7525 The Pioneers | 2024 Build Thread | Open Alliance

[Seb]

Welcome all to the 2024 Pioneers 7525 Open Alliance thread!

Hello, this is The Pioneers’ first time participating in The Open Alliance! We are a relatively average/mid-resource team, and hope to help other mid-resource teams by sharing our team’s progression.

About Us:

We, The Pioneers, also known as FRC Team 7525, had our rookie year in 2019 and have since competed in 2022, 2023, and now 2024. We are a community team based in Nashville, TN. We currently have 35 students from four schools and 7 mentors. Our goal is to educate young people in STEM across a range of disciplines, including programming, engineering, business, and more, all while participating in FRC!

“The Pioneers were founded on the basis of equal opportunity for people of all identities and backgrounds. Our mission is to uplift underrepresented communities by offering them meaningful experiences in STEM and encouraging them to pursue STEM in higher education, through the FIRST Robotics Competition.”

– The Pioneers Mission Statement

Posting Schedule:

During the offseason, we will post weekly Sunday updates, and we may post more as important events/decisions occur.

During the competition season, we will be posting at least bi-weekly, once on Sunday and once on Wednesday. Again, expect extra updates during the competition season as important events/decisions for the team occur.

Team Structure/Subteams:

Mechanical: Divided into two unofficial sub-teams: the design team and the build team. The design team designs the robot in Onshape, and the build team turns the CAD into a real-life robot. The mechanical team plans to design and build a relatively simple robot early on in the season so that the controls subteam has plenty of time to wire and program the robot and our drive team has ample time to practice.

Controls: Controls handles both the programming and wiring of the robot, requiring all members to have a full understanding of both skills. Controls team members will also learn the ins and outs of pneumatics. The controls team aims to use safe and efficient wiring practices, as well as clear and effective programming, to make the robot’s performance as consistent and high-level as possible.

MOO : The Marketing, Operations, and Outreach subteam’s tasks cover the media, outreach, awards, and fundraising needs of the team. This includes organizing fundraisers, planning outreach and volunteering, coordinating communication with potential mentors and sponsors, designing imagery for the Pioneers brand, and preparing the necessary materials for awards throughout competition. This team also takes care of media taken throughout competition and manages the team’s social media across Instagram and Youtube.

Throughout the off-season and upcoming on-season, MOO hopes to create more outreach opportunities to further connect with our community in Nashville. We’re also aiming to sufficiently prepare for competition through preparation of various FIRST® awards and reaching out to potential sponsors.

Scouting/Strategy: Scouting and strategy is mostly active during the competition season. It deals with data collection at events, visualization of data, and robot architecture selection. During the Crescendo season, we hope to improve our scouting methods. We will be using Appsheet for data collection and Tableau for visualization at events.

Events & Extra Info:

We will be competing at Arkansas week 2 and Buckeye week 4!

You can expect post contributions to this thread from our student leadership and mentors, including:

@Seb - Mechanical Lead

@bcb - Controls Lead

@oliviahou - Moo Lead

@GreenTomato - Scouting/Strategy Lead

@BryceHanson - Head Mentor

We, like all teams, are looking to improve! Please don’t hesitate to give us feedback in this thread!

Instagram

Website

[BryceHanson]

Beyond stoked to have our team be contributing to OA this year! I personally have read several thousand OA posts and have learned a ton. I hope this serves as a great opportunity for our team to reflect on our own process, get advice from the community, and maybe have a bit of helpful content along the way

[UnofficialForth]

Hear there was some nifty things coming from this team, excited to see how the build season progresses!

[Seb]

Pioneers WK 1 offseason recap

Note: Over the summer, our host school unexpectedly moved all of our equipment from 2 rooms on the first floor to a single, much smaller room on the 3rd floor. This move made it very difficult to progress for the first few days because they were spent organizing everything, and even after all the organization some things were still missing.

Subteam Updates:

Mechanical:

CNC enclosure: Mechanical’s main task so far in the offseason has been constructing a table and enclosure for our CNC router. We previously had it in a closet, but since we were moved, we had to disassemble the old table and build a new one in our new space. We also had to build a DIY wooden enclosure for it so metal and wood shavings don’t go flying everywhere.

New swerve modules: Over the summer we purchased another set of SDS MK4i swerve modules that we assembled and plan to make a new chassis with for programming to do testing with, and the new modules may also become the ones we run in 2024

General training: Mechanical has been training all students on how to use tools like standard hand tools, saws, drills, etc., and has been training a few new students on using CAM software and our CNC router so we can manufacture parts in the 2024 season a lot quicker.

Controls:

Swerve drift: Much of our early pre-season work consisted of determining which motor on the previous season’s Falcon swerve drivetrain was causing drift problems to better resolve the problem. Once we discovered the module, controls was working on implementing YAGSL so we might be able to more easily transfer previous drive code made in the preseason to our new NEO modules.

Autonomous tools: During the off-season, we have been working on becoming familiar with and implementing PathPlanner into our autonomous routines.

Vision work: In the vein of developing smarter autonomous routines, our controls team has also been working on utilizing the Limelight for April Tag vision tracking which we will use for aligning in autonomous and while scoring. As the 2024 Crescendo game will also employ april tags, this will be a valuable learning experience that can hopefully transfer over to the competition-season.

MOO:

Fundraising: Throughout the off-season, MOO has prioritized fundraising by hosting a relational mapping meeting with the entirety of the team, initiating outreach calls, and sending emails to any potential sponsors.

Through our relational mapping meeting, we’ve been able to reach out to a lot of potential sponsors! And in finding contacts to reach out to, we collected information from the banners of other teams during last season’s competition.

Students of Vanderbilt University who are especially knowledgeable of methods in supporting non-profits have also recently spoken with members of MOO and leadership to assist with our team’s fundraising methods.

Presence & Branding: We’ve worked towards increasing the presence of our team in Nashville by creating a new and improved website, creating a business card, and increasing the frequency of social media postings.

Volunteering: Many volunteering opportunities were also created for our members through our close ties with Adventura Community School and the starting of two FIRST® Lego League teams within the school. Volunteers throughout the summer assisted with the school’s FIRST® Lego League Summer Camp, and during the school year continue to volunteer every week in preparation for the teams’ competitions.

Scouting/Strategy:

Scouting/Strategy will not be very active up until the competition season as we need to know the game to create most of the functionality of a Scouting/Strategy app as well as to efficiently train scouters. But, we are excited to announce that we will be participating in Scouting Palooza! Expect updates on our progression with regard to what awards we are applying to and what our submissions look like.

Over the summer, members of the Strategy counterpart of the subteam were able to look over past games from 2011-2022 and understand ideal architectures that year, what top teams looked like, and general game information. This knowledge will hopefully aid in deciding our 2024 robot architecture at kickoff!

