We finished the CAD of the robot!
Feel free to ask any questions below.
As always, github repo here.
Release with .step here.
In other news, we recently got a fabworks partnership. You can use the code FRC599 to get a 5% discount on all orders and give us some support.
28 September 2023
This past Saturday, our team practiced at the Vitruvian Bots’ scrimmage. Thank you 4201 for the invite!
Our team brought our main 2023 robot, Carter, to the scrimmage and we were able to run a total of 5 full-length matches during our time there, with little failures. This scrimmage allowed us to ensure that Carter was working as intended before our first offseason competition, SoCal Showdown.
At the scrimmage, we verified that our autos were working, especially the auto-balance, given how we disassembled our charge station back in our shop. We also assessed our candidate drivers and operators for our upcoming competitions and for build season. We plan to have this finalized by SoCal Showdown.
When we tried to preload a cube for auto, we broke one of the plates of the intake. This was a bit surprising considering how durable it was during the 2023 season.
Our main driver station’s mainboard died during one of our matches, forcing us to switch to our backup laptop which may have also caused more issues with our robot code - our driver controls would sometimes invert while in a match.
We also had some close calls with our arm being hit by other robots as our stow position was outside of our frame perimeter. (remember the SDR incident? :copium:)
See you at SoCal Showdown!
…or in a few days or hours, when i [Ben] writes up the next posts in queue
post written by @kungfuwisdom , edited by Ben
look, i know it’s midnight in california, do not worry about it
29 September 2023
We have finished the assembly of the drivebase and elevator mount.
An issue was raised with the vertical elements of the elevator mount interfering with the elevator’s travel, so we just. you know, bandsawed the problem area off :ha:
This did make the assembly asymmetric (remember to check your mirrors in your assemblies/part studios), but we just match drilled the places where that mattered and it was fine as well.
mfw: fabrication “5 thou up or down, no exceptions” / assembly time “just match drill, it’ll be fine”
With how much you see these around, you could probably assume that there’s an easily accessible public, and ‘not a surface part’, CAD of a mk4i cover.
Yeah I thought that too, the answer is haha nope but at least there is one now?
This cover is designed for an all Neo MK4i swerve. Featuring:
We also have a much less interesting set of frame corners to ensure our bumpers stay legal. They can be pretty tight, maybe get a mallet on hand.
All these files can be found in this repository that also includes electronics cases and other 3d printed parts. The corners and covers are in a neutral file format; if anyone wants the other files we can provide them as well.
The CAD should finally not be changing at all anymore. We’ve created a (hopefully) final release in the github with a .step.
There’s a slight discrepancy between the CAD of the modules and the actual mk4i module we received - the bottom plate’s corner radius is 0.25" rather than the 0.5" it is in the CAD. This may only apply to the 8-32 modules, however.
And lastly, remember to set your weight overrides so you don’t get surprised during build! We’ve found that .step files usually do not have masses, even upon setting materials. This probably caused weight overruns that we saw on Carter, as it was only 100 lbs in the cad.
See you at Tidal Tumble! (with this robot)
inb4 another post in the pipeline comes before socal, i wonder if it might be scouting related 
Post written by me, myself, and I [Ben]
4 October 2023
Hello there and happy October!
As you may know, 599 is competing in 2 offseason competitions: Socal Showdown from October 6 - 8, and Tidal Tumble from October 20 - 22. To better prepare for build season, we are testing out significant modifications to our scouting and strategy system during these competitions.
Like many other teams, we are currently using Google Sheets and Forms for scouting.
In the 2023 build season, we used an adapted version of 6421’s 2022 team lookup sheet. This mostly worked fine for us, but we did have a few issues:
2023 San Diego Regional - scouting sheet
We remade our scouting system for SoCal Showdown, with significant improvements:
SoCal Showdown scouting sheet - team overview page, in testing
And for Tidal Tumble? Well, for Tidal, we’ll be using this Google Sheet as the basis for our own scouting app! We’re taking inspiration from Team 4414’s TideScout, but we’re using Microsoft Powerapps instead of Appsheet because our school provides Powerapps for free. Our plan is to have the app as a framework for next year’s scouting system, so that when the new game rolls around, core functions like team summaries and app layout are mostly finished.
Preliminary App Layout
See you at Socal Showdown! :D
Post written by @leahthedragonite, edited by Ben
how do i make the (:D) not an emoji please aaaaah oh it’s a ‌
I’ve been receiving a few questions about the mounting of the cancoder guard with the swerve cover on - that is, if we are a. using printed spacers or b. using different-length screws.
In case anyone else has the same question, the answer is no to both. In our experience, the cover works fine using the stock SDS spacers and screws, which is what we are running.
Results: Ended 5th/6th in Elims
From 10/6 to 10/8, our team competed at the first ever SoCal Showdown event. We would like to first thank our alliance partners: 2710 JetStream, 9995 (5199B) Robot Dolphins From Outer Space, and 4999 Momentum.
Our team competed with our main season robot, Carter, with a completely new drive team and pit crew. Carter went 5-4, finished ranked 19th, and was the first pick of the 5th alliance captain, 2710, alongside 9995 (5199B) and 4999. Our alliance went 1-2 in playoffs, meaning that we ended 5th-6th at the SoCal Showdown.
Our first day started pretty rough given some programming issues with our drivebase and autos that we discovered during load-in and had to fix during the start of Day 1. The problem was resolved after two qualification matches and from that point forward, there were improvements in every match. On Day 1, we also received a red card for violating rule H506 as our human player had kept their hand in the portal while our robot was also lined up in the portal as well. We looked into and tested a double substation pickup to avoid another red card, and would spend that night looking into how to continue using the single substation without violating the rules again.
