Hi everyone!
The RoboSpartans are back again for the 2025 build season and are excited to announce their return to Open Alliance as well this year! We are so excited to share our ideas for this build season with our daily blog posts like last year and see what everyone else comes up with. We wish everyone a wonderful build season and we can’t wait to compete!
Regards,
Parham - FRC 4639 President
Welcome back to our chief delphi blog, we are so excited to share everything we do along the way this year with our daily blog posts (except sunday), and we are looking forward to all of our competitions this year.
We started off by watching the premiere all together, and we got lucky again this year by correctly predicting the game pieces once again, as for about a month ago I had assigned all the new members to prototype an intake for the 2022 ball and a foam roller, meaning that the game pieces for their prototyping project were very similar to the game pieces for this year’s game. We’re very glad that our members will be walking in with somewhat of a warmed up mind, but given that, however, we are still walking into this year’s game with a fresh mind open to many new ideas.
Following the video, we all went to a smaller room to read the game manual together for about an hour or so. We split the 70 or so people which showed up into smaller groups so that they could ask each other in smaller groups about their findings or other questions they may have had. Contrary to previous years where we split groups to read a specific section of the manual, we made each group note down the entire manual so that everyone gets a good understanding of the game rather than being experts on a single portion.
Once everyone was done taking notes on the manual and figured out all the small details that came with it, we came back together as a group and discussed our findings. We created a large table that included many different aspects of the game such as robot build restrictions, scoring teleop and auton, and fouling teleop and auton. We then went one by one and listed everything down on a large white board to make sure that everybody knew what was going on in regards to this game’s rules so that nobody would make an unlawful design and so that everyone could understand what the most efficient solutions would be.
Following the kickoff, we dismissed everyone and I split up members into the four following subsytem prototype/design groups: Algae intake, Coral intake, Climber, and Scoring mech. About a few hours after everyone was dismissed, we all hopped on a call together for a couple of hours to discuss ideas we had, after which we came up with some simple design possibilities that we definitely want to prototype and try out.
For the algae game piece, we decided that shooting the algae into the net would be quite inefficient and would just bring unnecessary complexity to the robot. This is because it only gives you 4 points along with wasting time lining up and shooting, meanwhile scoring into the processor can give you a minimum net of 2 points and maximum of 6 points. Additionally, we realized that coral was the main point of the game, and scoring the coral on all the high branches is what would be the most efficient strategy for winning the game and getting the most amount of RP. Although we plan on scoring two algae at the start of the game for the co-op, we don’t see ourselves scoring algae during the actual game unless if a subsystem breaks or something of that sort.
Because of all this, we decided we want to go super simple for the algae scoring, so I mocked up a simple intake on a pivot in Krayoncad. Essentially, the point of this is to intake the algae only partly (it won’t go fully inside the robot) and it will just outtake it into the processor. We will have to see how well it works with prototyping, but it’s just a day 1 idea I thought would be good to share.
For the coral game piece, we realized that this is going to be the main show of the game, and this is what needs to be as fast and as efficient as humanly possible. Because of this, we realized that a ground intake which can pick pieces up close to instantly is what we need in order to efficiently and consistently score. Additionally, we also want to minimize the degrees of freedom we have in order to minimize failure points, so we spent some time coming up with some ideas and here is what we came up with so far.
This first design is a 4 stage elevator which has a slap down intake perpendicular to an elevator with a wrist/claw on it. The idea behind this design is that once it intakes it through the slap down intake, the coral will come to the center of the robot and the claw will pick up the coral from the center of the robot. After that, the elevator will extend to the needed height and the wrist will rotate around and place the gamepiece on the other side of the robot. It’s just a very rudimentary idea, but it’s something to get our prototypes going.
For the second idea, we went with an intake which is parallel to the elevator this time, and the other difference is that for the intake it rotates around in a circle so that it can essentially line up next to the branch on the reef and spit it out so that it drops down on the branch. Once again, it’s just a very simple idea we had but we decided to visualize it using krayoncad so that we could share with everyone else.
For Monday, we are going to begin prototyping a lot of these ideas, but primarily we are going to test how the game pieces work with different types of rollers and flex wheels.
We’re very excited to see what everyone else has to offer, and we’re very excited for this season!
Hello, I am Krish the Outreach Director for the 2025 School Year! We were very busy this summer and offseason hosting multiple summer camps and preparing awards for the new season.
Camps:
In early June we help our STEM Camp which is our biggest summer camp of the year. We had only 45+ students attend and taught them STEM Concepts using fun activities. The activities consisted of bottle rockets, elephant toothpaste, and Mindstorms. The camp lasted for 4 days and included veteran member volunteers. Next on our calendar was the Web Dev camp in late June where students learned how to build their website from scratch. The week after was Mindstorms camp but it had to be canceled due to a tropical storm for the entire week in our area. We rescheduled, and Mindstorms camp went on as planned. In mid-July we held our JAVA camp for middle schoolers which helped them get ready for CSA. Finally CAD camp was completed during a long weekend. Overall the camps were engaging helped veteran members earn their outreach hours and played a huge part in fundraising. We had our Free Lego Legends Camp, where went over FLL basics as well as our electrical camp, where we taught advanced electrical techniques such as soldering that occurred every Saturday for 8 weeks starting in September. Finally,y our last camp was in mid-December with Engineering Design Camp where students learned about problems using hands-on materials. Throughout the school year, we worked with various non-profits such as GirlStart, where we gave a robot demo and talked about FRC to almost 80 young students, Girl Scouts, where we hosted a free camp so almost 75 troopers could get their robotics badge, and with Best Buddies, where we held a STEM-related social for special needs kids.
