. However we did know what their strategy would be and they would set up four cones that only Pascack could pick up if they were standing of facing forward. So we decided that 56 would get their cone for their high link, 4652 would get their cube for a mid link and we would run through all the cones and push them against the wall so no one could get them. This worked out and then we all ran cycles and were able keep pace with the top two rank teams. The game came down to endgame and lucky for us, sorry for them, but 8588 burned their motors and could not drive onto the charge station.

Match 7 - After taking down Alliance 1, we faced Alliance 5 who had two cube scoring robots and only one that could score cones. Knowing this, we played bump defense against them to slow down their cone cycles. However, mid match, 4652 got run over and got disabled. Since 4652 got run over Alliance 5 did get a red card and we won the match. We did realize though that our system only works if we are all there and able to help.

Match 11 - we were again in winners finals but we got lucky with the red card so we knew we needed to prove that we deserved to be there. Up against Alliance 3 we went back and forth and we were up by 13 going into endgame. We had two balanced with 9 seconds left and hindsight we should have stuck with only 2 but we went for a tiple balance and it didn’t work. That pushed us down to losers finals. However we knew we were good and we could have won that match.

Match 13 - Against Alliance 5 again we knew that we could beat them it was just doing it. Luckily we had time to get set up and ready. However we noticed last second that our steel angle bracket in our hand broke down the seam and we did not have a back up made. We could not get it fixed in time for the match so we could not score middle at all. So our scoring ecosystem is now broken and 56 needs to score their high link and place the mid cones. Mid match 4652 had a big hit and their drive gearbox broke so they could not move. Then 56 lost coms since their ethernet unplugged. We were disappointed by the loss but we were much improved from Mount Olive.

Thoughts
We played well, we proved that we can perform but we still have the ability to improve. We decided to create an auto balance since we cannot pick up off the floor. Our aim was to be a second pick at districts and an auto balance would be huge for that. We spent the week leading up to districts testing auto balance and scoring faster. We were looking to make our arm work faster and be more reliable.

FMA Districts

This only being our fourth time at Districts (MAR/FMA) we were nervous about the higher ceiling of this event compared to regionals.
Quals
In our Qual matches we performed well and but got unlucky at some twists and turns. We ended districts 4-8-0 rank 45. We again had a hard schedule and lost some very close matches. In the end, it was a great learning experience for everyone on the team and showed how good we could be. That is why this offseason we are looking to do better and look for towards the future.

Offseason
This offseason we have had our recruitment events and gained many new members all eager to be successful. One of our biggest offseason projects is swerve drive. We were able to get it up and running and when Crescendo starts we can build a drive frame for this game that will give us an advantage. We learned a lot from this season and our success allowed us to gain some knowledge on how to be more competitive. If you made it this far, thank you for reading!

[Skeller]

PreSeason Update

During the off season we have gotten some housekeeping tasks done along with some outreach projects. Our biggest development is the website finally being live and updated. Website. Awaiting our Media day, we will have our captains page finalized.
Haunted Halloween
As a team, we hosted five rooms in our Schools Haunted Halloween event where community members could trick or treat safely. We hosted a STEM corn maze, Starlab dome, Drone flying, Halloween Safety, and Boo crew. Overall it was a great event for everyone!

Community Garden
We have over the last few years helped out at the community garden for our town. We have two plots where all the food gets donated to the food kitchen. We also are in the works of creating an irrigation system and compost pile. This was a fun event for our team!

We are getting closer to the Robotics season and were starting to prepare for it! Best of luck to all teams!

• Keller

[Skeller]

Build Update 1

• Season Goals
• Priority List
• Design
• Plan of Attack

Season Goals

Short Term Goals:

• More than a two piece autonomous
• Consistent Scoring in Speaker
• Consistent Climb every match

Long Term Goals:

• Middle School STEM outreach
• Blue Banner
• Pick/get picked at FMA District Championships
• Attempt Impact Award
• Full shop space

We have never in our 10 years as a team made it to playoffs at District Championships so getting there is our next step! However, the team is dying to go to worlds, baby steps. We have also never done the Impact Award since we have been a consistently underfunded and small team but this year with 60 members we are going to try to do more!

Priority List
Need:
Ground Pick Up
Speaker Scorer
>=2 Piece autonomous
Climb
Speed

Want:
Amp Scoring
Trap Scoring
Drive below stage

Reach:
Vision Tracking
April Tag Pose
Long Distance Scoring

Design
We looked into all RI3D robots and previous years of our teams and others and fell in love with the Cranberry Alarm bot. We were stuck between having our intake and shooter in one system or two separate systems. We ended on two separate systems for less moving parts and simplicity. We however did make some alterations to the bot since we are running MK4 swerve modules.