Events:

This past week our team volunteered at the local elementary school Waverly Belmont for our second year at their STEAM Night

• Demonstrated our robot to over 400 children and their parents
• Allowed them to toss cubes at our robot for it to pick up and toss back at them gently
• Helped children learn Scratch Jr. so they can create fun games and learn the very basics of programming

• Helped set up and run Blue bots which are a fun introduction to programming

Extra Info:

• We usually have 3 in-person meetings a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) but due to extenuating circumstances, we could only have Monday and Wednesday meetings this week.

[J_Beta]

Very excited to have you compete at this year’s Scouting Palooza, we are thrilled to see your submissions

[Seb]

Pioneers Offseason WK 2 Updates

Subteam Updates:

Mechanical:

With only two meetings this week and standardized testing on Wednesday, the mechanical subteam didn’t have much time to get things done. However, we did have some time to do basic training. We continued building a kitbot for testing and began building a WCD for our test robot.

Controls:

Path Planning: Last week we set up and created multiple paths in the 2023 version of this path planner and are now shifting over to use the 2024 beta version (so we can transfer it over to the competition-season)

This week we again continued to work on limelight vision work which we should hopefully be able to use this competition-season which we were unable to do last year.

MOO:

We haven’t had much done this week as many team members have been absent + our week has been a bit short. Despite the circumstances, MOO has been researching potential team volunteering opportunities outside of our weekly volunteering at Adventura for later this year/early January. We’re also continuing to email potential sponsors, notably one being the president of MNPS’ school board.

There is also planning for a potential art gallery that our team could host in February of next year

Scouting/Strategy:

This week we started working on our submissions for Scouting Palooza and as a subteam have come to the consensus of completing a submission for the Data Visualization, Team Scouting, Innovation, and Applied scouting awards.

Additionally, we hope to implement double robot scouting this upcoming competition season as we have a surplus of new students; this should allow us to collect more reliable robot data.

Events & Extra Info:

Team bonding Party:

Having interaction between team members outside of meetings and a robotics environment is necessary for the team to actually function, so during the off-season students or student leadership often host events for the team to go to. On Friday we had a 2-hour long get-together in which members built a fire, played games, etc!

[Seb]

Pioneers Offseason WK 3 Updates

Subteam Updates:

Mechanical:

Mechanical continued with more basic training for new members this week, cutting tubing and shafts to build a WCD drivetrain. We also taught new students how to make chains and how to accurately drill holes in tubing. Unfortunately, we discovered that our Omio CNC router is broken and getting stuck on something. Next week, we will take it apart to try to fix it and share what was wrong if we find out. We have also been making some organization efforts so we actually know where things are located when we need them.

Controls:

Controls continued with our work on Limelight implementation and PathPlanner capabilities. We began some of our electrical training and continued with our training of many new members. Next week, we hope to move past Limelight setup to using its data in robot movement.

MOO:

Art Gallery & Imagery: MOO has been continuing to plan for our upcoming art gallery exhibit in January (accidentally said February last post)! We’ve been brainstorming ideas as the date gets closer, but we are super excited once we get our projects going for the exhibit. We’ve also been focusing a lot on creating our designs for stickers and buttons, as well as our plan for creating merch for the whole team.

Animation awards: We’ve also discussed the probability that we’ll create an animation for the Safety Animation Award and/or the Digital Animation Award. As the deadline for the Safety Animation Award is quite close, there’s a high probability that we’ll opt to prepare for the Digital Animation Award if we decide to create an animation at all.

Scouting/Strategy:

Not much happened for scouting this week but for strategy, we were able to make significant progress on our scouting palooza submissions for the Team Scouting award! Obviously, we cannot post our answers to our submissions. Still, if you would like to look at some data visualization work we have done over the summer with Tableau to learn how to use the software for the 2024 season you can see what we’ve done here; we will most likely use some visualizations from the tableau app in our Data Visualization submission!

2013 Mock Kickoff: This Monday we had our first mock kickoff! This is an event meant to emulate the real kickoff and prepare strategy members to make lists of various robot architectures/actions that will actually be used to design our robot.

Structure:

1. Watch 2013 Game Reveal Video (5 mins)
2. Break into 4 groups (2 mins)
3. Shaker Sheet (each group does at least 2/4 sections: 40 mins)

• You can find our 2013 shaker sheet here, we took inspiration from 2791 & 6328s past shaker sheets!

4. Review Shaker sheet (10 mins)
5. List all robot actions (15 mins)

• This includes driving, score low, etc. As a group, we wrote all of the possible robot actions on a whiteboard

6. List possible robot architectures & select the ideal one (30 mins)

• After getting all possible actions, we used them to create 6 separate architectures and create an ideal one (on the right side of the board)

[BryceHanson]

Mentor Corner: Team Growth and Demographics

Every so often, I’ll make a post in this thread about team organization and function. Today, I’ll be talking about team growth and demographics.

The data I have includes the 2022, 2023, and 2024 rosters. This is the span that I’ve acted as head mentor, and our data collection during COVID was a little lackluster.

Goals

Team 7525 was founded at RePublic High School, a Title I charter school in the outskirts of Nashville. The school is relatively new and is struggling to retain teachers and funding. 93% of students are from a racial or ethnic minority, and 55% are eligible for free or reduced lunch. As such, a core tenet of our program is access and opportunity. We do not collect dues of any kind for any of our students. We hold a pretty robust attendance policy (which I’ll cover in a post about team retention some time in the future), but every student who meets our threshold will get all of their competition fees paid for. Last year, we started the season with 27 students, and we paid for all 27 students to attend competition. We have not set any specific demographic targets in any of these categories, but intend to following the 2024 season.

Team Size

Our team has grown like crazy since I took over in October 2021. We have seen 212% growth since the 2022 season. We’ve almost doubled team size each year, going from 16 ('22) to 27 ('23) to 50 ('24). That’s also been enduring of senior graduation, as from '22 to '23 we graduated 11 of our 16 students. From '23 to '24, we only lost 1 non-graduating student (he moved). However, our mentor ratio is not keeping up. We are targeting a (pipedream) 2:1 student-to-mentor ratio. Currently, we are 10:1.

• Strength: Rapidly growing enthusiastic team
• Weakness: High student-to-mentor ratio
• Opportunity: Find more mentors to increasingly engage students, continue to cultivate informed student leaders
• Threat: Lose students due to disorganization and lack of guided learning from lack of mentorship

School Breakdown

Though 7525 was founded from and meets at RHS, we function as our own 501(c)3 and accept students from anywhere in the county (or anyone who wants to make the drive from a different county). We are the only team in Davidson County (with a population of over 700,000), and there is only 1 team within an hour of us. FRC in Tennessee really only exists in Knoxville and Memphis, which are each about 3 hours away.