Awards:
For awards, we set the timelines and have started to recruit new members to our “Awards Team”. The binders have been designed and the Outreach Binder and Business Binderares are near completion. Sponsorships have been a key improvement area for us this year which led to us making “sponsorship” runs in our local neighborhood with our brand new “Sponsorship Packet”. We went around handing them out and talking to local business managers in hopes of securing funds. Throughout the offseason, all teams made significant progress on awards and are in their final stages of drafting as the Build Season is about to begin. Awards will now play as our biggest priority in the Build Season with Tomball approaching quite quickly, as well as all of our outreach members will start working on the Robots as well. In our first Awards meeting and went to back last year’s submission and compared it with the winners, understanding what went wrong and how we can improve. Next, we drafted our mission statement by looking at our community and our efforts to solve problems in our community.
Misc
Our new spirit team was working hard throughout the year creating new button signs and a new mascot for the build season in addition to trying our new spirit chants for our competitions. We have been recycling all our old motors, and materials such as Lexan and wood by giving them to recycling agencies or donating them to other teams.
Outro
I hope everyone had a great kickoff! Feel free to ask me any questions or share anything and I’ll get back to you! Have a great Build Season!
Hi everyone! No build update today since our workshop is closed on Sundays, however me and another team member worked on a scoring calculator for this year’s game, and we hope that this will be able to help you all! Here is the link to the calculator. You will have to make a copy of it in order to edit it.
See you all tomorrow
Today was a pretty productive day for us as for it was our first day in the workshop after kickoff, so we were able to prototype a bunch of different things today.
For the algae ground intake, we tested how much the algae could compress and we found out that it could compress quite a decent bit much. The most compression we tested was 4.5 inches of compression, however the optimal amount of compression was 2.5 inches of compression. Although the most we tested was 4.5 inches, we could easily do more, but it just didn’t seem necessary. Below are the videos of min compression we tested, max, and optimal, respectively.
Additionally, when we mounted the intake on the robot we saw that it worked the same when it was far and low versus close and high, so currently we are going with the roller being high up and closer to the robot to reduce the weight of the intake. The exact measurements of the wheels are 16.75 inches off the ground and 11 inches away from the edge of the drive train bar (using 4 inch flex wheels).
We also tried with a versahub roller, and we found that the grip was better than any of the compliant wheels when the versahub roller was 13.5 inches away from the ground.
For tomorrow, we need to build the new prototype of the intake with the pivot and add a second set of wheels on the pivot point (or just use a versahub roller) in order to hold the algae once it comes in. Additionally, we need to do bounce tests and make sure that we can intake the ball when it’s bouncing towards the robot and not just rolling straight towards it.
We built a small rig to test the compression needed to best intake a coral game piece. The rig worked for its basic purpose, but could not accurately represent the distances and angles required for actually intaking a piece off the ground. Thus, we went ahead and created another prototype that took these factors into account and were able to test them. The initial design had large gaps between the wheels, which worked fine for intaking the coral horizontally but did not work at any diagonal angle, as the coral had a tendency to get stuck in the gaps. We added a ton more wheels to the contraption and tested the prototype again, which showed much improvement at angles but was still absolutely inept when faced with picking up the coral head on.
To advance this prototype, we need to begin thinking of a way to funnel the game piece so that it ends up straight when it enters the robot and not horizontal.
For climber prototyping, we built a rig to test whether the motors on the pivot would be able to handle the load of holding the robot up. Over the off season we built a clone of 1678’s 2023 robot, so we used that as a test to see if we could climb by pivoting the entire robot up. The rig allows us to comfortably and safely hold the robot therefore allowing us to test whether the robot can hold itself up. The 99 lbs robot can hold itself up comfortably with a lot more power that can be added if needed.
For tomorrow, we’re going to take a look at other climbing strategies and mainly do research and brainstorming for other possibilities which could fit our previous robot concepts
Today we built a mockup reef because the field won’t be built for another 1-2 weeks at least, so we built a reef in order to see how the coral reacts with it. After the reef was finished, we tried scoring the coral from different positions. From a vertical position, dropping above the end of the bar would allow it to slide down all the way, but scoring horizontally required a forwards push. For tomorrow, we’re going to begin actually making a prototype for this subsystem.
Last night, I continued brainstorming robot designs, and I came up with a slanted elevator design with a ground intake for the coral and the algae, along with an indexer for the coral to orient it straight.
Some of the pros and cons are that it’s a really low center of gravity robot, and it’s able to score on all levels, and it also has not that many degrees of freedom which means less complexity and less chance for breaking, but the main issue is fitting a climber in this. We will continue brainstorming, but here is another idea for you guys to all take a look at.
Today, we continued many of our prototypes from yesterday, and expanded on our simpler ideas with a little more advanced prototypes
Today, we finished building an aluminum prototype of the intake with two rollers (1 set of wheels and 1 versahub roller) on a pivot and mounted it to a drive train. After testing, we concluded that the algae had compression between the outer wheels and the bumper to stay in place when just the wheels rotated and could pass through the ~10in gap between the roller and the base of the robot with the roller rotating. Since the algae is so compressible and the versahub roller has lots of grip, we are able to securely hold the algae in the robot with just a little bit of it in, meaning that we can save lots of space with this subsystem. We also found out that if we outtake through the intake, the algae has a downward trajectory and might not make it over the seven inch wall of the processor, but that is something we will have to test tomorrow with a mockup wall of the processor.
In addition to testing with the mockup processor, tomorrow we’re going to also add some sort of stopper to the rear of the intake to see how little space we can use while effectively storing the game piece in the robot.
