9033 Ocebots | 2024 Build Thread | Open Alliance

[Ocebots9033]

Welcome to the Ocebots 2024 Open Alliance build thread!

The Ocebots are extremely excited to be taking part in Open Alliance for the first time during the 2024 season!

Who are the Ocebots?

The Ocebots are an FRC team based out of Yorktown High School in Arlington Virginia. We have ~20 students, 1 mentor, and 5 team leads for all of our subteams. Our team is entirely student-led.

OA Posting

During build season, a weekly update will be posted by this account recapping everything we did during the week. Expect these updates to come out on Fridays. At the end of build season, we will do a full breakdown of the full bot in one post

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Links

Instagram

TBA

Github

Website (coming soon)

2024 Robot CAD (coming soon)

[Ocebots9033]

Update 1: Let the build season begin!

It’s been 2 days since kickoff, and things are moving over here at the Ocebots. We had a fun kickoff day, followed by a day off, and a nice Monday meeting. Here’s the recap!

Saturday (Kickoff):

For kickoff, we started by setting expectations for the day and then watching the kickoff stream. After that, we started reading the manual and broke into groups to talk about ideas. After getting our hands on the note, we practiced throwing it and looked at how it would behave in the air. With a basic idea for a claw intake and flywheel shooter, we called it a day.

Kickoff Pictures

Sunday:

While we didn’t officially meet on Sunday, but that didn’t stop us from trying some cardboard prototypes at home. After Saturday we thought that we wanted to do a servo-based claw intake, with a shooter that could flip to dump the notes into the amp. After some tests by members at home, we decided that a roller-based ground intake would be best. (I would attach videos but because of the age of this account, we can’t do that yet. Hopefully next week we will be able to).

Monday

We decided on an under-bumper intake (for now) and worked on theory crafting that. Along with that, we changed a plan from dumping into the amp to shooting into it. We also got Swerve working 100% even on carpet! We ran it into a wall accidentally and it ruined one of the absolute encoder adapters. Luckily it wasn’t a full-speed impact, and nothing seems permanently damaged.

We plan on working the rest of this week on prototyping, before starting CAD over the weekend and starting to build on the 22nd.

[Ocebots9033]

Update 1.5: Moving along nicely

Normally, we’re going to post 1 OA update per week, however, this week since we posted early, we’re going to do a half-update to keep our version numbers intact.

Tuesday

We got some intake testing in using some hex shafts. View the video of our test here
After that, we went and tested swerve on some carpet in a small teachers’ lounge. We ran the bot into the wall at full speed. The bot did not like this, and the Sparks flew off. The bot turned into a rhombus (rhombot anyone?), but luckily nothing was permanently damaged, except for a single absolute encoder adapter and a shorted rio breaker.

Wednesday

Due to the strong storm that came through our area, we weren’t able to meet in person. We still met online and did some math to calculate how our shooter would need to be angled.

Thursday

We built a cardboard mockup of an AMP, it surprisingly worked pretty well. We’ll attach some pictures with our next update, especially when we build more field elements.

See you next Friday for Update 2!

[Ocebots9033]

Update 2: Let it snow!

If you know the CHS region, you know that it just dumped snow on us for the first time in almost 2 years. Because of that, we were only able to meet 2 days this week.

Tuesday

We got snowed out

Wednesday

On Wednesday we continued our work on field elements and started cutting out parts for our speaker. It’s a little jank, but we hope that it will work in the long run.

Thursday

With the threat of looming snow, we had a quick meeting to continue assembling our cardboard speaker and continue cadding.

We worked on some cad this weekend, and expect to start ordering some parts soon. A cad preview will come sooner rather than later

This weeks pictures:

[Ocebots9033]

Update 3: Wood you like to know what we did this week?

This week was insane, and we managed to accomplish significant progress. Coders did lots of coding, builders did lots of building, and we overall got a lot done.

Monday:

We superglued our 3d printed field together.
You can view a timelapse of it printing on one of our team members 3d Printer here

Tuesday:

We finished our cardboard speaker and it collapsed in on itself almost immediately. Our coding lead and others disassembled our not-working swerve robot and banished the modules to The Cabinet of Doom where they will live until we get the material we need for the actual robot chassis. Our mech lead had some people help him assemble a basic intake test, you can see some of the best videos here:

5 new items by Ocebots 9033

Wednesday:

It is the end of our semester, so a bunch of team members weren’t able to make it. Our mechanical lead chilled with some of our other members in a Discord voice channel and got some CAD done at home.

Thursday:

Since we didn’t have many people show up, a group led by me wired up our old bot so that eventually our new drivers could test on that.

Saturday

Since our cardboard field elements didn’t pan out, we decided to meet for our first Saturday of the season to construct them out of wood. It went well! I got to test our new miter saw, and can confirm that it is a saw. A small group helped some of our team leads assemble the amp, and then we all moved on to assembling the speaker. We could finish the speaker because we are unsure as to where we are going to store it, and if it even fits out of a door.