Since the 2022 season, we’ve doubled the number of schools we pull from, as a conscious effort to provide opportunities for more students. We are still in the beginning stages with FRA, Valor, and Overton, but we hope to keep building out these pipelines. We’ve seen a decline in RHS participation (6 in '22, 4 in '23 and '24), likely due to losing our key teacher at the school. We’ve worked to find a replacement teacher and get marketing materials in front of potential interest groups (clubs, STEM classes, etc), but haven’t had much luck. Across that same time, MLK (one of five public magnets in the city) has continued to represent nearly half of the team.

• Strength: Increasing number of participating schools and student streams
• Weakness: Low and decreasing number of students from partner school
• Opportunity: Increase relationships with partner school through new faculty, or lobby for partnership with a more represented school that is more easily accessible by the majority of students and mentors
• Threat: Cut off access to RHS students due to lack of transportation to new location, continue to lose RHS students due to lack of support

Grade Breakdown

There’s a few trends to look at here. First, you can see just how many seniors we lost after 2022, and then only 3 in 2023. We’re gearing up to graduate a pretty big cohort of seniors this year, many of which who have been integral to the rebirth of this team after COVID. Another interesting data point is our freshman population for 2024. Somehow, we only have 2. I’m not really sure how that happened, and would love advice for fixing that problem if anyone has any. Finally, in 2023 we started taking 8th graders on a provisional basis. Usually, this is for students who have older siblings, but we are open to others. We invite interested 8th graders to attend a few meetings to see if they’re a good fit, and then it ultimately comes down to a mentor decision.

• Strength: Relative balance of 10th-12th graders
• Weakness: Small proportion of 9th graders
• Opportunity: Recruit more 9th graders (or 8th graders who then become 9th graders and can advocate to their friends)
• Threat: Lack of 9th graders now may mean a smaller group for that cohort over time

Gender Breakdown

[Note: gender non-conforming students are included in the “female” segment both to protect them if they’re not out to everyone and because I’m evaluating this more as “are we a male-dominated space or a shared space”. Trans students are included with their presented gender identity.]

This has also been a focal point in our recruiting, and one that we are slowly progressing in. It’s worth noting that over 50% of our team leadership has been female in both '23 and '24. This is something we’re actively working on balancing, and take care that our open house and info session presenters reflect all aspects of our team. Another growth opportunity for us is that we do not have any women as engineering mentors. I believe that increasing female representation within our mentor team - particularly in the mechanical and controls subteams - would go a long way. I am overall happy that we’ve been trending in the right direction, but not quite at the rate I’d like. It’s cool that in 3 years we now have more women on the team than we had total students in 2022.

• Strength: Steadily increasing gender balance
• Weakness: Not increasing particularly quickly
• Opportunity: Bring on more female mentors and promote more women in leadership, building a more inclusive space
• Threat: Fewer total women on the team may create a feedback loop that hurts future recruiting cycles

Race/Ethnicity

[Note: as we left this as a free response in our demographics survey, I standardized the data to the best of my ability for visualization. For the purposes of this discussion, students who identified with more than one race are grouped with one of their minority identities. That is to say, each student only contributes to this chart once. If someone has recommendations for how to better handle this in the future, please let me know!]

I am very happy about the trend toward increased diversity in our program. I feel we have done a good job of promoting access to students of color (for reference, Davidson County is 66% White), and that is reflected here. Nashville has the largest US Kurdish population, and one of our mentors has done an excellent job in building the team’s relationship with that community.

• Strength: Increased over team diversity, leading to a proportionally larger amount of students of color
• Weakness: Some groups, particularly Black students, are still underrepresented compared to Nashville’s racial makeup
• Opportunity: Create new targeted recruiting pipelines to encourage participation from traditionally underrepresented groups
• Threat: Lack of participation from traditionally underrepresented groups may create a feedback loop, harming future recruitment cycles

Subteam Breakdown

For this, we’re looking at our 3 primary subteams (scouting and strategy students are each part of a primary subteam in addition to their S&S duties). 7525 did not develop mechanical or controls skills during 2020 and 2021, so (I assume, I wasn’t there yet) students interested in those subjects left. Coming in to 2022, that meant we had a proportionally very large business (MOO) subteam of 10. Since then, we’ve maintained about 7-10 students in MOO each year. Across the same period, controls has grown by 140% and mechanical by a whopping 271%. @Seb has his work cut out for him to organize 26 students worth of prototyping. As we only have 1 in-person mechanical mentor, 1 remote CAD mentor (who comes in person on weekends when things get dire) and myself (who is not a mechanical engineer by any stretch but can project manage and use tools well enough), I expect this to be a big challenge for us.

• Strength: Relatively steady proportions from '23 to '24, corrected from '22
• Weakness: Lack of sufficient mentorship for the largest and quickest growing subteam
• Opportunity: Bring on more mechanical mentors to help guide new mechanical students
• Threat: Lack of mentor guidance may lead to student disengagement, leading students to drop out of the program.

That’s all for now! I’m happy to dive into any specifics or answer questions. If there’s something you’d like to see explored on a future Mentor Corner, let me know as well

– Bryce | Head Mentor

[Seb]

Pioneers Offseason WK 4 Updates

Subteam Updates:

Mechanical:

Mechanical continued with basic CAD and build training with 3 main projects

• Continuing our little WCD drivetrain for an eventual outreach robot. We are waiting for parts from Fabworks to arrive before we can finish the drivetrain, but everything else is done and ready to assemble.
• Fixed a kitbot chassis that had a locked-up gearbox (a shaft flew out while driving)
• Took our second set of MK4i swerve modules, made a chassis with thick Maxtube, greased all the gears, and almost finished all the wiring. We are experimenting with Wago connectors for CAN and power to decide if we will switch to those for the 2024 season, so far we like them quite a lot and they make wiring so much easier. (We will clean up the wiring eventually I promise)

We also found the issue with our Omio CNC, and it seems like the issue is with the bearings on the y-axis threaded rod. We need to find out what bearings they are (if anyone happens to know, please do tell) and buy replacements, and that should solve our problems.

dead bearings

Controls:

Again, this week we worked on path planner and implementing the limelight to detect april tags. We hope to finish up on path planning by the end of the week!

MOO:

Art Gallery Preparations & Keychain Designs: Throughout this week, members of MOO started drafting their ideas using scrap cardboard to prototype an art piece that might be shown in the exhibit. Our mechanical lead, @Seb, was also able to 3D-print 2 keychain designs that one of our members was able to create via OnShape.

keychain photos

Budget Overview Meeting: On Wednesday, leadership members and some of our mentors grouped up to have an overview of our budget and how much fundraising was needed to run our team. This was necessary to ensure transparency amongst our leadership and mentors as many of our leadership members had questions about the current state of our budget.