Today, we adjusted the angle of the intake prototype in order to determine one that works. The intake has to be positioned extremely shallow, however, and the entire basis of the prototype does not seem to work with intaking the piece straight in, as in not horizontally. From our testing, intaking the coral while it’s parallel to the bumper seems to be quite simple, but intaking it while it’s perpendicular is the real challenge.
The main difficulty with intaking straight up is the lack of space for the rigid section of pipe to redirect upward, off the ground and into the robot. In order to do so, we would need to almost be flat on the ground and thus find a way to move the coral upward. This could be done by having such a flat intake and lifting the intake with the game piece inside and outtaking it upward straight into the scoring system after bringing the intake up Instead of intaking the coral and out the back horizontally.
This design would also be mechanically and conceptually simpler, although may result in a rather heavy intake for the pivot to do its thing with. However, this would also cut out some of the middleman in moving the coral game piece from the intake to the scoring system by doing it directly.
For tomorrow, we’re going to work on a prototype which is more flat to the ground so that it’s easier to pick up the game piece perpendicularly. Also, we are going to add more rollers to the design to try guiding it better into the robot with a more flat design so that we can have full control of the game piece inside the intake itself at all times.
Today, we cut the desired pieces for creating the cage on the hacksaw, planned the structure and drilled screw holes accordingly, and began assembling the cage. This structure, when complete, will allow us to test different climber prototypes while the field is not built. We also machined a piece for the current prototype in order to continue developing the pivot system. Although based on yesterday’s testing we know that we would be able to climb fine if we have a pivoting elevator design like citrus from 2023, we wanted to try the climb which the RustHOUNDS Ri3D robot does simply because it looks much more space efficient and also much simpler than having to stick to a single robot style simply because of the climb.
Today, we discussed extensively the pros and cons of keeping the coral parallel to the bumper versus perpendicular during the handoff because of the complexity and space management tradeoffs. The issue with keeping the coral parallel to the bumper is that it’s much harder to keep it parallel when it has room to move around, but if it’s perpendicular then once you funnel it perpendicular it will stay that way. For now, we’re going to test both, so for today we machined the plates for a prototype which involves picking up the coral while it’s parallel to the bumpers, but next time once we assemble this and test it, we will build a prototype which picks up the coral perpendicularly.
Today for strategy we discussed primarily auton paths and the different tradeoffs for each. We figured that in order to be as flexible as possible with other teams, it’s best to try and stay out the way as much as possible, and also to prioritize having a 2 piece coral in L4 from the right, middle, and left for our first comp. This is because of time and resources, but we figured that if we can get these consistent, then we can for sure add on and make the paths more complex in the future.
Lots of good prototyping today, but there’s still a lot which we need to test. Our biggest challenge right now is perpendicular intaking for the coral, but that is something we will have to continue developing.
Today, we had a little bit slower progress than usual but we’re beginning to get a grasp on what we want for more of our subsystems
First, we tested the prototype with a 7 inch wall and concluded that the algae passed over it (bounced/touched the wall) from a max distance of 13 inches away from the wall (from end of bumper). We also tested it from right up against the bumper to simulate the robot scoring from against the processor and the algae went over the wall. We also tested the same distances with a 9 inch wall to account for the bumper and the algae still went over the wall but bounced on it a little more (shouldn’t make a difference).
Next, we tested the amount of compression the algae needed to stay put in the ~10 inch distance from the roller and the bumper. The minimum distance between the outermost edge of the algae and the outer edge of the bumper is 8.5 inches. After that, we also did some bounce tests to see how well our intake can get the algae when it’s bouncing towards it, and results were pretty successful.
Lastly, we started coming up with a new prototype design using lexan and motors. We CNCed 3 of the 4 pieces of lexan we need and begun to CAD the rest
For tomorrow, we need to finish the full prototype CAD and start assembling according to it. After that, we’re going to assemble as much of the prototype as possible and figure out motor placement and wiring.
We had decided to quit worrying about intaking the piece pointing straight at the intake, instead opting to limit the robot’s intake ability to coral that is sideways / at a moderate angle to the robot. It seems that the general consensus is that lining up the robot properly is a much better option as opposed to creating a straight-in capable intake that would be more space consuming and likely more prone to jamming.
We had also mostly thrown out the previous idea of leaving the game piece in and outtaking upward into a scoring subsystem, as doing so would mean the handoff would have to sit pretty high up, causing issues with the robot’s center of balance and ability to score in the lowest level of the reef, where game pieces are likely to bounce out of the trough if dropped from too high. It would also prevent the intake from being as wide as we would have liked.
Today, we neared completion on an extremely wide intake prototype that would be limited to taking in horizontally orientated coral, but extends across the entire length of the robot. It is a pretty commonly tested design across FRC so far this build season, but appears to be pretty effective and consistent. It also allows for a potentially easier time funneling the coral into an orientation that the scoring system would be happy with, as its immense width leaves a lot of room for coercing the game piece to adhere to a certain direction.
For tomorrow, we need to test the wide intake prototype against a bumper and finalize the the required coral orientation with the scoring group people. We’re also going to test funneling to see how that works, primarily if it needs a set of powered wheels or if it can happen on it’s own.
Today, we finished creating and assembling all the pieces for the deep cage. Now that the cage is finished we can start testing our prototype designs. We also drilled holes in the plate we created yesterday for the fork on the current climber prototype and created the fork pieces. We then began to assemble the fork portion. No photos for today, but once we build our prototype over the next couple of days we will be posting some videos of that. Primarily, we need to figure out the pivot for the climber and how to attach it to the robot so that it doesn’t take up too much space and so that it doesn’t accidentally touch the anchor.