Pictures

[Ocebots9033]

Update 4: Less than a month to go!

A bunch of parts arrived this week! We got to assembling those and then ordered some more. Hopefully next week we can actually make some good progress on our bot

Monday

Since we had a teacher workday, we were unable to meet.

Tuesday

After a quick inventory of the parts that arrived, we were ready to get cracking on some building. Our first order mostly consisted of motors and motor controllers, but we did have a few things that needed assembly. A team of people went off to build two 180º gearboxes, while another team assembled both of our 90º gearboxes. Whilst they were working on that, two people started assembling one of our three linear actuators. After completing both of the 180º gearboxes, we noticed that one looked to have a severely bent motor plate when compared to the others. After some investigating we realized the plate was mounted upside down, and flipping it over resolved our issues.

Wednesday

I was out today grabbing some stealth wheels for our shooter from 8230, another robotics team from our school district, but while I was gone, the team got lots done. The other two of our linear actuators were completed, and one of our new members started assembling our emergency backup swerve module. While everyone was building the parts, our team leads scrambled to order NEO Vortexes and Spark Flexes that were coming in stock during the meeting.

Thursday

The new member who was assembling our emergency backup swerve module finished that off, and we banished it to The Cabinet of Doom with the rest of the modules. A group of new members helped take our bumpers from last year, with the hope being that we can salvage at least some of the materials. With our drive base dimensions finalized, we went and cut our tubing for the frame on our new saw. Which was a really big step up from hand-cutting last year’s parts. A group started drilling holes in our frame to mount the cross braces. Unfortunately had to make some changes and we will have to re-cut and re-drill that piece, but we luckily ordered enough tubing to make it again.

Friday

Our team leads sat down with our mentor and we ordered basically everything we need to build the bot

B-B-B-BONUS ROUND: CAD Release

That’s right, the CAD is done, and it’s Glorious.
Here is the link to the CAD: Onshape
And here’s a link to our mechanical lead fully explaining what each part of the robot does: YouTube

Here are the pictures and videos from this week:

[11 new items · Album by Ocebots 9033] Week 4 pictures

[Ocebots9033]

Update 4: No Pain, No Gain

We started building the robot this week. Assuming we stay on schedule, our next post will be a robot completion post.

Monday

Not too many people showed up today, so we just worked on getting Photonvision installed on our two Raspberry Pi 4s

Tuesday

Tuesday was a big day for us. We started by cutting the linear actuators to length and drilled holes in the crossbeams so that we could mount them to the frame later on. Our SPARK Flexes and NEO Vortexes arrived, so a few other people spent some time testing those and making sure they worked. Finally, our mech lead started cutting our indexer tubing, at an angle. (idk he told me to mention this but idk how it’s relevant)

Wednesday

We had an early release today because of county-wide professional development, unfortunately, it meant we weren’t able to meet.

Thursday

A few people started by test-fitting the crossbeams into the frame and making some adjustments. After we were sure that they fit, we mounted our linear actuators to the crossbeams and wired them up for quick testing. After we did that, the rest of the meeting was mostly spent debating as to what shirt color we should get. Since we didn’t want to use the same color as last year’s design, it took us quite a while to figure something out.

Friday

We had a lot to do today and very few people. I started by going to grab our machined polycarbonate plates from 5549 (thanks guys!) and an extra MaxPlanetary base kit from team 611 (double thanks guys!). While I was gone, a group of people were countersinking our motor plates from Thrifty Bot. Once I returned, we got working on mounting our 90-degree gearboxes and motors to the linear actuators. We then took out the crossbeams because we realized that we’d need to get the hex shaft put in later.

Saturday

This was a huge day for us. Probably the largest progress day we’ve had in a while.
We started by testing the linear actuators with the added weight of the new motors. You can see the video of that test here. Once we confirmed their function, we started riveting our indexer plate. We used these new rivets that were massive and it took us a while to get all 4 in. Once that was riveted together, we put on our bottom shooter plate and hooked up the motors to test. (Peep our gorgeous test wiring here). Our tests started out, uhh, not good, as we totally had the motors inverted on each other and it nearly snapped our polycarbonate plate. Watch the moment of pain here. After that catastrophe, we took it slow, and tried a few more times. We quickly realized that we accidentally had the motors inverted, and after that, we tried again to much more success. After some more tuning and making sure everything was working, we finally got to this point, which was the end of our meeting for Saturday

CODE TIME:

Here is our public code, while it has been public all season, we now feel comfortable enough to share it with y’all on here: GitHub - Ocebots/ocebot-code-2024

Overall, we got a lot done this week. Hopefully, the bot will be done next week, but I can’t make any promises.

[Ocebots9033]

Update 5: Sitting, Waiting, Watching, Wishing

This week our progress slowed quite a bit since we are waiting on a SendCutSend order. We still managed to get some things done, but not as many as we would’ve liked.