Preparation for upcoming sponsorship presentation with AllianceBernstein: On Friday, we had an optional meeting, allowing MOO to have a quick run-through of our upcoming presentation for AllianceBernstein on the 14th of this month. We went through the presentation, assessed what needed to be added or changed to our presentation slides, and addressed critiques of our script.

Scouting/Strategy:

This week we continued to work on scouting palooza submissions. We also plan to have a 2018 mock kickoff at next Wednesday’s meeting! As members were able to understand the general structure of how a kickoff will work in our 2013 mock-kickoff we’re shifting to a slightly more complex game and will include a few more sections in the meeting like planning out robot cycles after selecting an architecture! (see the last weekly update for the structure of our last mock kickoff).

[Seb]

Pioneers Offseason WK 5 Updates

Subteam Updates:

Mechanical:

Continued with basic training by having build students continue wiring our second swerve drivetrain and continue building a mini WCD that turned out a little wonky, so that might need to be re-done next meeting.

Omio problems continue: we now need a new ball nut as well as the 3 bearings that allow the screw to spin. We are in the process of finding the best place to buy these with fast shipping times, so we can hopefully have our Omio back online before the season starts.

Controls:

Sadly not much new happened this week. We continued working on vision with the limelight, wiring, and autonomous path planning (already detailed in previous posts) so we don’t have much of an update for you on the controls side this week.

MOO:

Successful sponsorship presentation for AllianceBernstein: On Tuesday of this week, a group of our members presented an overview of our team and our growth to our returning sponsor AllianceBernstein, and successfully renewed our sponsorship for the 2023-2024 season. This was a huge win for us as more funding = more opportunity!!!

We’re also planning on an interactive robot demonstration to present at the AB building on Dec. 1st as a means to garner more funds for the upcoming on-season.

Individual fundraising amongst team members: On Wednesday we launched our individual fundraising program! This incentivizes members of our team to reach out to those they know in an effort to raise funds for the team. If they achieve the outreach requirements of sending messages, emails, and raising money on their own, members will enter a raffle that will award them with an array of prizes.

Scouting/Strategy:

As mentioned in the last post, this week we had another mock kickoff! Instead of basing it on the 2018 game which some of our members already knew of, we decided to shift our focus to “Rhythm Remix”, a game created by team 694 in 2021. This time around, we were able to minimize talking and the usage of phones (for things other than looking at the game manual) which was the main issue in our initial 2013 mock-kickoff, and get more input from newer members of the team who needed the practice by simply emphasizing the importance and rationale behind the mock-kickoff at the start of the meeting. Additionally, we asked group leaders (those who lead groups who are answering parts of the shaker sheet) to ask for more input from newer members. We had initially planned to have 3 mock kickoffs but this one went extremely well and newer students seemed acquainted with the atmosphere of kickoff so we will not be having a 3rd!

We followed a similar structure to our previous mock kickoff with some tweaks:

1. Watch Game Reveal Video (5 mins)
2. Break into 4 groups (2 mins)
3. Shaker Sheet (each group does at least 2/4 sections: 40 mins)

• Shaker Sheet: here (we tried to minimize game specific questions as those won’t be on any shaker sheet at MK as we won’t know the game)

4. Review Shaker sheet (10 mins)
5. List all robot actions (15 mins)

• This includes driving, score low, etc. As a group, we wrote all of the possible robot actions on a whiteboard

6. List possible robot architectures & select the ideal one (20 mins)

• After getting all possible actions, we used them to create 6 separate architectures and create an ideal one

7. Create autonomous and teleop robot cycles on the board with our chosen architecture (10 mins)

[Seb]

Pioneers Offseason WK 6 and 7 Updates

Note: We did not have an update last week because we only had one meeting and it was Thanksgiving break

Subteam Updates:

Mechanical:

Mechanical continued last week and this week with basic training for new members. The main project was still the small WCD for our outreach robot (forgot to take a pic) and also trying to fix a kitbot that had been assembled wrong the first time. We also took inventory of all the tube stock we own to know how much we need to buy. I am currently working on ways to get more students involved because as of right now, there are far more mech kids than we have tasks for.

Controls:

Controls had a packed week! We made great progress on most of our projects this week. We were able to get our new NEO swerve drive up and running with the YAGSL library, but we’ve noticed that we’re still facing issues with drift. We’ll be investigating this consistent issue in weeks to come. Additionally, we set up an arm reset function to make our pre-match load easier and made some progress on our vision work.

We continued to move our new members through Java and FIRST onboarding, and we’re looking forward to using them for our new season.

MOO:

Reaching out to schools in Nashville: This week, we’ve continued to contact nearby schools in Nashville that might be interested in having Little Libraries installed in their schools filled with STEM children’s books. We’ve also been provided the opportunity to start on a longer-term project which includes redesigning a school’s entire library! We’re still in the process of deciding how we would do this + deciding if we can take on the project.

Art Gallery Progress: Throughout the week, some members in charge of the art gallery exhibit have visited nearby reuse centers to gather materials for our pieces. We’ve started prepping, painting, and assembling some of our pieces and are on track to have our pieces ready for the exhibit!

Scouting/Strategy:

Not much happened for Scouting/Strategy this week, we probably won’t have many updates to bring you until after kickoff as we have finished all of our mock kickoffs and scouting palooza.

Extra events:

On Saturday, Dec 2 we volunteered at the Adventure Science Center, a local interactive science museum, and their FLL Middle TN Qualifier event for the year. The Pioneers were happy to help our friends at the science center as we aided in refereeing matches for the kids and helping in event setup and cleanup. Watching the teams compete was so fun and we hope to help out again next year!

[Seb]

Pioneers Offseason WK 8-9 Updates

Note: This will be our last weekly update for the off-season! Midterms have just started for students so we will not have meetings over the coming week and will only have 2 optional meetings (aside from kickoff) during winter break.

Subteam Updates:

Mechanical:

Mechanical continued the last bit of training for new students by finishing the drivetrain for the outreach robot pictured here (the other gearbox got finished too just a day after).

We will likely have to postpone further progress on this robot until after the season because we don’t have enough money to keep making this robot and cover all other costs.

We also took inventory of all unused tubing so we know exactly what we have in the future.

MOO:

Art Gallery Progress: Throughout these last few weeks, we’ve made great progress in creating pieces for our art gallery exhibit! Crochet gears are in progress, and components of our “mechanical garden” are being completed. Our promotional flyer is also finished, and our gallery will be featuring one of MLK’s art teachers

Awards Progress: Throughout the past couple of weeks, we’ve been slowly finishing our executive summaries so we can go ahead and get it out of the way! This will take some of the load off of us once we start on other awards and documents that’ll need to be completed during the season.

Controls:

This week we continued to work on our projects: implementing YAGSL on our neo swerve bot, using the limelight, and finalizing path planning.

