Hey guys, we’re excited to be back for another year of OA! This build thread will be updated throughout the season so you can follow along and give feedback - or take inspiration from what we do in 2024.
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Hey guys!
We have been hard at work with kickoff, discussing goals and brainstorming with our team. So far, we have some substantial ideas in mind, so look out for our upcoming posts detailing our progress!
In the meantime, here is a quick summary of scoring for the game- thanks to our media team.
Good luck to all teams!
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Hello everyone! I hope your season is progressing terrifically so far : D
An update on our team’s progress, from Day 1-6:
Organization
This season, our team is building our skills in documentation, task allocation, scheduling, and making sure we stay realistic with our abilities and resources. We’re making sure we keep track of work and prioritizing goals for every subteam.
Our team organized frequently used resources.
Thanks to this thread!! → All the Crescendo Resources
We also finalized our calendar for the first 2 weeks of build season:
This time around, we made sure to strike a balance between working fast to have lots of time for drive practice and tuning, and making sure our initial phases of design are robust and allow for a little bit of wiggle room for changes.
Also, for ease of BOM production, we now have a standard spreadsheet to use… →
6423 BOM Template
Game Analysis and Strategy
During the offseason, we worked on a strategic design “checklist” in order of progression. Linked here → 6423 Strategic Design Doc
This helped us understand our capabilities, what falls into our “can do” and “cannot do”, and what we need to prioritize (as the design scope can be difficult to keep in check).
We have learned that it is imperative for us to designate goals very early in the season to make sure we focus. Thanks to Team Rembrandts (Team Rembrandts Early Analysis and Prototyping Post) for making an awesome goals spreadsheet! Our team has taken inspo from it to designate goals for us as well.
Priority Definitions
| ranking | definition |
0 → should not have|
1 → nice to have, interesting
2 → should have
3 → must have, top priorities
During game analysis, we’ve determined different subsystems for consideration:
- Drivetrain
- Intake
- Shooter (speaker)
- Outtake (Amp)
- Outtake (Trap)
- Climber
And narrowed our focus down to:
- High mobility drivetrain
- Touch it own it style intake
- Consistent shooter
- Outtake (amp)
- Climber
Right now, spending time on the trap mechanism is suboptimal for our team, as our focus is on the specified above abilities. We want to make sure our cycling is great, and a good endgame.
And speaking of the endgame, as we are currently not attempting the trap, we are training a human player to score on the microphone for the ensemble RP. We have approximately 55 days before our first regional, so ample practice could result in consistent spotlit throws!! Today, his accuracy was at about 15%~, but I am confident there will be improvement with progress. I will report back soon…
For this we built a pole that’s the height of the microphones, while the stage is being constructed.
Meanwhile, our team is brainstorming about game strategy and our findings will be posted soon : )
Robot Archetype
With the help of the strategic design document and the high level goals spreadsheet, we’ve progressed from 2D drawings → Krayon CAD → initial iteration CAD in just under a week.
As always, please give advice!! We would really appreciate it, and if you have questions, feel free to ask as well : )
Prototyping and CAD
First, the shooter:
Pretty straightforward linear shooter, but we will probably modify it after testing it.
Next, the climber. We’re decided on the climber in a box from AndyMark, which would decrease the workload of creating our own climber. However, we didn’t particularly like the hook on the climber in a box, so we will modify it.
Field!
Field in progress!
Programming
Our programming team has been working hard!! We are working on setting up our cameras, note and apriltag detection to assist the operator, and path following (Pathplanner). We also want to make pose estimation later. We are considering having three (3) cameras mounted on the robot to take advantage of all the apriltags on the field.
Currently, aiming for these capabilities:
- Note detection and rotating to face the note
- Assistance lining up at the subwoofer
- Assistance lining up at the amp
- Assistance climbing (possibly?)
- Cool autos.
That’s it for now!! Good luck and see you all soon again 
!
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Wow! Looks awesome.
It’s very good to hear that we’ve inspired you to make a goals spreadsheet. Really means a lot to me, seeing other teams making a lot of progress 
Must give it to you, your design for the spreadsheet looks way better 
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Thank you so much!! This means a lot and I always look forward to your OA posts 
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I saw that you noted that scoring the note in the speaker from outside your wing is illegal, was there a rule change for it since i thought you couldn’t score from the opposing wing only and in auto it was illegal to score from outside your wing. But the implementation of the skills list looks awesome so far great job!!
