5417 Eagle Robotics Build Blog | Open Alliance | 2024

Hello Everyone! Welcome to 5417’s 2024 Build thread for this 2024 season! This will be our 9th year in FRC, first running out of Allen High School and now the Steam Center, both in Allen Texas.

We will be competing in Week 1 Plano and Week 4 Dallas! Good luck!

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week 1 plano? i thought plano was week 2?

Offseason:

Hey everyone, as the offseason is wrapping up and kickoff is just around the corner, we wanted to showcase what 5417 has been up to! After ending the main season at district championships, winning some cool awards along the way, we dove right into offseason competition, getting the opportunity to compete at the Texas Robotics Invitational hosted by the one and only team Spectrum 3847. Furthermore, we, along with 5411 and 9105 hosted the very first Texas Talon Throwdown and Fight like a Girl tournament! After all the fun of offseason competition was done, we moved on to our preseason training for new members to our team, and we also got the opportunity to include rookie team 9533 from Melissa High school, to help them prepare for their rookie season.

Offseason Competition:

At TRI:

After having the honor to compete with alliance 3 as the third pick, our alliance fell into the losing bracket in the first round. However, we were able to bring it back, and nearly fought all the way into the final match, getting finally beat by alliance 2.

At TTT:

Making our way into the playoffs, we managed to fight our way to being the winning alliance for the tournament! As well as this, our sister team 5788 Eagle Spec Ops debuted their robot. Be sure to check out their OA blog this season for some truly exciting stuff.

Preseason Training:

Starting on December 4th, we hosted 3 different build/programming workshops to help prepare our new members for the coming season, as well as extending this training to members of new rookie team 9533 from Melissa High School, to make sure that they were ready to challenge this season head on. Those interested in build had the opportunity to learn about the tools used in the shop, materials used, and the different subsystems that make up an FRC bot. Those interested in programming had the opportunity to learn about the fundamentals of programming and electrical systems, as well as getting hands-on experience and setting up their personal devices with the software needed to program this season. All in all, we have built up a strong team that is ready to take on Crescendo!

What’s coming up:

Our energy is reaching a crescendo (hehe pun) as we prep for kickoff and get ready to take this season by storm! Stay tuned for all of the fun we cook up this season!

Kickoff and Week 1:

Hey everyone, here comes the first official OA post of the 2024 season! Our first week has been full of dissecting the game, planning, and creating some prototypes for our robot. Without further ado, let’s get into the nitty gritty of what we’ve been working on this week.

Kickoff thoughts:

After watching the game animation, every member of the team went through the game manual, trying to get a good understanding of the game this year. Some interesting rule changes we identified (as many are probably aware of by now) were that bumpers had to be continuous, and the extension limit was a foot outside of the robot perimeter. In addition to this, we noticed that the notes were actually quite squishy.

After the rules were read, we grouped up and started spitballing strategy and robot ideas. Some very important elements of strategy were uncovered by this, such as:

  • Being able to hang and score trap consistently would be good to focus on in endgame, as it would make gaining the Ensemble ranking point much easier
  • Being able to score in Amp during Auton would mean coopertition can be started much faster

On the robot ideas side of things, we had a myriad of intake, outtake, and climber ideas such as:

Intake:

Some groups entertained the idea of a floor intake which could be lowered down to the floor, while others suggested having the intake be the same as the outtake, and have that piece be able to collect from the floor and/or source

Outtake:

Most groups suggested the idea of a wheeled shooter outtake with horizontal wheels, and have some way to angle that shooter downward to be able to score amp and speaker. However, some groups also entertained the idea of a clay pigeon shooter style outtake, as well as a punch/gantry style outtake.

Climbers:

Most groups suggested a vertical slide/pulley style of climber with two contact points, and an important point brought up by some groups was that the climbers would need to be able to pull the robot up all the way to the chain to provide optimum space for scoring trap.

At our next meeting after kickoff, we dove right into…

Prototyping:

The prototypes that were focused on this week were scattered around the board. For outtakes, a small team worked on creating a shooter outtake with horizontally oriented wheels. At the end of the week, this prototype was shooting a distance of about 10-12 feet. The wheels on this prototype were situated on both sides of the note, and had a total compression of 4 inches, 2 inches on each side.

Outtake prototype doing what it does best

On the opposite side of things, another group began putting together some floor intake prototypes. Using varied amounts of vertical compression, they determined that 1 inch compression would not work well, but 5/8ths of an inch seemed to work quite well.

1 inch compression working well…?

And not so well.

In addition to this, some header work began on climbers, meaning our bot was really coming together. Finally, we had another group build up the kitbot for this year so the driveteam could begin driving ASAP.

What’s coming up:

Prototype, iterate, redesign!

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