Today, we finished the prototype with rollers parallel to the coral and perpendicular to the coral. When scoring on the reef, the second prototype with the wheels perpendicular to the coral seemed much more consistent than the first prototype.
Right now, the struggle we’re having is figuring out what we want our general robot shape to be like, so we’re trying to come up with as many different scoring possibilities as possible.
For tomorrow, we’re going to expand on this prototype a little more, possibily by cncing some more precise parts, but we will see how everything goes with integration of this and the elevator.
Yesterday, we continued talking about autonomous routines, and while speaking of autonomous routines we realized that the most efficient robot design would be one which intakes from one side and scores from the other. Similar to how SuperNURDS visualized it with their 2024 robot, every .5 second which you spend spinning counts, and will add up and make the difference between a robot which is good and a robot which wins. For that reason, we’re continuing our brainstorming for designing whatever we can which can accomplish this goal whilst not being too complex for our building capabilities.
Overall prototyping has been going pretty well and I’m really starting to like this game, I can’t wait to see what the other robots look like once reveal videos start coming out.
We’re approaching that time of the season again where we begin to settle on one robot idea / shape so that our prototyping can be more directed, so today we spent about half of our time just brainstorming as much as we could so that we are all on the same page for settling on a design idea.
We didn’t do all that much prototyping today, so I’ll mostly be talking about our favorite robot concept so far rather than much of the prototypes.
As I had mentioned in previous posts, we knew that this year’s game is all about saving half a second here and there everywhere which you go in order to maximize efficiency. Because of this, we knew from pretty early on we needed something which can intake from one side and score from the other. However, dealing with the implications of this was quite a challenge.
After some brainstorming yesterday, we’ve settled (so far) on this idea (images below) which is essentially a variation on the citrus robot from 2023 with several key modifications.
We decided to go with this because of several reasons. First of all, this type of design makes climbing a little bit easier simply because of the reason that lifting the entire base of the robot up gives a lot more clearance than many of the other designs which I’ve seen so far for this game. Another reason why we like this design a lot is that when fully retracted, it’s height is only 20 inches, meaning that center of gravity is quite low, and for us, that will be the shortest robot we have ever built.
Although not shown in the picture, we are planning on making the intake for the coral reorient itself while it’s in the intake so that it saves space in the actual robot. That could have several different methods, but the one we want to try as soon as possible is the prototype which 4481 posted on their youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWpE0UWFx2U
Another reason why we liked this is because with our previous designs, picking up directly from the human player station would’ve been quite difficult, but with this you can directly get it from the human player station which makes auton more precise and consistent.
The last reason for why we liked this design was because the pivot point is about 18 inches off the ground, which means given the length of the claw/scoring mechanism, our elevator only needs to extend a little more than 4 feet, if not less. The elevator in the picture is a 3 stage continuous elevator, which means that due to the number of stages and due to the fact that it doesn’t need to extend that far, there won’t be much wobble at all in between the stages. During the off season when we made our test bot, it had 2 stages and could extend a little more than 6 feet, and that already had very little wobble to no wobble, so this should have even less (in theory).
Today, we continued our wide intake design and we saw that it works fine going over the bumper. We might decide to combine this with something which can make it straight inside the intake itself, but we’re still just testing everything as much as we can.
Today we finished the assembly of the lexan prototype with two chains, one for the pivot and one connecting the two rollers (88 link and 118 link). We tested the pivot with a drill and noticed that one side (one of the pairs of lexan bars) was weighed down (can be fixed with a connector shaft). We also tested the rollers with algae but the algae got stuck in between the two due to the front 4 inch wheels being larger than the roller. We are going to test it tomorrow with the intake wheels themselves being the same diameter as the roller which holds the algae, but if we see that’s not the greatest at intaking then we’re going to try creating a reduction in the wheels so that the speed of the wheels are proportional to the size difference.
We finished building our drive train a couple days ago (i forgot to send the picture) but we knew that we wanted something quite large, so we went with 28.5x28.5 right off the bat. We’re waiting for the field to get built so that we can begin driving and creating auton routines, but other than that we just need to do a full functional test with the wheels raised and we’ll be good to go. This is just a temporary wiring setup so that programming can get a headstart, so we’re going to rewire it once we know what the robot design will be.
Now that we’re mostly settled on a design, we’re going to begin prototyping more towards that specific design, which means we’re going to actually begin the real cad of the robot instead of krayoncad.
I think this robot structure is pretty well documented, and the low cg is a big selling point. I look at this bot and see 5940 from 2023. Awesome work! Cool to see.
Today we officially settled on a design after lots of brainstorming and conversing with each other, and we continued prototyping our designs from yesterday.
In yesterday’s blog, I had showed a design which was on paper a versatile and flexible design, however we came to realize that it had way too many moving parts, meaning that it would be extremely complicated to do the design in practice.
We decided to sacrifice the strategy of pickup one side and score the other side in order to significantly simplify our design in order to emphasize consistency and reliability over everything else.
Below are the pictures of the design which we settled on.
The design is a 3 stage elevator with a carriage and wrist (2 degrees of freedom), a ground intake for coral which reorients the coral whilst still in the intake, and a ground intake for algae. The deep climber will go in the back of the robot where the leftover space is.
The pros of this design are that it’s much simpler than other designs, it can score in all 4 levels (L1 not shown in the images), it has a low CG because all the motors and moving parts are less than 12 inches above the ground, and maintenance will be easier because of the generally open robot design.
The cons of this design are that in order to reorient the coral in the intake, the intake has to be significantly longer than most intakes, and also that we have to sacrifice the pickup from one side and score on the other side concept.