Our second day had our strongest performances of the competition, with us ending our last qualification matches with a 6 cycle match, relatively similar to our performances at Ventura County Regional. We started the day by reevaluating the pickups at the single substation by clarifying the bounds of the portal and even changing the person in the role. With these new reevaluations, we were able to return to pickup at the single substation and improve our cycle time, bringing back some of the traction we desired during Day 1. Following our fixes after the second qualification match the day before, our main auto, the high-cube taxi balance auto, had a 100% success rate till the end of the competition. Our wrist belt also broke after our first qual on Day 2 and we had one qual to fix it before having to be on the field again, and miraculously, our technician (@ ben) was able to fix it in 5 minutes to allow us to continue scoring accurately in the following match. We unfortunately ended our playoffs run with our air tank fitting falling out during a collision, causing us to lose the ability to score.
Failure: Swerve Wheels were fighting each other and had a large offset to the typical movements.
Fix: Resetting the zero point for the swerve wheels and deploying older code that we knew.
Failure: Wrist belt snapped and broke after a collision
Fix: Putting a replacement belt we packed.
Failure: Cone Autos failed and caused the robot to move unusually during teleop.
Fix: Sticking with our cube-balance auto the entire competition and fixing the cone autos back in our shop.
Failure: Receiving a Red Card for violating H506.
Fix: Rereading the rules, understanding the bounds of the rules, and discussing/implementing methods to avoid red cards in future matches.
Failure: Air Tank fitting came out during a collision
Fix: Using more new/not as worn out fittings for the air tank, checking all connections through pull tests, securing connections down as well
With the experiences and lessons from SoCal Showdown, we hope to improve Carter both in a technical aspect and in a drive team aspect so that we can bring a strong performance at Tidal Tumble. In addition, we are also going to bring our second bot that has been worked on throughout the summer till now (look above at our previous OA posts) and work to extract the strongest performance from that bot as well.
The tide’s coming in!
Post written by @kungfuwisdom
expect a short post and media dump on new bot soon:tm: -ben
Inspired by 3847 Spectrum’s Posts
I think I forgot to mention this - we named our second robot. We will be operating with Carter the Cardiologist (our season robot) and Barry the Bacteriologist (our offseason B bot) at Tidal Tumble.
the robot isn’t really a Barry to me but you know, democracy
bumpers
Bot looks hella clean, nice job! That clip has to be the most average robotics reaction.
Results: Finalist
From 10/20 to 10/22, our team competed at Tidal Tumble, an annual competition hosted by Team 4414, HighTide. (wonderful comp as always)
We’d like to thank our alliance partners: 2659 RoboWarriors, 3647 Millennium Falcons, 7415 Jaguar Robotics, 4 Team 4 Element, and 696 Circuit Breakers.
Our team brought both our main season bot, Carter, and our off-season bot, Barry to the competition to maximize the experiences we could give to our team. Driven by our main drive team, Carter would go 5-4 and end up 16th place to be picked up by alliance 4 as a 2nd pick. Our alliance would end up going 3-1 in playoffs and would lose finals 1-2 to the 3rd seeded alliance (couldn’t win against 973 again sadly). Throughout the event, we recalled many of the mistakes made at SoCal Showdown and were able to improve on it, allowing us to even have a 9-cycle match (compared to our typical 6) which we are very proud of for the new drive team.
i wish i had an image of this - we shattered Carter’s intake in Finals 3, remind me later and i might have some
we somehow got to engage even with coast mode swerve and a drive that was neither robot nor field oriented
On the other hand, our off-season bot, Barry, would go 4-5 in quals, end up 36th, and be picked by the 8th alliance - interestingly, of all B robots - with the main focus being towards gaining more experience for rookie drive teams. Unfortunately, our alliance would end up going 0-2 in playoffs and be eliminated in the lower bracket by the 5th seeded alliance. Barry would undergo many troubles throughout the event as it had many issues with the swerve drive base and the elevator movements. The main focus for Barry throughout the tournament would be just to ensure that Barry could drive, which did end up happening somewhat in the last couple qualification matches it had.
Failure: Spark Maxes CAN connectors were slipping out after collisions sometimes.
Fix: Using hot glue and tape to secure connectors down and utilizing the drop test (proposed to us by 7157, thank you to Mubotics for that) to test all connections
Failure: Wrist NEO pinion slipped out after a collision.
Fix: After being saved with a spare pinion from 3512 (thank you them as well), we resecured the pinion back on with a zip tie at the end to decrease the slipping occurring
Failure: Programming for Barry was not integrated well together
Fix: Giving more time to programming during the season to ensure testing for them, decreasing the time spent on other areas to maximize time as best as possible
With Tidal Tumble over, our off-season unfortunately comes to an end here. We are very grateful for all our alliance partners throughout the season and also very fortunate to have received many awards and opportunities throughout the season as well. Till kickoff, we plan to get Barry properly working as programming practice, train many of our members to be sufficiently ready for build season, and just try to relax a bit to ensure we have all the energy to have a strong 2024 season.
We are getting amped up here! / see you in 2024 the 2024 thread!
Post written by @kungfuwisdom and ben
Inspired by 3847 Spectrum’s Posts
so long as i have you, any tips for kickoff and prototyping? we’ve never managed to get that done well in recent (post-covid) team history —though that should probably go in the other thread.
See you around!
aaand that’s a wrap on this thread. See you in the next one!
3647 and 2659? I’m getting flashbacks to our season 
