8745 RoBeagles - Build thread 2022

[ExponentialPower]

Hello! We are team 8745, the RoBeagles! We are a rookie community team from North Phoenix, Arizona. We have participated in two competitions so far, Arizona Valley and Flagstaff. At Flagstaff, we were captain of the eighth alliance and at Arizona Valley we were first pick of the fifth. Winning all three rookie awards, we were invited to the FIRST Championship in Houston! We are excited to join the Open Alliance and will post updates on our robot for the rest of the season!

Our robot, Toto, is a high hub shooter with a turret and can climb to the mid rung. It is late in the season, so here is a recap of our robot so far:

Subsystems:

Intake:

The intake is a set of aluminum bars with two sets of compliant wheels. It is controlled on a single pivot and is released by the climber arms at the start of the match. We went for a simple design that isn’t retractable, because we figured we wouldn’t need to retract it during the match.

Shooter:

Our shooter is a set of counter-rotating compliant wheels powered by a 1:1 NEO and fed by a snowblower motor up a curved ramp. The turret shoots straight up with no spin, and the direction is controlled by the turret.

Turret:

Our turret is an unique design which is essentially a rotating deflector. It is capable of rotating ~360 degrees and is controlled manually, but we are working on adding a limelight to improve accuracy.

Climbers:

We went for simplicity by buying two AndyMark climbers and mounting them on either side of our robot.

Links:
GitHub (Java): RoBeagles - FRC Team 8745 · GitHub
Website (WIP): https://www.robeagles.com/

[ExponentialPower]

Update for this week

• Shooter

  • We added a linear actuator to our robot which allows us to change the angle of the hood on our shooter so we have capability to score from the launchpad, along with most other places on the field. The actuator unfortunately broke for unknown reasons, causing it to only be capable of extending, not retracting. We already have ordered backups and replaced it.
    

    

  • We tested shooter capabilities from different distances by changing motor speed and turret angle. We found that we could score from almost anywhere on the field, and we tested this at the fields of teams 498 and 6413.

  • Updated our limelight mount to a custom 3D printed part.

• Intake

  • We tested adding, but ultimately removing 2" mecanum wheels from our intake, because they didn’t actually collect the cargo, only pushed them to the middle. This is great, but we put them on the intake in a place where we can already collect the cargo. That makes them a disadvantage, so we are going to try with them on the outside of the bars, replacing the larger mecanum wheels. We also tested replacing out modified compliant wheels with red capture wheels, but they were too flimsy and failed to grab cargo so we decided to switch back.
    
    

• Climbers

  • We rotated the direction of our climber arms to both face inwards on the robot. The idea is to climb with one arm, then swing and catch the high rung with the second one. The change only took 15 minutes, so we figured it would be worth trying, but not too bad if it fails. It unfortunately didn’t end up working, but it was still worth a try.
    
    

• Repairs/Replacements

  • Replaced lexan on our shooter, entire wiring panel, and sponsor panel after they cracked at the last competition.
  • Made replacement intake arms so they are easy and quick to replace in the event of bending/snapping them
    
    

• Programming

  • Practiced tuning the limelight in different conditions to hopefully be capable of quickly setting it up at worlds.
  • Programmed the limelight to calculate the distance to the hub and adjust the linear actuator and shooter speed to the correct values to shoot from almost anywhere on the field.
  • Finally got odometry working with turret flipping logic so we can track the hub for the entire match. We also setup the odometry to calculate the distance to the hub and to adjust the turret rotation and hood angle when the limelight can’t see the target.
  • Setup a practice hub with the retroreflective tape