Scouting & Strategy:

Over the past weeks, we have been formulating our schedule for kickoff. We generally based it on this CD post and our schedule from last year’s kickoff event. We will provide more elaboration on how each portion of the schedule went and what we would change after kickoff! For now, here’s our (tentative) schedule for kickoff:

Saturday Jan 6th:

10:15 - Leadership Arrives

10:30 - Everyone Else Arrives

11:00 - Watch Kickoff Video

12:00 - Shaker Sheet in 4 separate groups

1:15 - Lunch!

1:55 - Shaker Sheet Review (everyone)

2:25 - List Robot Actions

3:00 - List robot architectures

3:50 - Pack Up & Clean

4:00 - leave

That Night - Send out Strat test to do

Sunday Jan 7th:

11:00 - Everyone Arrives

11:15 - Game Demo

12:00 - Lunch

12:40 - Explain scouting, drive team, scouting test, etc.

1:10

-Strat breaks up and selects items to scout

-Everyone else breaks into subteams and plans out what to do

1:45 - Strat finalizes architecture decision and plans out possible match cycles

2:30 - Strat members go back to subteams

2:50 - Pack up and Clean

3:00 - Leave

Other Events:

As a result of a tornado hitting Nashville on December 9th, some of our team members joined the Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition in providing meals to families that had been affected by the disaster. We had an amazing time helping out our community and hope to become more involved in the new year!

​​

[Seb]

Pioneers Kickoff Day 1

Note: Today we had the first half of our 2-day kickoff, we’ll have another similar update tomorrow covering what we do tomorrow and recapping the entire event. We will also have an update soon discussing a recent change in shop location

Schedule

10:15 - Leadership Arrives to setup

10:30 - Everyone else arrives

11:00 - Watch Kickoff Video

12:00 - Shaker Sheet in 7 separate groups

• We split people into 7 smaller groups of about 5 to make sure everyone was able to give more input
• We used 2791’s Shaker Sheet which includes a broad range of questions that can cover the important points of almost any game
• This worked well, almost everyone was focused throughout the process and gave input in individual groups

1:15 - Lunch!

1:55 - Shaker Sheet Review

• This ensured everyone was on the same page about rules and how the game works before we moved on to making architectural decisions
• Unfortunately, fewer new members voiced their input while we were in a larger group (public speaking can be quite the imposition)

2:45 - List Robot Actions & Split robot actions into 4 groups

• First, we listed every specific thing robots can do (things like defense, strafing, etc. are encompassed by drive)
• After listing all robot actions, we classified them into different groups (Need, Want, Nice, and No) based on how feasible each action would be considering our limitations as a mid-ranged team and if trying to complete them would be worth it
• Need:
  • Driving is needed
  • We valued scoring in the speaker over the amp as it provides significantly more points in both Auto and Teleop compared to the amp and is not too difficult to do (the kit bot this year can score in the speaker)
  • We placed climbing (solo) in need because it is the easiest way to get points in endgame and is not too difficult. You would need to cycle speaker and park to make the same amount of points that you would get from climbing and you would also be missing out on the ensemble RP unless your alliance partners had reliable hatch-scoring capabilities (probably not going to be very common).
  • We place intaking from source in need because it is significantly easier than intaking from the floor
• Want:
  • Intake from the floor is a high-ranking want because if you can do a 2-point auto (e.g. score speaker, cross line, intake ground, score speaker) you can make the points you would otherwise make in over 2 non-amplified speaker cycles in teleop. Floor intake also enables you to quickly cycle using the game pieces that start on the ground in teleop.
  • Scoring in the amp provides significantly fewer points than the speaker and although you can both amplify the speaker and get a coopertition bonus from the amp (lowering required notes scored for melody rp), it does not directly provide you with an RP (that is exclusive to the amp). The amplification is nice but we valued the 5pt auto score of the speaker and higher teleop score over being able to amplify the speaker.
  • Climbing with friends is having multiple teams on a chain, being able to do this would probably make climbing more difficult so we placed it in want
• Nice:
  • Driving under the core is nice because it lets you more quickly cycle but it means your robot’s tiny and is not a necessity
  • Scoring far shots into the speaker is nice but it’s significantly more difficult than just slamming into the subwoofer for alignment and shooting into the speaker.
• No:
  • Buddy climbing: no
  • Scoring in the trap is not something viable for us as it’s much too difficult to do for something giving you a max 5 pts (ignoring the ensemble RP)
• This exercise went quicker than we had initially expected because of training at mock kickoffs and newer members gave more input than they had while we were reviewing the shaker sheet

3:10 - List robot architectures

• Using our list of robot actions and how we classified them we created various robot architectures defined by their abilities to complete the actions
• What we wanted to accomplish was:
  • Intake from source
  • Climb
  • Score speaker
  • Intake floor (maybe)
  • Score amp (maybe)
• Non-crossed-out architectures in the image are those we said were viable for us to accomplish
• Tomorrow we will have a strategy meeting to discuss the architecture we said we wanted during this section of kickoff and revise it if there are any points we were missing

3:50 - Pack Up & Clean

4:00 - leave

Tonight - Rules Test

• Tomorrow we will finalize our architecture decision and decide what data to collect for scouting. To make sure everyone making these decisions is familiar with the game, everyone who wants to participate in the discussion has to get at least a 35/40 (87.5%) on 1678’s Rules Test

CAD/Mech first impressions and ideas

Using KrayonCAD, I made a simple model of what I think would be a reasonable robot for us to make (not really to scale). It features 4 rollers to get the notes off the ground and into the tunnel that feeds into 2 flywheels. The tunnel/shooter can be either pivoting or static depending on what we decide on. The two climber hooks are rather simple to just add on to our robot, and if we do use a pivoting shooter I had an idea to put hooks on the end so the shooter can lift the robot, but that idea might not work very well.

Other ideas have also been presented, like something similar to 1986’s 2013 robot, with an intake on an arm at the back that pivots up to feed to a static shooter tunnel with 4 shooter wheels.

The idea with a robot like this is that we would have wheels in the intake that could place the notes in the amp, which we have found to be something we want to do but isn’t necessary.

Another idea presented is an intake/shooter combo similar to what teams did in 2016 like 330. This would allow us to intake and shoot with the same mechanism and would likely allow for scoring in both the speaker and the amp. It would also allow us to be short enough to go under the chains but tall enough when needed to score in the amp. The major downside to this design is that we would have to turn around in auto because we intake and shoot from the same place.

As this game is very similar to the FTC game in 2020, we dug up the school’s old ftc bot to take a look at how it works, and it’s a pretty simple yet effective way to get the rings from the ground to a shooter that works. The main downside to this robot is that no bumper gaps are allowed in this game, so you either have to go over or under the bumper. We will likely be looking at some other FTC robots from this year to get inspiration for intakes.

