Post 1: Offseason recap and intro to our team!
Team intro
We’re team 4795, the Eastbots, a FIRST North Carolina team based out of East Chapel Hill High School. We’re a student-led team with a mission to lower skill floors and make large scale impacts, both in our school and local community, all this to inspire the next generation of leaders in STEAM.
This year, our team is about 80 strong, with 12 leadership members and 8 mentors. We’ve worked for the past several years to innovate new training and engagement programs to support sustainable knowledge transfer, and provide a transformative team experience to each team-member, all while building awesome competition robots through student-led innovation. We’re psyched to be a part of #openalliance for the 2023 season.
What we’ve been up to - Offseason recap
Summer
This summer our team focused outreach and improvement of our in-house capabilities. Below is a brief summary of these activities, written by involved members.
Outreach
During the summer we did regular outreach events at local children’s museums, summer camps, and the local public library. Generally this consisted of taking our robot to the event, demonstrating its ball shooting, and talking to parents about our program/ programs appropriate for their children. We also attended outreach and robot demonstration events for a few teams close to us, namely 587: The Hedgehogs, and 4829: Titanium Tigers.
Tooling upgrades
We received the Gene Haas Foundation grant this year and decided to use it to buy new tooling. We decided to purchase a Shapeoko 4 XL. This machine isn’t ideal for cutting metal, but we were happy to make that compromise as we have a sponsor that can cut metal parts for us. The ~$2000 cost savings over an Omio was worth it for us.
Fundraising
Following the increasing formalization of the rest of our team, our business team has increased in number of roles and size. Because of this, along with our recent work to promote equitable technical training, we have received over $8,000 in new grants: a very large amount for us.
Competitions
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We attended 2 offseason competitions in FIRST North Carolina this Fall, specifically the THOR 3 and Doyenne inspiration events. We were thrilled to win both, along with our great friends at team 4829: Titanium Tigers.
Fall
Annually, our fall season consists of efforts to recruit, train, and engage new team members. We have innovated a series of programs through the past 3 years to better accomplish this. Additionally, our fall offseason typically provides returning members with creative outlets that benefit the team and its capabilities. Our fall activities are described below by participating members.
New Member Programs
Recruitment
We started the year out by equitably recruiting students at our school. We do this by advertising our interest meeting in freshman english classes so every single freshman at our school hears a pitch to join the team. We definitely went a bit overkill on recruitment this season with over 70 new members registering for the team, and we’re still struggling with the amount of new members on the team now.
Skills Training
Our skills training program seeks to provide recruited students with the foundational knowledge needed to contribute in their respective sub teams, through 8 hours of classroom instruction over 4 weeks. We typically encourage members to train in multiple subteam disciplines, but this wasn’t possible this year due to our incoming class size.
Our training programs in general have taken considerable iteration, and we’re quite proud of the knowledge we’ve built in how to train for FRC over the past few years. Info and curricula can be found in this super document.
Design
Our design skills training is the 3rd iteration of a CAD basics program using onshape, and this year focused on slowly building CAD confidence in members. The slow and steady approach to CAD learning, along with persistent returning member teaching assistants to help our design lead, led to our highest success rate, with over 70% of our 25 design members CAD competent by the end of skills training.
Mechanical
The goal of our mechanical training is to have members who have never touched a drill before be able to meaningfully contribute to building a robot. They spend one month building a mechanical training kit in small groups and getting safety trained on our shop tools.
Electrical
The goal of our electrical training is to have first year members be able to wire most of a robot and help design basic custom circuits for sensors. We start out by teaching basic electrical concepts, then move on to learning about FRC specific components, and finally finish up by doing various wiring exercises.
Programming
Our programming training is 8 weeks instead of 4 weeks because we’ve found that it’s difficult to train a member that doesn’t have programming experience in 4 weeks. We start out by spending 6 weeks learning Java and then move on to working on Romis. This course bleeds into the first few weeks of our next activity, ERC.
East Robotics Competition (ERC)
While skills training provides foundational knowledge to new team members, ERC provides opportunities for each new member to practically apply that knowledge. Founded in 2020, this activity splits our new team members into multiple (3 this year) ERC teams, each building a small scale, FRC analogous robot over a 6 week build season. This year, we were able to, for the first time ever, open ERC for participation by other teams in NC.
Our competition was held this past weekend (December 11th). More info about this will be posted soon by our ERC coordinator.
Returning Member Projects
As stated before, our returning members have championed a variety of projects in order to improve theirs and the team’s capabilities and knowledge.
Elevator
Like many other teams, we’re building an elevator in preparation for the upcoming season, specifically its potential to be a pick and place game (this group of team leadership only has experience with shooting games). Our design is a 3 stage continuous elevator that mounts on a WCD drivebase given to us by 2363: Triple Helix. CAD of our elevator design can be found here.
Pneumatics Test Board
We haven’t historically had a way to test pneumatics on our robot without an entire electrical system, so we decided to build one that runs off an Arduino. This has two double solenoids but is pretty easily expandable if we want more in the future.
Build Season Prep
Our design team has been hard at work with a myriad of drivebase designs in preparation for the upcoming season. Specifically, we’ve been working to design a standard west coast drive (for our second robot), a swerve drivebase using 3” MaxSwerve (which we just recently purchased), and a specialty drivebase (as a starting point, should we encounter a terrain-focused game). More information about these designs will be posted soon by our design lead.
Conclusion
Thanks for taking the time to read this! Please ask any questions here in the thread, which we hope to update quite actively in the coming months. We’d be thrilled to share any materials or references, don’t hesitate to ask.
Thanks, and happy open alliance!