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It’s only legal during teleop. But therefore it should be on the skills list. However, I would put it in low priority since it’s super hard to make the shot from outside the wing.
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Oh!! I interpreted that skill as shooting from the opponents WING (since the “outside” WING). But yeah, it would be quite difficult, and the time + effort put into that skill wouldn’t pay off for our team vs just shooting from around our wings, I think. : 0
And thank you!!! : )
Hi! I saw you posted a CAD render on the OA discord, which featured a flipdown mech presumably for amp scoring. Could you talk more about that? We’re looking for a solution to do something similar.
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Of course! Just a declaimer though, it hasn’t been prototyped, so take the design with a grain of salt.
AMP Mechanism
The idea behind our amp mechanism was to be able to shoot directly down into the amp for ideally 100% consistency, without having to pivot our shooter.
It works by handing off the note to a pair of rollers (similar to 2023 cone intakes) at the top of our shooter mechanism.
The grabber thingy (we still need a cool name for it) then pivots around when you’re ready to score in the amplifier and ejects the note downwards
The grabber thingy hardstops on top of the shooter and has an abs encoder belted off the liveaxle pivot which should make controlling it as easy as possible for our programming. We will also use a beam-break sensor coupled with current detection to know when the grabber thingy has the note. As always, if you see any holes or have any suggestions to improve this mechanism, we’d love to hear any and all feedback!
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This is a very cool mechanism, thanks for sharing. Do you have a sketch showing the height change of the note from the launcher to scoring in the amp?
Hey guys! I hope you are all doing well and are making great progress. Lots of updates…
Robot Archetype and CAD (so far)
ignore the glitches, onshape was being weird
We designed an over the bumper intake, fixed position shooter, and the amp mechanism (that my co-captain @Astro_6423 explained in the posts above). Our drive base is swerve.
We decided on these mechanisms after switching between other variations for a variety of reasons.
1.) Over the bumper intake vs. under the bumper intake
-We really liked team 95’s “inside-outside intake” → Team 95 Inside-Outside Intake. We considered it because we could drive over the notes easily and possess them instantly, could eliminate a pivot, it being full width, and other reasons that @JamesCH95 detailed. However, it was difficult to incorporate with our SwerveX Flipped Corner Mount modules, and we were concerned about the possibility of wheel interference, so decided against UTB intakes overall.
^ our OTB intake!
-Also, considering the center line chicken race during the autonomous period, OTB bumpers have an advantage in reach. Same with source pickup.
2.) Fixed vs. Pivoting shooter
-Though having a pivoting shooter might expand our shooting range (i.e. from the podium), we decided that it would add a pivot and complicate the robot more, especially for the operator.
-So, we decided to keep our robot light to cover the distance from the podium to the subwoofer pretty quickly without losing much time lining up/shooting near the subwoofer. This will make up for the lost range with faster driving.
3.) Conveyor/Indexer hands off to shooter vs pivoting intake hands off to shooter
-The pivoting intake is not that complex for our programming team to pull off (considering the hardstops we also added).
-A conveyor would not fit in the frame perimeter and overall configuration as of right now.
-The OTB intake needs to pivot back to stow within frame perimeter anyway, so why not just utilize the pivot?
4.) Climber in a box
-Eliminates complexity in robot that comes with designing a climber.
Game Strategy
Right now, our team is looking to be a speedy cycler robot, and have yet to look at cycle times for our robot. Since it’s only our second year with swerve, and our first year with a (hopefully) light robot, we expect relatively fast (hopefully) cycle times.
Also, our human player has been making steady progress. He’s gone from ~15% accuracy to now ~26%. Since there’s so much time to practice, I expect he will make much more progress!!
Progress in Programming
The robot is now able to rotate towards notes and AprilTags, even while driving. This will help us with aim during intaking and lining up to the amp and speaker, greatly helping the drive team during fast cycles!!! Overall, we are very excited about the auto alignment and can’t wait to see it’s benefits during drive practice!!