Monday

Today was mostly spent mounting our NEO Vortexes and SPARK Flexes to the shooter plate. We were using some screws that were to long and may have accidentally killed on of the SPARK Flex. We also realized that we never put the SPARK Flex screws in, so we had to take them all off to put those in. Here is the only picture we managed to get

Tuesday

We spent some time fixing the NEO Vortexes and mounted them successfully. We quickly put together the intake and hoped for the best for tomorrow, as we planned on shooting.

Wednesday

We put some white lithium grease on the shooter wheels because they kept rubbing all over the place, and finally got to shooting a note. Here is our first shooter test: Shoot test. With that absolute success, we set it to a higher speed, and shot once more. High-Speed test

Thursday

Before starting anything, we put on our top shooter plate, as it looked like the wheels were working well. Then we started accuracy testing. Our best video by far was when we were trying to record to see if the note would always hit the cardboard in the same place, and, well, it def hit something. Watch it here

Saturday

Because of the fake snowstorm that was forecasted, we had to meet at a team member’s house. We mostly focused on adding a few bits and bobs around the place, and adding a secondary stage to our intermediate motor because it did not have enough torque. We did a little more shot testing you can see here

At this point, we’re kind of stuck. Our SendCutSend order for our intake plates and belly pan won’t be delivered until Thursday (even tho we ordered it like 2 weeks ago!), so we have not much to do. We will hopefully have better news to share with y’all next week.

[Ocebots9033]

Update 6: T-Minus 5 Days Until Competition

This was our last full week of work, and luckily we got pretty far. The robot is not done yet but it will be shortly.

Tuesday:

We were still waiting for our SendCutSend order, so we spent the day talking about strategy, scouting, code, and what to expect at competitions. We moved the robot back into our meeting space and mounted a limit switch to detect when the note enters the intermediate shooter.

Wednesday:

Our parts arrived a day earlier than expected, so we were able to start working on those. A small group of people mounted the belly pan from the bottom, while others started working on the intake plate. Our plan to do a 550 for the intake was thwarted when we couldn’t find the base kit for our UltraPlanetaries. We slapped a 90-degree gearbox on and did a full NEO with a 16:1 CIM sport. It’s not the fastest in the world, but it’s what we had left in inventory. Belly pan picture here

Thursday:

We started mounting our neo, and fixed some weird problems we were having with the intake. The plan was to also start wiring the robot, but we ran out of velcro and zip ties for the Spark Maxes so we put that on pause.

Saturday:

Saturday was an absolutely NUTS day. We got the most done by FAR of any day. We first grabbed some carpet from team 614 who had some extra for us (thanks guys!!) and then quickly ran to Home Depot. Once we returned we started proper wiring our robot, making sure that our cable management was somewhat decent. While we were doing that, we sent some members outside to paint our trailer. You can see what we did here. We also set some members off on bumpers, and oops, I messed up the measurements so we have to start again. Once the robot was finished being wired we went off to testing everything. Intake is working nicely, and the shooter is looking pretty good. One of the linear actuators is jammed, so we need to replace it with our backup, and fix the broken one this week. Here are the videos of all our tests: Video and Video 2

The build season is coming to a close, and weekly updates are going to change a bit once events start. When we have events, an event recap post will go up instead of our normal build recap.

[IsmaelM]

awesome progress, love the robot!

[Ocebots9033]

VABLA

Day 0 (load in)

We arrived at the venue just as the pits were opening. Despite the rain, the
robot and all our tools made it inside safely. We started inspection but didn’t
complete it because of an issue with the way our battery was mounted.

Day 1

The robot completed inspection today, after we drilled some holes to run our
battery strap through. We then played in 2 practice matches, where the robot
performed very well. Throughout the day we tried to reinforce the linear
actuators holding the shooter, but we weren’t able to find a good solution.

Day 2 - Quals

During the first match of the day, we discovered a motor key had fallen into
our CIM sport gearbox and severely damaged the casing, which caused our intake
to stop functioning completely. Since we could not function propely anymore, we
decided to remove the entire shooter assembly in order to prevent it from
wobbling around while playing defense.

Day 2 - Kickoff

We were chosen by alliance 2 with teams 1629 and 401. During lunch, we
installed a large sheet on our robot to block the shots from the other
alliance. While this part was effective in blocking shots, due to an issue with
401s intake, we were knocked out in round 2.

Post-Comp

We spent most of our first week back cleaning things up and unpacking. During
this time, our mechanical team worked on designing metal parts that would
provide support to the linear actuators (more details are in OnShape). That
Saturday, we modified our bellypan to give the screws at the bottom of our 180º
gearboxes clearance. After that, we remounted the shooter assembly and fixed up
some wiring. The week after, we focused most of our efforts on coding. We were
able to get auto-aiming working using position estimation from wheel odometry
and a Raspberry Pi 4 running PhotonVision for AprilTag tracking. Using Google
Sheets, we measured the necessary distance from the speaker at various shooter
angles and performed a power series regression. This equation was then put into
our code, which allows us to convert distance from the speaker to a shooter
angle (code is here). Auto Aim Tests