The largest change is the intake since the motors get in the way of the ground intake so we made them shorter and thinner.

We prototyped this and it worked well but squished the note more than the original Cranberry one. We will lose a bit of intake width but swerve should compensate for the loss.

Plan of Attack
We have already built the field elements as well as a wooden mock up of our intake and shooter. We are keeping the wood mock up and putting it on our Kit of Parts JV bot for plan out the climb. The goal is to have the main bot speaker shooting and ground intaking within the next week for driver practice while a team designs our climb system. This extra time also allows for our programmers to get PathPlanner going and maybe April Tag Pose.

Good Luck to All

• Keller

[Skeller]

MEDIA DROP 1

We have our field elements built! In an effort to save money we used 3/4 inch cardboard instead of plywood for the major faces and structure.

Our Swerve bot has been constructed using 2x1x.125 aluminum. Currently we are using the MK4 modules and our belly pan to hold everything together. We are going to put reinforcing brackets once we have our subsystems attached.

https://youtube.com/shorts/h8ulhwiwobU?feature=share

Here is our first test of our shooter into the speaker. We are considering changing the angle or having an adjustable angles

• Keller

[Skeller]

Build Update 2

Design Strategy

        We compared this years game to Rapid React (2021) where the main source of Rank Points is shooting and climbing. During that year we did not focus enough time on shooting so we are starting with ensuring a good quality shooter. When referencing RI3D the most consistent scoring robot was Cranberry Alarm so we innovated off their main concept.

Mechanism Test

Main Robot Update

       Since we are running MK4 swerve and not the Kit of Parts like Cranberry Alarm, we had to redesign the intake to fit between the motors. This does give us a slightly smaller opening for intaking notes but we are exploring an indexing bar similar to team 95. 
       Within the time this picture was taken we received our Neo Vortexes and attached them to the shooter instead of Neo 1.1's. We noticed an extremely drastic power increase with these motors. 
      We are also prototyping a top/bottom wheeled shooter however consistency has been an issue with shooting from a distance. 

Hype/Decor

Last year we decided to move away from ordering pins from a third party and make the pins ourselves. We purchased this set which has been wonderful since we are able to make as many different pins as we want. We are currently producing 5 styles of pins and plan to bring at least 150 of each to competition. Previously, once we ran out of pins we were out since ordering and lead time would never make it for our second competition. Now, within 6 hours, we can restock all pins.

Current To Do

       Right now, we are in a position where scoring in the speaker is our main purpose but we have not dialed in our intake amp scoring method. We are considering implementing an extra mechanism that will allow us to shoot the note out our shooter and it will slide into the amp. 
       We are also experimenting with our climb and we are between two different mechanism. First is two climbers in a box from Andymark that will go on either side of our shooter. The other is a chain drive hook that will flip over the top to attach to the chain and pull down. 
      For now, we are ignoring the trap scoring.

If you have any suggestions please let us know!

Best of luck to all!

• Keller

[Skeller]

Welcome Back, it’s been a while! We got very busy on our end and this got put on the back burner. This is going to be a full year recap of our 3 events, 1 Blue Banner, 1000 electrical issues and Autonomous being the bane of our existence. Also sorry for being a D1 Yapper - Keller

Before Competition 1

The Good

1. Shooting was super consistent in teleop. When we were designing we wanted to score well and score quickly. We originally had two Neo’s for each side of our horizontal spinning shooter (Cranberry Alarm). We fundraised well and we were able to afford Vortex’s which saw a significant increase in power.

2. We went with a pneumatic climb due to our familiarity with it and we already had pistons that were perfect. We mounted the pistons on the outside of the shooter and put a bar across with our hook, super simple.

The Bad

1. Swerve. We did swerve over the summer with MK4’s, Neos, thrifty encoders and a Navx. It worked for driving but we never attempted autonomous. Right when the season started we moved to Cancoders and Pigeon 2.0 for reliability and flexibility of mounting. We did not want to put our Rio under the shooter for the Navx to be centered and the thrifty encoders unplugged a few times from the Rio. We started swerve over with a base but it started having issues once we started autonomous and tuning.
   We used YAGSL which was amazing to work with but we found issues with the press fit gear for steering on the Neo and motor connections.

2. Path Planner (not their fault.) We were working on autonomous and ran into many issues running paths and executing commands. We have never used the software before so we expected some issues but we struggled more than expected. It also did not help that when we were attempting a 2 note auton, our intake motor was dead. We couldn’t figure out why it was never spinning on the named command but it took 4 hours to think, does it work in teleop, it did not. This was the day of Allentown set up so that was stressful for everyone.