Another year with opportunities for inspiration is 2017, when floor pickup for gears was important. Lots of teams did something similar to 1619, with a simple slot that pivots down to pick up the gear and then pivots up.

While this design worked great for 2017 because the scoring area for gears was so low, it likely won’t be of use in Crescendo unless wheels are added and the intake is able to feed into a shooter. Either way, we will likely take inspiration from some of these 2017 gear intakes and 2019 floor hatch pickup mechanisms with similar designs.

Another good source of inspiration is F4 cadathon 8 and its recent rerun, cadmas. Fellow OA team 111’s/@Eliot’s winning submission’s overall intake and architecture layout would fit very well for Crescendo, and other submissions to these cadathons have very good solutions as well.

Tomorrow, we will be prototyping intakes and shooters using plywood and whatever wheels we have laying around. The goal is to find the best wheels for shooting and intaking as well as the best amount of compression for each. We will have a post recapping all of our findings from tomorrow.

[Seb]

Pioneers Kickoff Day 2

Schedule

11:00 - Everyone Arrives

11:15 - Game Demo

• We ran through 4 game demos to shed light on how gameplay might look like (seeing play on the field is different from just looking at the rulebook)
• Game Demo Rules:
  • Robots are a pair of someone sitting in a rolling chair and another pushing the rolling chair
  • Notes = balls (we only have 1 note)
  • You need 6 human players (2 at amps, 2 at speakers, and 2 at sources)
  • Taped-out triangles are stages, if you want to climb you have to do 5 jumping jacks inside of the triangle and 10 if you are climbing with a partner
  • 5 balls (we only had 1 note) are placed on the taped-out center line and 3 are placed on the spikes in each wing
  • To score in the amp you hand a ball to a human player sitting in a chair
  • To score in the speaker you have to throw a ball over the subwoofer (Taped-out trapezoid) to the human player standing behind it
  • You aren’t supposed to go through the cores (people still did)
• Our taped-out field had quite a few limitations: we could not effectively amplify the speaker, counting scores was up to the “robots” so they could just lie about getting more points, and we didn’t have an effective way to stop people from going under the core
• The main takeaway we got from this exercise is that floor intaking should be valued over intaking directly from the source. It allows you to more rapidly cycle from the game pieces on the ground and once ground pieces are out you can simply go to the source and have the human player drop a note onto the ground. In our demo games intaking from the source was obsolete until the latter half of teleop.

12:00 - Lunch

12:40 - Explain scouting, drive team, scouting test, etc.

• We wanted to make sure everyone who wants to be on the drive team on Strat gets the opportunity to understand what they would be getting into. We discussed the operator, driver, all forms of Scouters, pit crew, etc.

1:10 - Strat finalizes architecture decision & schedules

• First, we reviewed our need, want, nice, & no list. We moved ground intake from want to need and source intake from need to want (see the main takeaway from game demo for rationale).
• Our general idea for the shooter is some kind of fixed shooter similar to the everybot, so the main question today was what kind of intake we want to do. We decided that under the bumper would be a pain so we are ruling that out, and the two main considerations were scoop intake in front (like team titanium 2013 in the above post) or otb intake in the back. Below is our list of pros and cons for each.

	Pro	Con
Front	floor and source load from same place, easier to add amp mech	broken state stops from source loading
Back	great for auto, if floor intake breaks can still get from source	game piece must contort

• The next step of our strategy meeting was planning out a rough schedule for CAD and Build using Monday(programming and MOO will be added later). Our schedule can be seen below and is more aggressive than in the past with the goal of being done early to get lots of programming time and drive practice.

• We also planned out what motors will be used keeping in mind that we have a limited number of neos and falcons.

Where?	Number	Type
Drive	8	Neo
Shoot	2	Falcon
Climb	2	Neo
Intake	2	1 Neo 1 Falc
Kicker?	1	775/550
Total	14/15

2:30 - Strat members go back to subteams

• For the rest of the meeting we continued with regular subteam work
• Mechanical began building the SOURCE and AMP game elements

2:50 - Pack up and Clean

3:00 - Leave

Scouting Palooza Update: We won the Team Scouting award!

[BryceHanson]

One of the things we’ll be trying this year is a post tagging system, so viewers can quickly look for posts based on their content. We will be beginning with mechanical, controls, MOO, scouting/strategy, misc., and mentor tags. Guess which one this is.

Kickoff weekend purchasing

One of the things that I do incredibly often is nag other mentors to learn what their teams are purchasing. I’ve sent plenty of texts, DMs, phone calls, and emails to other teams to see what we’re missing, what might be useful, and what might go out of stock. In an effort to be transparent, here are the Pioneers’ opening weekend buys.

A few quick notes:

• We are relatively restricted on robot budget this year, as we cover all student fees and the team doubled in size since 2023
• We will not purchase anything from VEX (and will do our best to avoid VEX-affiliated SKUs provided by other vendors).
• We will be reusing parts from previous robots where applicable. For example, we bought 3 WCP climber kits in 2022. Those will very likely make a reappearance this season.
• We did some pre-season purchasing of motors and such, which came out of last season’s budget.
• We love our vouchers! In kickoff weekend, we spent our entire REV and AM voucher allotments. Thank you vendors!

REV

Item	Quantity	Price	Total
MAXPlanetary 100:1	1	$120.00	$120.00
MAXPlanetary 45:1	1	$120.00	$120.00
MAXTube 2x1 grid (47")	3	$38.00	$144.00
MAXTube 2x1 LIGHT grid (47")	2	$28.00	$56.00
Blinkin LED Driver	2	$46.00	$92.00
		SHIPPING	$38.58
		TOTAL	$490.58 ($125 from voucher)

A lot of these purchases are driven by an expectation to be using a Cranberry Alarm-adjacent architecture. The 100:1 MP would be for the intake wrist and the 45:1 for the climber. The heavy tube is for our chassis (we overbought a little - you can get it done in 2 sticks but I’d rather be safe than sorry) and the light tube for other superstructure. We want to experiment more with signal lighting after some success in 2023, so we picked up 2 Blinkins (one being a spare).

TheThriftyBot

Item	Quantity	Price	Total
1/8" Dyneema Rope (25ft)	1	$10.99	$10.99
4" 45A Urethane Wheel (1/2" hex bore)	4	$29.99	$119.96
		SHIPPING	$11.80
		TOTAL	$142.75

Yeah man, these sure are shooter wheels and rope. Not much else to say here. We have 4" 40a compliant wheels, 4" colsons, and 4" blue neoprene tread wheels that we’re going to test, but we’re betting these guys will get used.

AndyMark

Item	Quantity	Price	Total
Single Chain Set	1	$49.00	$49.00
NOTE	6	$19.00	$114.00
MK Battery (2pk)	3	$116.00	$348.00
		SHIPPING	$70.58
		TOTAL	$581.58 ($575 voucher)

There was a mad rush at noon EST to buy some notes today, and we decided to just lump everything together to save on shipping. Though you can get MK batteries cheaper directly from the vendor, we didn’t see a ton else we wanted that was in stock.

