5013 the Trobots to join the Open Alliance

FIRST Robot Showcase
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The Trobots 5013 are happy to announce that we will be participating in the Open Alliance for the 2023 FRC season Charged Up.

We believe the open alliance will provide us with the following benefits

  • Commitment device to produce better documentation and keep our CAD up to date.
  • Peer review. Sometimes we have bad ideas, the faster we realize it the better.
  • Visibility. We want to get our name out and get known better outside of our region.

It doesn’t come without a cost of increased time commitment to keep everything updated though.

Since Champs we have done a few things:

We are switching to OnShape to allow for easier usage from any machine and easier sharing. So we had a few training sessions where students worked on designing a robot cart. We did not get around to finalizing any of the designs or building but the practice was good none the less. Link to our OnShape Team

We also developed a Lego robotics camp curriculum for a Girl Scout camp. The camp went well and the girls really enjoyed seeing the competition robot shoot the big tennis balls.

We attended Cowtown Throw Down. An offseason event in Lees Summit. It is a great event and the competition was fierce. Since we didn’t have any trained climbers and we really like our swerve modules we chose not to exercise our famous climber.

We ended up as captains of the #3 alliance and chose 1939,1764, and 1763 as our alliance partners and went to the semifinals. Incidentally at Heartland 1764 was our first pick and at Central Mo 1939 was our first pick. So we were getting the band back together.

Next year our biggest goal for our robot is reliability. Last year through regionals and champs we suffered from electrical unreliability. At Cowtown we had no electrical issues. The difference? Solder. on all of our 22-24 AWG connections we went from Wago connecters to solder and it served us well. The only issues our robot had were a cracked polycarb intake plate and a broken belt. Both of which we had spares for and both of which were non crippling damage for the match.

Over the summer we did fix a code issue with our autonomous routine that had plagued us. Our robot didn’t make it the distance we intended. We had used PathPlanner. The problem we had was the constraint declaration for our controller had declared the max speed as the robots theoretical (not practical) max speed and not the max speed of the leg of the routine. This led us to no be able to travel the whole distance of the leg. We now know better.

Our github for those who are interested.

We look forward to learning from and sharing with the rest of the wonderful open alliance teams.

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I’m always excited to see another team join the Open Alliance. Good luck this year!

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Will be watching this and all of the open alliance threads this season! Good luck this season!

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Brad, this is awesome, I will definitely be following you guys closely this year!

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Are you guys going to open build too?

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I think for us right now that would add more work than we are equipped to handle for this next build season. We will try to share as much as possible though, and our facility is always open to having guests from other teams come by and collaborate. It is just trying not to stretch people too thin trying to clean stuff up, post it, answer questions, etc. we have a few sophomores that have been talking about it though so maybe they will take the initiative with a little guidance, I will bring it up and see what everyone thinks.

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We are excited to see 5013 the Trobots join the Open Alliance. We have been watching them get better and better each year. They are going to be a powerhouse team in our region this year and I am looking forward to following along.

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Thanks for the kind words. We have been learning and growing and both 4522 and 1706 @Emerson1706 have been instructional for us. You could join us in the open alliance.

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This will be fantastic for the reasons you list, and also a brave world to enter into. I think the stuff put out by 2357 last season was great, and whether it is like that or some long thread like 6328, it will be a worth it.

I know since at least 2019 I’ve been impressed by 5013, not only in bringing it in competition, but also growing as a team in ways like this. Can’t wait to see what you all do this season!

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I can’t wait to see what we do this season either. Lol. Definitely excited for a new game Now that we have made the public promise for open alliance and gotten and all this praise the pressure is really on.

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Update11/3/2022

PR/Outreach/Fund Raising

Now that Cowtown Throwdown is over we shift our focus to our craft fair fundraiser / outreach event.

11/12/2022 we will be holding a craft fair as a fundraiser.

craft fair
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This is our first year running a craft fair event. In addition to manning the event and aiding the vendors we will set up our pit and bring Sidewinder our 2022 competition bot

sidewinder
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In addition to showing off our competition bot we will be running some STEM activities for kids. The activities will be similar to those in our Girl Scout Lego robotics camp

On 11/19/2022 some of our mentors and students will be attending a workshop put on by the KC Stem Alliance and KC First.

Mechanical
The mechanical team will be reorganizing the supplies after competition as well as taking an inventory of what we have and will need for the upcoming season.

One thing we had hoped to do was upgrade from the SDS mk4 to the SDS mk4i. However they are currently out of conversion kits. We aren’t budgeted for 5 (4 mods and 1 spare) new swerve modules. We may opt for 3 so we can have one side inverted and the other not. Then net year we could get the 2 additional modules. Then we could have 2 full swerve chassis. One for mechanical and one for drivers an programmers. Given monetary constraints and long lead times we may be using regular mk4 (if the game calls for swerve)

Programming
With the announcement that Charged Up will include April Tags we have been closely watching the development of Photon vision The Beta Thread has a lot of great information on the upcoming release as well as very responsive help from the volunteers programming the new features. There are also examples of getting field position from transforms off of the detected tag.

We believe it will be in our best interest to use the field location provided by the tags to keep our field position up to date. As such we have been looking at WPILIB Pose Estimators This would allow us to move to a target even if we can’t see it with our camera at that time.

Competition
We are currently confirmed for Week 3 Heartland KSLA in Olathe KS and week 6 Green Country OKTU in Tulsa, OK.

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