The Ugly

1. We wanted to create a JV bot for underclassmen and newer members to work on and learn. We had the parts and the ability but lack of attendance made us scrap that since we needed a competition robot more than a JV bot.

Allentown Week 2

Our first event was Allentown during week 2. This was the first time that they were hosting an event so we were excited. In the weeks leading up we were looking good and should be a team with a very consistent shooter and climb. We did have to swap out the intake motor as soon as we got there which sucked but it got done before inspection.

Issues
We decided to “upgrade” our motor connections from amazon connectors that were cheap to Wago Inline Splices. We found these amazing to work with but we found out the hard way that they do not like to stay attached on Neo 12AWG wire. We noticed after one slight hit on the stage when cycling two of our swerve modules stopped working. I remember just naming motor numbers to our technician to check after the match from the logs.
The solve, a lot of soldering. We decided that the best fix would be to solder every connection. However, this was going to take a while. We were also afraid of non swerve motors also getting disconnected due to contact so we originally had over 40 wagos on the bot and we ended with 4 (extenders for CanCoder power). On Saturday we did as much as we could between matches but for the first four matches we were just praying to lose swerve. During each match and into lunch the team soldered every connection of 12AWG.

The Good
Even with a lot of electrical issues we were still playing well when we could move or if we were getting fed. Our shooter was super consistent so getting to the Melody RP was possible even with one or two dead swerve modules.
Once we got all of our electrical issues sorted out and we fixed our intake after it breaking for two matches, we ended Saturday 3-5. It’s not great but for a coinflip on if our robot would work, I was content. We also ended our day with a great win that would have been better if our bumper mounts didn’t snap.
On Sunday we won every qualifying match we played with our scores and capabilities increasing rapidly. Our final qualification match on Sunday had us scoring 10 notes ourselves. We were incredibly proud of fixing almost everything while also improving in other aspects.

Playoffs
We ended Qualification rank 10 which amazing compared to our Saturday performance. We were Alliance 6 Captains with 2016 and 5624. We were defiantly underpowered in Auton compared to 1923, 103, 1807, 834, 555 but we were able to do well enough in Teleop to upset Alliance 3 in the first round of the upper bracket. We then lost in Match 8 and Match 10 to end our run at 5th/6th. I will say that losing Match 8 feels like a death sentence since you are already in queue right after you lost.

Retrospective
Besides having to rebuild our intake twice, solder every wire between matches, attempt Path Planner for the first time it was a pretty good weekend. Plus we won the Imagery Award for the first time!

Between Competition 1 and Competition 2

Review
The good news is that we fixed a lot of problems at competition. Our wires are now solid, and we redesigned the mount for the intake motor to be more sturdy. Continually our climb and shooter were solid at comp with no major issues. So in our two weeks between Allentown and Warren Hills we had two major focuses: Auton and Amp.

Autonomous
At Allentown we were able to get a Shoot command working and we attempted a shoot and pick up so we needed to path out and add commands and we should be flying. Autonomous
For this we used Path Planner as our main structure for code. We had named commands for:
Zero Gyro - At the start of Auton we would zero the gyro to the alliance color
Intake Pick Up - Moved the intake arm to the floor and spun the intake wheels
Intake Return - Stopped the intake wheels from spinning and returned the arm to the shooting position.
Auto Shoot - Spun the shooter wheels to speed and then spun the intake wheels out to pass the note through the shooter.

We then made paths for pick up and shoot for each piece and then used sequential groups and parallel groups to make the systems work together.

Amp Scoring
We were less successful with amp scoring as we were with autonomous. At first we spend a full day with the bot shooting into the amp with no changes except speed of the shooter. It worked but was inconsistent. However, all of our notes were in the same used condition so we had a feeling it would act differently on new notes. We then tried a bar that deployed from the robot to block the note from bouncing out but that as well was inconsistent since the notes did not behave like new notes. We decided to try to mess with it at Warren Hills and we premade some mechanisms to try out.

Warren Hills Week 4

Review
We have been at Warren Hills for the last two years and it has been one of our strongest events each year. We wanted to show off out 4 piece autonomous and climb the rankings. We expected to be top 10 again and we were only held back by our Amp scoring. We know our climb is consistent and our scoring is decent.

Qualifications
Once schedules were released, we saw that we were expected to start off hot but then end very cold. Per Statbotics, we were supposed to win the first 6 matches and then lose the last 6 matches. However, we improved so hopefully we could flip some of those expected loses.