I will post a more in-depth robot budget (or full team budget?) breakdown sometime in the future

[Seb]

Pioneers Build Season Wk. 1 Updates:

Subteam Updates:

Mechanical:

Build

Prototyping:

This week we began our first prototypes: climber hook, shooter, and floor intake. Our intake prototype seen below features some 3d printed prototyping blocks on tubes that can slide up and down to adjust the c-c distance of the rollers and then we adjust the angle by just tilting the whole thing. We made this table to list all the needs and variables of this intake.

Needs	Variables (first thing to test)
pick up flat pieces on floor	height from ground (1/2")
durable	acquisition angle (between rollers, 45*)
simple	compression (1.5")
relatively compliant	speed (drill)
light	durometer ( 45a squish wheels)
consistent (touch it own it)	width (16")

We also made a simple (and a little scuffed) version of the Kitbot shooter for initial wheel testing, as seen below. We will work on improving this prototype and test different wheels, the number of wheels, the durometer, etc.

Our last prototype was a sort of climber hook that we mainly used to test the grip by using some random rubber we had lying around and found that it held very well without slipping on the chain. Our next prototype will likely be something similar to 4481’s “Trident” idea so the hook does not slip at all on the chain.

We will be continuing to prototype as the season progresses and will share all discoveries we make and use them on our robot if they work well.

Building Game Elements:

We started building on Sunday and have completed the subwoofer, amp, and source. We are almost done with the speaker but will likely make it in 2 pieces so it can fit through a door because we will be moving these pieces around a lot.

CAD

Our first CAD iteration used the kitbot shooter with an intake I designed, as seen below. After thinking about doing a Cranberry Alarm style handoff instead, we decided it would be better and reduce failure points because this first idea requires a lot of wheels to get the note to the shooter.

We will also likely switch our shooter to something more similar to Cranberry Alarm, with 2 wheels per side, but that still needs to be prototyped.

We also plan on adding a sort of flippy bar like Cranberry Alarm tested for scoring in the amp. With enough testing and prototyping, we think it can be a rather simple and consistent way to score in the amp.

As for the climber, the first idea was just to throw two GreyT climbers from 2022 on the sides, but a few other ideas have been thrown around, like using the flippy bar as the climber, but We think that it would be too slow and possibly break.

Schedule

We are still on track for all of the goals we set at the beginning of the season but are a little behind on climber hook prototyping. CAD should be done over the weekend because it’s a 3-day weekend (possibly 5 with a chance of snow!) and there will be plenty of time for it.

Controls:

This week we got a great start to the season! We’re still finishing up onboarding for some new members, but we’ve been able to rework our implementation of YAGSL and have started on working with 2024 software updates to plan out our future code. We’ve also started on auto paths and optimal strategy in that area. We’ve found that drift is still a significant problem for our drivetrains and look forward to continuing to build in programming adjustments to combat it.

MOO:

Art Gallery: As our opening day for our exhibit is soon, MOO members have continued to work on pieces (such as crochet gears) and have started new ones (creating a main centerpiece). Portraits will also be created to be shown at the exhibit.

Creating Resources: We’ve also started working on some resources for competition such as the Tech Binder and Judge’s Notebook. We were able to get our Tech Binder template completed and have other members working on different components of the Judge’s Notebook.

Working on Awards: Lastly, we’ve started on an outline for our Impact Award essay, are continuing to work on our Executive Summaries, and have made progress in completing a submission for the Digital Animation Award.

Scouting & Strategy:

After kickoff, we dove into setting up our scouting app. We are using AppSheet to write to a Google doc and by using the data there creating a tableau dashboard used by the Analyst at comp. Here’s an overview of what we decided to collect (Excluding alliance, match number, names, team numbers, etc.):

Pit Scouts (Go down into the pit and do stuff):

• Number of Batteries
• Years of Driver Experience
  • This is nice to have when forming a picklist, it can easily determine which of two teams you pick if they are close in performance
• Drivetrain
• Drivetrain Motors
  • This is similarly also helpful for picklists, mainly selecting a defense bot for a second pick
• Programming Language
  • In case we need to help a team with programming their robot, we collect data on the programming language they use (even if we don’t use this much there’s no harm in collecting it!)
• Picture
  • Hopefully this year we can better train pit scouts on how to take good photos
• Notes

Super Scouts (Qualitative Scouts):

• Robot Driver ranking (1-3 with 3 being the highest ranking)
  • This gives us more of a perspective on driver skills other than just how many years of driver experience a driver has
  • Super Scouts rank every robot on 1 alliance
• Robot Defense ranking (0 if no defense was played, same 1-3 scale otherwise)
  • This allows us to easily pick possible defense bots for 2nd picks or advise an alliance captain on who to pick if they do not have scouting data on defense
• Notes (More detailed than pit/quantitative scouter’s notes)
• Super Scouts collect these for each robot

Quantitative Scouts:

• Auto:
  • Intook from where? (robots can’t intake from the source during auto because the human players can’t cross the starting line in auto to feed a game piece into the field so this is just ground intake & no intake)
  • Did the robot cross the starting line
  • Amp Score
  • Speaker Score
• Teleop:
  • Did Alliance use the coopertition button?
    • This may not be very useful but there’s no harm in collecting it (would be used to determine how likely a specific robot alliance would be to use the coopertition button)
  • Amp Score
  • Speaker Score
  • Intook From Where? (ground, no intake, source)
• Endgame:
  • Hatch Score
  • Climb type (solo climb, buddy climb, climb with a partner, climb with 2 partners)
  • Issues during the match (Tippy, Disabled, Parts Fell off/Broke, Failed Auto, Made Alliance Fail Climb)
  • Notes

If there’s anything we missed please point it out we want to make sure we’re collecting all useful data!

General Roadmap:

• By the end of the week (Sunday) we hope to be done with the actual data collection app on AppSheet (already mostly done, we just need to add some final touches)
• We should hopefully have a finalized Tableau dashboard done in ~2 weeks
• Once week 0 matches are over, we should be able to train our scouters so they can be effective at our week 2 comp at Arkansas

Volunteering:

Second Harvest Food Bank:

Today, members of the Pioneers volunteered at the Second Harvest Food Bank, sorting and packing food items, and even packing 1,473lbs of apples! Items that were sorted and packed will be handed out this coming Monday as a part of their mobile food truck initiative.

The Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee provides food to those facing hunger in the Middle Tennessee region. We’re so glad that we were able to help in the process of distributing goods that support Tennesseans, especially in terms of education! Hunger prevents students from being in a state that would foster the best learning in their education, and our goal is to uplift individuals by providing them with the necessary resources to succeed both inside and outside the classroom.