All in all however, we realized from last year that the biggest thing is reliability and consistency (in addition to really low CG). In 2022, we had a mostly reliable robot, however at Pasadena when we had about 4 breakdowns in 10 or 11 matches that dropped our rank from 4 in Channelview to 10 in Pasadena. Also, the CG for our 2022 robot was rather high so we sometimes had problems with accelerating and tipping backwards a little bit, overall slowing down our cycles. In 2023, we had a really inconsistent robot, in addition to very unreliable because of the number of degrees of freedoms that we had and how poorly we made them. In 2024, we were basically a speaker only robot (we could do amp but it was pretty inconsistent) and we had no trap, however because our CG was really low, and also because our consistency for speaker shooting was so high, we ended up ranking well in most of our competitions we went to. Additionally, we only had 1 breakdown in the entire season, showing the importance of building a simple design which will do you justice during the competition season.
Because of all this, we tried to reduce the number of moving parts as much as possible, thus coming up with that design.
Today we took inspiration from the 4481 video and set out to first create our version of the V-shaped intake before modifying it. The main advantage of the intake is allowing the robot to take the coral both vertically and horizontally and store it in the vertical orientation which is beneficial for scoring.
We used the entrapment stars which were working but were not fully suited to the task along with the regular compliant and sushi wheels.
We set out to originally create each component separately to allow for more adjustments such as angle and widening the entire setup and individual components. Because of the nature of the intake we need a lot of wooden supports and ramps to support it at the right which was tricky because of our approach of using modular components. We did however manage to intake it properly about 3x.
Next, we decided to keep each side independent from each other resulting in 2 parts which would be attached by a single pivot to a base to allow for changing of angles. Because we were using used wood pieces with holes already cut the construction was quite weak but we did manage to get 3 consecutive intakes in.
We believe with the proper measurements we have taken today, can create a much better model and get to work to CAD it out. One thing we noticed which was interesting was that the intake worked better when the speed on one side was faster than the speed on the other side.
Additionally, we continued to test the wide intake alongside the alternate style. The wide intake continued to work in kicking up the coral over the bumper and into the frame, but caused some issues with consistently funneling the game piece into a straight on orientation. It seems to be very difficult to get this done without severely encroaching on the interior space of the robot. In addition, the intake being that wide causes problems with intaking more than one coral at a time, being able to fit nearly three side by side. We would probably need to severely shorten this width to about 22 inches and have the intake cadded out and cnced to further the prototyping process.
Today, we assembled a new prototype for a cranberry alarm style end effector in order to see more accurately how well it works. We cnced the lexan plates needed for it and began assembly. We will test it tomorrow.
Tomorrow, after we test it we are going to try doing a less wide prototype for this design and increase the length to see how well we can store the coral in our robot for our proposed design idea.
Today, we finished drilling holes for and assembling the climber “fork”, which will be put on a pivot. We assembled a gearbox for a Neo and drilled holes in a 2x1 bar preparation for attaching it to the bar. We also prepared the prototyping robot for attaching the bar.
Now that we have our robot shape decided, we are able to progress our prototypes with actual cnced designs which will hopefully lead us to getting a better idea of what we need on our robot.
After discussing and going over what we’ve done this past week and what to do next week during our design review meeting, we continued prototyping our subsystems and started cadding out some more designs to cnc for testing.
We started off by assembling the prototype we designed yesterday. Very quickly we realized that we needed another plate on top of the wheels and shafts in order to belt the shafts properly. We ran into other problems due to the measurements or assembly being wrong but finished the prototype.
During testing, we solidified the idea that one side had to go slower than the other but the back wheels needed to have the same speed which we could not achieve in the design of the prototype. The prototype worked correctly, however.
We next tested many things at once. We had the idea of removing the back two wheels and using the shoots/scoring subsystem as the last step and the final part of the funnel. This would help us reduce the length of the intake. We next needed to widen the intake but unfortunately could not do it today.
We then constructed a combination of the previous ground intake with the rollers and built it in front of the new v-shaped intake. There would be a row compliant wheels on the top and we can also try with smaller wheels on the bottom roller. We tested this out and figured it would work but we needed to polish the design a little more so that we can get a fully functional prototyping going.
After that, we tested a roller between the wheels instead of in front of it to mixed success because the apparatus was quite poor and shaky but it did work 1-2 times. We also learned that only one set of wheels might be able to funnel it but we didn’t test it further. The shorter and wider we can get our intake, the more efficient and quicker it’ll be, so that is our end goal.
Tomorrow we’re going to machine plates for a new prototype which has the front rollers which we want, and we’re also going to hopefully assembly and test it by the end of the day.
Today, we fixed the issue we had with the different diameter wheels causing the ball to get sucked out whenever it was intaking. We replaced the 4 inch flex wheels with the versahub rollers and it worked as intended.
After that, we began adding motors to the intake in order to test the gear ratios needed for a pivot and to test how fast we’re able to intake the algae.
Given that we’re moving forwards based on the touch it own it concept, we really want to make sure we can accomplish that with all aspects of the game, algae being no exception. Even though our prototype works decently right now, it can still be better, which is why we are going to be prototyping a team scream style intake because it’s vaguely the same concept as ours, however the packaging is much nicer than what we have.
Tomorrow we’re going to machine the plates for the new prototype and also test the old prototype with real motors and see where everything goes.
After constructing and testing the prototype from the previous day, we realized that there were several flaws with it. Firstly, it wasn’t as fast and “touch it own it” as we want it to be, and second off it isn’t as long as it needs to be.