Prototyping
We’ve prototyped the shooter so far, but noticed issues in the prototype that caused the note to travel in a curved manner. We believe the issues stemmed from not having a top cover and only having 1 pair of shooter wheels. Both of these issues are resolved in the actual design (we have a polycarb cover and 2 pairs of stacked fairlane shooter wheels, along with a pair of compliant wheels being “pusher” or indexer wheels).
As always, let me know your thoughts and give your advice!! Any help is appreciated, and thank you so much for your time : )
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I really love how your robot is turning out!
I think that if you plan to compete in the auto war, you should beef up the front of your intake, or it might break.
Your amp mech looks great, I might switch the NEO to a brushed motor in order to have less weight up there.
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Thanks for the suggestion!!
We are not sure if we will be doing the center chicken during autos, but will consider it if we can get all the notes near the subwoofer first during testing. Perhaps we could go under the stage and get the center notes to avoid the robots coming in from the sides?
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That’s a CLEAN robot, green and black really does cook 
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This year, our team has tried to standardized kitting and BOM production!! So far here is how that’s going:
^ example of a BOM for an individual mechanism. This has been working better for us so far, as we can produce drawings and keep track of what’s already been manufactured, plus order COTS easily.
^ Kitting! We are trying to organize parts (COTS and fabricated) in each kit as opposed to laying them around and guessing… lol
^ An inventory of the items we ordered specifically for the build season so far. Although measuring lengths might be tedious, it would be done really at the end of the fabrication phase to add the remaining stock lengths into a general inventory spreadsheet.
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I’m back with some more updates!!!
Robot Prototype
This year, to test out the architecture and to make sure the shooter and other mechanisms will be functional, we are prototyping our intake, shooter, and amp mechanism on the drivetrain and frame first!
This way, if something doesn’t work as well and we need to tweak our final robot’s CAD, we wouldn’t have already exhausted our inventory and funds by remaking it all from polycarb. : )
Some more cool pics from our week of work:
^assembling our swerve modules with our new custom grease guards
^ the grease guards unassembled!
^ powdercoated the bellypan after it’s been cut from the plasma cutter
^ bumper brackets in their final state : )
^ another shot of the prototype bot!
Good luck everyone, see you all soon!
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Hey everyone!!!
Lots of progress has been made throughout the last week!!
Robot Assembly
Right now, we’ve assembled the drive base, swerve, and superstructure frame. We are constructing the shooter and intake out of plywood to prototype on the robot itself.
Here is our (manual 
) testing of the intake and the shooter:
We will definitely run this test using motors and will update later : ) 
But as of right now, we have not done much electrical work on the robot itself at all.
The robot without the battery and bumpers is looking to be around 90 lbs, so with, I expect it will be around 115 lbs!!
Drive Team Discussions
There’s been much discussion about the drive team this year- whether we need an operator as well as a driver, and on how to delegate controls between the driver and the operator.
We’ve decided on having both a driver and an operator, with controls delegated as such:
Driver
- Intaking
- Shooting note into the SPEAKER / depositing into the AMP
- Move
Operator
- Choose amp vs speaker mode
- Prime for amp and shooter
- Climb
Mostly, drivers control the drivetrain only and operators are tasked with the superstructure. However, I believe the driver should be the one to actually intake and eject the notes into the amp or speaker. This is because they would intuitively have the best understanding of the robot’s position on the field- from practice and their hyperfocus on the robot’s movement. Also, they would recognize that they are in the correct positioning to eject the note much before than the operator- who would either require prompting, or would realize a split second later.
This split second is so important in a game that is predicted to have really fast cycles, and I believe driver scoring control is how we can shoot on the move. For example,
driver auto aligns to note → holds down note deployment button that spins up the rollers as it pivots down → intakes note → beambreak detects note is adequately within the rollers → intake pivots up → drive coach gives either amp or speaker command → operator sets up for either goal while driver is focused on getting us from the source to the goal while averting obstacles → driver auto aligns while driving towards the goal → deposits note when driver knows they’re in the perfect spot.
I know this looks like quite a lot of steps. But, most of it is (hopefully) automated, and with adequate practice, the driver and operator can sync without much prompting, which also eliminates time and focus distracted from their given tasks.
Organization
This list is getting quite long 
As always, thanks for checking us out, and let us know what you think! Good Luck to everyone : )
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