We were able to win the first 6 matches as expected with very few scares. Our biggest thing was that we wanted as many RP’s as possible since we knew we would not keep the pace. We were able to earn 20 RP in our first 6 matches which had us in 1st place. Our drivers were getting confident and cycling faster and faster each match.

Over the last 6 matches, we split them 3 - 3 where we were supposed to lose all of them. We were also able to secure 2 extra rank points to get us to end Quals 9-3 and rank 3. This is our best rank after quals in our history.

Playoffs
We ended up being Alliance 2 Captain after 219 picked 555. We picked up 4285 Camo Bots with our first pick due to their extremely consistent 4 piece auto, amp ability and feeding. We decided that climb was not a priority in playoffs unless our second pick could in which case we could hopefully harmony and 4285 could keep cycling. We picked up 4652 Iron Men 2 since they were a competent feeder and could climb with us during endgame.

We were able to win our first two matches which put us in winners finals versus 219, 555 and 1279. We were leading out of Auto with 4 notes scored but Alliance 1 attacked the midline and brought notes into their wing. We were running a feeding strat but 555 was smart and stole notes when we were away. We were able to get one amplified cycle but some missed shots made us save it till the end. We should have used it with 54 seconds left and got another shot amplified. In the last 15 seconds we were able to get 1 more note from out source score it and climb. Live scoring had us up in points with 1 climbed and 2 parked to their 1 climb 1 park. However, their was a penalty in auto that got taken off the board which swung it in Alliance 1’s favor by 2 points.

We then had to win losers finals to make it back and try to upset Alliance 1.

In match 13, we led out of Auto and never looked back. We knew they would get one amplified sequence so we waited for it and played defense to minimize that threat. Again with a last second climb we had two climbed and a twelve point lead. This means were got our chance to take down Alliance 1.

Finals 1 ended with a win for us by 13 but 219 was broken and 555 missed their auto. In finals two 219 had so sub themselves out due to drive issues so as long as we played our game we could close it out. The match was back and forth the whole time but a climb by Iron Men 2 pushed us over the edge.

First Banner in team history for us and Iron Men 2! Amazing weekend

Hype

Before District Championship

Even after we won Warren Hills, we knew there was room for improvement. We needed to clean up our 4 piece auto and amp scoring is a must. We spent hours on auto working on picking up and not bouncing the front piece.

For amp scoring, we considered the everybot amp scoring but putting it on a telescoping poll. We tried it and prototyped it out but it was not worth it. We then has two more days of practice time and we worked on feeding more effectively since that is where the meta was shifting.

We also combined and optimized some of the controls so now when our arm deploys it would also spin our intake wheels to faster pick up. It runs two sequential commands so that our operator is not trying to press two buttons at once. We originally tried it at Allentown since our operator had his deans list interview during a match but soldering the robot took priority.

Mid Atlantic District Championship

This was the second year in a row that we were attending District Champs. Overall we have been 5 times in our 10 years as a part of MAR/FMA. Going into the event we knew we had to have a killer Auto and could pass efficiently. We were a very good scorer in the speaker but amp just wasn’t in the cards for us.

Once schedules were released we knew it was going to be tough to do well but if we could perform our best and win the matches we were supposed to. However, our luck at Warren Hills disappeared and some matches that should have been great did not go in our favor. We ended up 3-9 but we put up a good fight in all of our matches.

Lessons, Advice, Questions

During crescendo we were able to improve our capabilities and raise the ceiling of our program for the future. We won our first banner and brought STEAM back to our community.

What we learned

• Simple is best. Last year we tried to do too much at the beginning and it ended up shooting us in the foot. We tried to score at all levels for all game pieces in any orientation and it just kept breaking. This year we had a priority list of what we wanted done first and working. Swerve → Speaker → Climb → Auto → Amp → Trap.

• Don’t use Wago 221’s on motor wire. They are the correct size but the motor wire does not like to hold. 1807 and 834 showed us Anderson Powerpoles and how they don’t grip to the casing but grip to the core. This is the strongest connection besides soldering. However, wago inline splicer work well on encoder wires!

• Pathplanner is great but can also be annoying. Making the paths, and pushing them into code was super easy. However, there were issues with inversion when changing alliance colors that made us run backwards. We had it working at our place on our small field but then at comp it would never work. Over the summer we are looking to figure it out.

• Have fun. I would like to attribute a lot of our success at the fun we had during the season. Obviously this is a huge time commitment for all of us and can lead to frustration but we always tried to enjoy the time together and keep it light.