Because of this we decided to create a new prototype more similar to 2056’s 2023 intake to see how well it would funnel game pieces from the intake. In addition to this, we’re also going to create a 4481 style end effector and test that out because that design is much more space effective, and if it works with our robot architecture, then it would be extremely good for us because the lower we can bring our CG the better. Tomorrow we’re going to try and hopefully test both prototypes, if not then only one.
Today, we finished drilling holes to our drive train robot to attach the neo for the climber, and once we tested the prototype we realized we need a significantly higher gear ratio than the 48:1 we are currently running.
Because of this, we are going to try not only increasing the maxplanetary gearbox ratio, but we’re also going to try mounting it on a custom gearbox alongside a sprocket reduction. We want to start high and then slowly come down to see what’s the minimum we need.
Earlier, we were having problems getting our drive train running due to some roborio and radio problems with the new radios, however after a quick laptop swap we saw that we were able to get the CTRE generated code deployed and also get the robot running on the old radios. We still haven’t figured out why we’re having difficulty connecting to the new radios, but for the meantime in order to let programming team work on their auton paths and programming needs we are running the old radios.
(The reason the wiring is so messy is because we just connected everything with no organization so that we could just quickly test and make sure the swerve code works and make sure that all the modules and other electrical components also work. After we got it running, we disconnected everything and started organizing all the electrical stuff to the final configuration)
Overall a pretty good day since basically all the teams were able to test their prototypes pretty sufficiently and get working on a new design, but we’re going to hope that this next week we can continue at an even faster pace.
Today we didn’t have as much man power so we didn’t do all that much physical prototyping, however we did work on several new designs for our subsystems so that we can machine them and get those going as soon as possible.
Today, we took off our old intake prototype and remounted it to make sure that the assembly was securely mounted. After that, we mounted a neo vortex on a 48:1 reduction to the pivot of our intake. Following that, we tested our intake once more, this time with the pivot being held up by the vortex.
We somehow managed to pop one of the old algae, however aside from that, we saw that the intake didn’t have as much grip as we would like it to. Because of this, we got working on a new prototype (recreation of the team scream algae intake) and we cnced those plates and will be testing that tomorrow.
We really liked the pantherbots climber design which they posted on chief delphi because of how simple it is. Because of this, we decided to get working on a design for this. We didn’t get very far because we were brainstorming a lot, but we still need to mount the two blue 2x1’s on the structure (with the ends with circles pointing away from the metal plate) and put the hubs on there. We also need to figure out how to attach it to the robot, presumably using the same kind of attachment used for the previous prototype, but on both sides with an extra support in the middle of the robot.
Aside from this, we worked on a ratchet gearbox on an 80:1 reduction to test how much better ratchet gearboxes are for this game than normal gearboxes.
Today, 2e continued to cad the Rembrandts-style internal gripper with a herringbone gear pivot and coaxially driven wheels. We really like their super compact design, and we want to test different wrist designs to try and make it as compact as possible. We are still going to test our old prototype with the wider wheel arrangement, but we need to 3d print some pulleys for that first. Below are the pictures of the new prototype design.
We hope to be able to create this prototype within the next several days, however we will see where prototyping takes us and how far we’re able to get.
Overall not a bad day, but there’s still lots which needs to be tested before we can fully flesh out everything we need to
Today, we worked a bunch on our new prototypes and although we were unable to finish assembly for some of them, we still were able to get a decent start to our prototypes. We also worked a bit on design for the actual robot, primarily the elevator.
Today, we assembled one of two prototypes for this mechanism, and although we were unable to test it properly with motors, we did see that just on its own it is able to hold the coral pretty well. Something which we need to test with this is trying different wheels with the same prototype. Currently, we’re using 3 inch flex wheels on the bottom and more solid ones on the top but that’s because we didn’t have any more 3 inch flex wheels, so we’re going to go around the RSC asking other teams if they have any which we can borrow.
We also worked on machining our 4481 coral end effector, and we are going to assemble that prototype tomorrow.
Tomorrow, we’re going to mount the motors on the old prototype and also hopefully build this new prototype so that we can test both of them and slowly figure out more about the meta for this year’s game.
Something which we realized was that a lot of teams this year are opting out of doing a coral ground intake simply because of how short the distance is from the human player station to the reef. Many teams claim that it will add unnecessary weight and complexity to the robot, which I agree with - to an extent.
I believe that if done correctly where it’s as space efficient as possible, the coral ground intake will be very useful for picking up coral near the reef which may have fallen down from other teams’ failed attempts at scoring.
However, that is a big if. Making a coral ground intake to fit with our robot archetype which is also very small and compact but also efficient is quite a difficult task, which is why today we mainly focused on taking inspiration from what other teams are doing for this and trying to research and find the smallest possible design which is also fast and efficient. Attached below are the images of one of our coral ground intake designs which funnels the coral perpendicular to the robot inside the actual intake so that it doesn’t take up space in the robot. The issue with this design is how big and heavy it is, so we’ve already scrapped the idea, but below are the pictures in case anyone wants to see.
We will continue research today and see where it takes us over the next few weeks. Currently, our plan is to put as much energy as possible into perfecting the elevator and scoring mechanism in order to be super consistent during competitions, and coral ground intake is currently a want which we have, but not a need for our first competition.
Today, we cnced the new intake assembly, and put together 1 of the 3 parts. The bottom part of the assembly is mounted on our drive train test bot.
Our old intake prototype is still on the robot, however, it is very broken and needs to be fixed. Depending on how our new prototype goes, we might completely just scrap the old design and go with the newer one. Our hopes for algae intake are that we can finish subsystem and get it designed by Monday of next week, and that we will be able to get it on the actual robot by the end of next week.