[Seb]

Pioneers Build Season (Wk. 1, Pt. 2) Updates:

Subteam Updates:

Mechanical:

Game Elements

We finished building all of our game elements this week, except the stage because we don’t plan to do trap and will just hang the chain from something else. The speaker was too big to fit through the door, so we made it in 2 pieces and clamped them together which works quite well.

Prototyping

We improved our shooter prototype and got our first test into the speaker. We used the 4” thriftybot wheels which work very well at drill speed, so we shouldn’t have any problem with them at real motor speeds.

shooter prototype

first shooter test

We also did some more scientific testing with our intake prototype to test different wheel angles to see what worked best. From our testing, we determined that almost any angle works, but that somewhere around 30 degrees worked the best.

70 degree intake test

50 degree intake test

30 degree intake test

15 degree intake test

Design

Here is what our robot alpha cad is currently looking like: (ignore the unfilleted stuff it’s temporary) (also ignore the weird rendering glitches)

The design is heavily based on Cranberry Alarm’s robot, with the shooter being almost the same and the intake being a similar style. We still need to add a climber mechanism, using GreyT telescopes we have from 2022, and a flip-up bar to score in the amp.

Controls:

This week was very productive for controls, to say the least.

We were able to get started on our navigation subsystem, which utilizes input from both the NavX and Pose acquired from the Limelight’s view of AprilTags.

We were also able to use YAGSL to its full potential by altering the heading correction function, thus eliminating our drift. We have had a huge problem with swerve drift for the past year, which you can see below. Much appreciated is the help from @nstrike and @BoiledBurntBagel. Our NEO swerve chassis can now move much quicker and much more accurately than before, and we look forward to utilizing this in competition with our full robot!

swerve drift

See how it’s working now here:

no more swerve drift

We’ve been able to get started on planning out 3+ piece autos with the PathPlanner update. Testing is in the near future, ideally, as our mechanical subteam is moving along very well with our field build and prototyping.

We’ve also made some great progress in electrical planning with our preliminary robot design and CAD, and we’re looking to 3D print cable combs to keep our wiring clean and thus less likely to experience the technical issues we encountered last season due to poor wire management.

MOO:

Judge’s Notebook: We’re close to completing updated organizational charts for our Judge’s Notebook and will be continuing to gradually add to the notebook as we have more volunteering + outreach events.

Digital Animation Award: We’ve also continued to make progress on our submission, and will be working hard to prepare it for the Thursday deadline

Here is a draft from a couple of days ago of our main character for the animation:

Scouting & Strat:

Still working on our Tableau app, expect an update on that along with our finished App Sheet apps on Wednesday!

Snow

Nashville is supposed to get 3-5 inches of snow in the next few days, so we will likely be missing at least 2 meetings (Monday and Wednesday) because the district will be closed and roads will be unsafe.

Links

CAD: Onshape

GitHub: FRC-7525 · GitHub

[Zatack7]

Not to be dramatic, but I would fight a bear for that lil” raccoon.

[Isriah]

His name is science raccoon, and you are not alone in this fight

[Seb]

Pioneers Build Season Wk. 2 Updates:

Note: Because of snowy weather conditions & Icy roads we were only able to have meetings on Saturday and Sunday.

Subteam Updates:

Mechanical:

We are still mostly on track with everything. CAD is done except for climber and amp scorer, both add-ons for later. The goal is to take the current CAD and build it as fast as possible to start getting testing in.

Today we built our chassis using some Maxtube we had, made an aluminum bellypan, and started mounting and wiring the electronics.

Yesterday I played around with the flippy bar ideas in CAD and came up with this.

The problem with an arm so long is that it’s not really possible to store it in the robot without being hit by the intake, so one idea we came up with is to use a rack and pinion along the side of the shooter like this.

However we end up doing it, it will be designed as simply as possible to just slap onto the robot and hopefully allow us to score in the amp, which we plan to prototype once we have the robot mostly built.

Controls:

Due to the snowy weather conditions, controls was not as readily able to get our hands on the robot. However, in the past week, we were able to contribute our heading correction to YAGSL and thus build some experience working on open source projects! We are working on incorporating the new update of this library with our last year’s robot, as well as 2024 PathPlanner. Additionally, because of the quick work of our mechanical subteam, we’ve been able to start wiring our new chassis!

Oh, and our Blinkin got a little crispy. Not entirely sure of the cause, but it isn’t voltage!

MOO:

Art Gallery: In anticipation of the snowy weather, our members working on the gallery have been able to work independently on their projects.

Here are some images that will be featured in our gallery:

Fundraising: As the season continues to ramp up, we’re cranking out our last grants and have established dates for a Panera and Chipotle fundraiser! Later on in the season, we will be much more focused on award writing and creating our materials for competition.

Scouting & Strat:

We were able to get the bulk of our tableau app built and finished up our apps for Quantitative, Qualitative, and Pit scouts on app sheet

Here’s an overview of our tableau app (for the data we randomly put in values):

• Team View:
  • Auto and Teleop Scoring over time for note-scoring locations (by match)
  • Average Auto & Teleop scoring for note-scoring locations
  • Co-op button pressed (by match)
    • This is by entire alliance, if anyone on their alliance pressed the coop button the result is true
  • Auto Intaking (each donut chart = a ring, the more orange the more often its intaken from)
    • Should help find out what members of the opposing alliance to talk to so we can ensure we don’t crash into them. We just see if they have ever taken from the center line, and if they have we ask them to to crash into us (if we attempt a center-line auto).
    • Also helps see if our alliance partners can intake in auto
  • Notes
    • From all scouters
  • Intaking (just a table showing how often a team intakes from the ground & source)
  • Robot Overview
    • We found this a pretty efficient way to visualize almost all of the pit-scout data. It’s a short overview of a team’s drive train, prog language, driver & defense score, etc.
  • Climb
    • How teams climbed

• Alliance View: Easy way to see all participants in a match at once
  • The red and blue boxes with team numbers are the teams for each alliance, they dynamically change with the match number (you change the robot 1, 2, 3, etc parameters accordingly)
  • Red/Blue Alliance Auto and Teleop provide a reasonable overview for each respective alliance, if we want to dig deeper on any specific team we can just look at team view
  • Blue/Red alliance climb help plan our endgame. If none of our alliance partners can climb it might make sense to just keep cycling because getting an amplified speaker score (assuming we can amplify the speaker pre-end game or during endgame) is worth more than just the max points we can get with a spotlighted so

• Pick List View
  • This will help while we create 2nd and 3rd pick lists the day before alliance selection.
  • Avg defense score is just the average of the defense ranking given to robots by quantitative Scouters (excluding 0 which means they didn’t defend)
  • Moving the sliders removes teams who do not meet the threshold for the sliders from the graphs