For our elevator, we started the actual design for it a couple days ago, and although we haven’t gotten very far, here’s a progress pic of where we’re at right now.
We still need to design the carriage, all the rigging, and basically everything which makes the elevator an elevator. Right now we’ve just done the easy part of making the general structure, but now we need to actually do the difficult part of figuring out all the tiny details.
We got our drive train running today on the actual field, and although we don’t have a video of it, we noticed that one of the modules were making almost a grinding noise whenever it was rotating, so we’re trying to figure out whether it’s a programming issue or a mechanical issue, but it’s most likely something which went wrong in the assembly of the modules so we are going to check it thoroughly.
Another thing which happened was that our Pigeon 2.0 wasn’t centered in the middle of the robot, so it wasn’t able to generate the correct swerve code. We are going to reposition that so that it will have no trouble generating swerve code.
Overall a pretty decent day, we’ve started shifting from our old wood prototypes to actually machining using lexan for our prototypes which is good. We hope to keep up this pace for the rest of the season, and we’ll see where everything goes!
Today, we mostly worked on getting the scoring prototype we had going so that we could test the effectiveness of that.
We built the 4481 style scoring mechanism from the lexan plates. However, we discovered that we didn’t have any ½” hex bore 16t gears, so we had to use one that had a ⅜” hex bore instead, which forced us to make the distance between the plates greater which increased the compression so that the vortex was barely able to intake the coral. We’re going to
Today, we continued building our Pantherbots style climber which we had begun prototyping earlier. We are almost finished with the “hook” part of the climber, and we started working on drilling holes for the bars for attaching the climber to the robot. We also figured out how to attach the winch mechanism to the robot securely.
We forgot to take photos today, but we will post those when the prototype is close to complete.
Our previous prototype proved to be too large to mount on a pivot inside of our robot’s perimeter, so we began searching for a new method of intake that can intake coral at any angle, and is compact enough to be retracted into the robot.
We believe we could be able to retract the front four rollers over the rear 2 vertical shafts to create a very compact storage for this intake, but we have yet to cad this design and test its feasibility. It seems that this design will not require any sort of plates to catch the game piece after the robot intakes it, saving weight where previous prototypes couldn’t.
The entraption stars on the first roller that makes contact with the coral seems like it could be problematic for immediately controlling the game piece when first contact is made. In team 340’s video you can see when the front mounted entraption stars made contact with the first game piece that was fed into the robot, there was a lack of grip on the game piece, leaving it stationary at the mouth of the intake for a moment. It seems that speeding up the entraption stars would resolve this issue though, but we’re not sure that our motors could keep up with this kind of speed while moving so many shafts. We started making the CAD for this design using compliant wheels for the rollers that first make contact with the game piece, but now we’re thinking that this would make the intake unable to intake coral when it is being fed perpendicular to the rollers.
Today, we fixed a few issues on our original prototype that came with changing the rollers back to wheels on both shafts. We adjusted spacing, bearing placement, and added crossbars to restrict the intake from shaking and collapsing. Then, while testing, we came across a few problems. Although the algae was intaking faster due to more surface area, it wasn’t compressed enough to be stable. It wasn’t going far enough into the robot to have a secure hold, so to fix this, we can increase the height. The algae compression was off because the wheels compress more than the algae itself causing it to get stuck. Additionally, we prepared the shafts for our team scream recreation.
We made some changes to our overall robot archetype after watching the 3255 19 cycle video and the WCP competitive concept. We realized that we can modify our design by not all that much in order to make it simpler and more efficient.
After watching these two videos, we modified our slanted elevator design to be completely vertical so that we can intake from the back like these two designs do, and so that it makes manufacturing easier.
We are going to do a more similar version to the competitive concept, in the sense that it will intake from the back and score in the front and also that it will have a wrist to descore the algae and be able to easily score it. Additionally, we are going to keep our ground algae intake and continue prototyping for a ground coral intake, but it’s not as much of a necessity anymore in our eyes.
We are also going to add rollers to the ramp in the video in order to ensure that we don’t spend time waiting at the human player station until it goes in our robot, we want to make sure we have touch it own it capabilities on every part of our robot.
We are going to start auton paths once our field is built, so that’s one of the next steps we need to take.
Today, we continued reiterating our prototypes and continued assembly of some of our older prototypes, and we also got the drive train running a little better following some issues we were having earlier.
Today, we built the two shafts with wheels (12 on each) from the team scream prototype and got together all the pulleys and gears(40t) and assembled most of the front. We also got the four remaining parts cut which we were unable to do yesterday and almost assembled everything. We anticipate to test this later tonight once we fully assemble it and hopefully begin to wrap up our prototyping for algae ground intake at least if it’s good and works consistently.
Today, we tested our old prototype which intakes the coral from inside the pipe with a reduction this time, because previously, we had issues with little torque, so we decided to add a maxplanetary reduction to test what would be the most effective. From our testing, we saw that a 3:1 worked fine, however, we’re not very content with the speed of it.
Additionally, this prototype no longer follows the new robot archetype which we’re going for, so we’re modifying the WCP competitive concept to find a more optimal version which accomplishes the same scoring style.
We modified the plate to be made out of pocketed aluminum instead of lexan in order to maintain the overall structural integrity better.
Today, we were trying to figure out the issue we were running into with the drive train making an odd grinding noise, and although at first we assumed it was mechanical, we then later realized we made a really simple mistake and simply input the dimensions of our drive train wrong in our program, thus messing up the driving and resulting in that noise. Following the fix, the noise was no longer there and the robot was driving fine.
Shifting away from krayon cad and transitioning more into real cad, we have been working on our robot cad for about 4-5 days now, and we’ve mainly been working on our elevator design so far. We are currently done with most of the main components of the elevator, however we need to go and actually figure out all the rigging, the supports needed, and everything in between.
Our plan is to complete elevator design by the end of tonight so that we can go ahead and review it in our design review meeting tomorrow, allowing us to begin machining the many different parts needed.
I forgot to make the blog post for last night, so I’ll just combine today’s and yesterday’s into one post. Here’s what we’ve done so far.
Algae ground intake prototyping is pretty much coming to and end as we’ve essentially wrapped up the design for it. The current design we have (the team scream style intake) works great and has no trouble picking up and scoring the algae in the processor. It has a fast pickup and also is pretty space efficient.
Even with the super harsh angle in the last clip, it is still able to score just fine. The only problem which we’ve run into with this intake, however, is that we seem to have issues with slack in the pivot. The many hex to hex interfaces affect this alongside not having a chain tensioner on the pivot shaft. Additionally, the pivot shaft only drives on side of it, so one side is slightly lower than the other, but from our testing it’s able to pick it up at many different heights, so it shouldn’t really affect robot operation.
Similar to algae, we have begun wrapping up climber prototyping after settling on a final design. We still have a little more testing to do with this, however, because we want to see how easy it is for drivers to line up with this climber during the heat of the match. To test this, we’re going to mount it on an actually functioning drive train and get it wired/coded so that we can see how fast we can get the climb during a real match situation.
Today, we tested two different designs. We tested a fork prototype and a pantherbots style prototype. We saw that the fork prototype was much harder to line up and also that it made the anchor/chain go more inside the frame perimeter of the robot, so the pantherbots design is the one we’re going with.
One concern we have overall with the deep climb is the risk of the anchor touching parts of the robot, which is why we’re modifying the wcp ramp for the coral to be on a pivot. That way, we have plenty of clearance to ensure that we don’t accidentally hit the chain or anything like that.
Another concern we have is that FIRST has not been fully transparent about what the rules with the anchor imply. From what I’ve read on CD and what I’ve seen other teams do, I believe that this climb is legal, however, I am not entirely certain. If any of y’all know the specifics about the rule, please let me know.
I’m about 99% sure it’s legal because the game manual implies it’s only the top surface which counts as the anchor, but once again I’d rather be safe than sorry so hopefully I can find some confirmation on the first q&a page.
We spent a couple of days debating on what to do for scoring, and we finally came to a consensus on what to do regarding materials to use and stuff like that. As mentioned in the previous blog, we wanted to machine an aluminum pocketed version of the WCP plate, however we realized that it’s probably super prone to bending under that amount of torque, so because of that we’re going to keep the current lexan design that is being used. We do however want to try and improve the funnel on the WCP coral scoring mech, however we’re still brainstorming ways to do that.
We’ve continued working on our CAD, and after some discussion, we decided that for this game a cascade elevator would be more efficient than a continuous elevator design. This is because cascade elevators lift everything at the same rate, which means that cycle times will be faster overall. For a game where every second counts, we don’t want to waste time on elevators moving up and down, so we figured we can just go with cascade to make it faster.
Additionally, we want to modify the WCP style coral funnel so that it’s on a pivot. This is because we need that space for our climber, so placing it on a pivot allows us to get the clearance we need to make sure we don’t hit the anchor when climbing.
Overall great progress the last two days. We are going to start cutting and milling our elevator bars on Monday in order to get a headstart before the freeze hits. We anticipate KatyISD facilities to be closed for probably two days at least, so we want to make sure that we are still going to be on top of everything despite the closures.
The freeze is coming soon, so we had to make sure we were as efficient as possible today to ensure that we didn’t waste any time whatsoever as for the next two days at the RSC will be closed.
We finally completed the elevator CAD with all of its specific details down to every last bolt and nut.
Following the completion of the CAD, we began machining the bars needed for this design. This design requires a lot of milling, so we anticipate that the bars will most likely be done by the end of Saturday of this week, but we hope that if we are quick enough, we’re able to begin assembly and hopefully maybe even finish assembly of the elevator by this week.
Today, we added code to our prototype algae intake and noticed a couple of key issues. First off, we saw that the backlash on the pivot was quite large (hence why the intake is so far back in this video), so to improve this, however part of this is because of the fact that all of our motors were mounted on lexan because we wanted to save materials since we were just prototyping.
Another thing we have to do however is to either make our pivot powered by a chain on both sides so that one side isn’t sagging, or we have to run a live axle instead of a dead axle. Doing this means that we will have to find pulleys which are dead axle, which is kind of annoying but we will see which option is best depending on the space we have in our robot.
When we get back to the RSC, we are going to begin manufacturing the final algae ground intake for our robot. The CAD will be completed over the next two days so that we can machine it quickly when we get back.
Today, we assembled the WCP version of the scoring mech to see how easy it’s able to pick up the algae from the reef. We saw that it had no trouble at all picking up the algae and scoring it, so for the algae we are most likely going to keep it the same or something very similar.
We haven’t tested coral yet, however we are working on a new prototype which slightly modifies the WCP design to be more space efficient.
We are hoping to begin our machining + assembly grind very soon so that we can figure out the issues we might run into with elevator sooner rather than later. See everyone on Thursday.
Loving this robot design, super cool! Are you guys planning on posting a CAD at any point?
Thanks!
Hi,
Since we use autodesk inventor, it’s a little hard to post actual CADs like you would with OnShape, but I can try uploading it to autodesk drive and everyone else can view the autodesk drive share link. Only issue is that you won’t be able to see progress until we post the new link every week or so.
Here’s the current CAD progress link. Hope this helps
