I’m seriously considering trying to Robot in 3 Days next year at my school (Case Western Reserve University). What would I need to get this going, in terms of space, materials, people, etc…? Is there an official way to register a team?
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All the same things you’d need for a normal build… only, the people have to be a bit more insane.
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Finding funding to create a good stock of COTS parts is important. You don’t have time to order gearboxes and wheels and everything else… you can really only build with what you already have on hand. Finding a well stocked veteran team that you can “borrow” parts from can be a huge help in keeping costs down!
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You do have to be slightly insane. I speak from experience.
You need some semblance of a shop with the tools you would need for a robot build. Saws, drills, drill press, etc.
I would have some material pre-purchased.
We, Team Cockamamie, were an official Ri3D team that created content for the actual Ri3D YouTube channel and official team. We had to get permission from them to join their official efforts. Billfred knows more about how we went about that application process. We got some sponsorship from AndyMark and Rev Robotics that made things much easier for us. Gearboxes, drive-train kits, wheels, stuff like that.
You should be prepared to stream, and provide regular updates on your progress. You are trying to better equip the minds of actual competing students on different aspects of the game challenge from your “team’s” perspective. Have fun with it of course, but remember the goal.
We actually built both robots that we’ve done in the Ri3D challenge with ~12 hour days being the average we spend in the shop.
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Don’t.
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QFT.
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I’d say “think very strongly about whether you doing robot in 3 days is going to be a positive for the community or just create more noise.”
If you’re willing to do more than just build the robot— release documentation, actual meaningful videos, engage with the community, then maybe it makes sense. If you just want to build robots… maybe reconsider whether you need to be an official team.
It took ‘Snow Problem 4 years until I personally feel we actuallly started to be a meaningful positive impact on the community, and Marshall probably still disagrees with that. Do good, give back, and try not to let good intentions be an excuse to relive being on a team.
To more accurately answer the OP’s questions, from the perspective of ‘Snow Problem:
For 2018 we had ~$6000 of funding, a build space approximately the size of a very small classroom, 17 people, and parts from three previous years with equal or better funding. Approximately $5500 of that funding was spent before kickoff on stock and COTS parts. For time commitments, we ran approximately 15 hour days, though some of the nights turned into all night for members. Worth noting is that the only reason we were okay with this is because we had apartments to crash at within walking distance. Do not drive on low sleep.
Our first year was around the same resource level, minus three years of shop improvements.
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You did better this year. I feel like there is still much to be done and far too many trying to do it and not enough actually doing it. Much of RI3D could be done without building a single robot.
That being said, you are admitting to a fault and attempting to track it down and fix it. That’s a big step in the right direction.
118 did a lot more good this year with the everybot work than RI3D. Full stop.
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I have never been on an Ri3D team, but here’s what I would recommend from watching some: Remember that building a robot is not your most important goal, so don’t do it if that’s what you’re into (join an FRC team instead).
Your goal is to tell useful stories about how to build a robot. To that end, make sure you have at least as many people (if not more) working on videos and documents as you do working on robots, and that those people drive the project.
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Well, there’s my answer.
Would it be possible to elaborate on this? Were there any Ri3D teams that provided useful information to teams?
+1 Robonauts really set the bar for impactful early season content. I wish more teams would’ve followed their lead. Some teams just jumped the shark I guess. I hope mine wasn’t one of them.
Overall I think Ri3D is somewhat watered down. There are a few good teams, but it’s hard to filter out the good content from the bad when there are 20 videos being released per day. Too many teams seem to be college kids trying to relive their high school robotics days.
It’s really important to consider why you would want to start an Ri3D team… Nick hit the nail on the head. If your goal is to help raise the floor of the FRC community and you believe you can do so by providing quality content beyond just the robot then maybe it’s a good idea. If you can’t do anything beyond just the robot don’t do it. I would hate to see Ri3D be watered down even further.
With that said, coming from somebody who started and has led an Ri3D team throughout my college years, I can say it’s been really rewarding. If you have any specific questions for me, shoot me a PM and I’d be happy to answer.
RI3D is awesome in theory, but in practice, many of the RI3D teams just seem to be doing what they can to relive high school stress, time rush, and build season mindset. Some of the teams definitely do their fair share of documentation and such to support the FRC community, but with so many RI3D teams, another team on the list of RI3D groups who build a robot and that’s it isn’t going to help with much. Every time I watch those reveal videos without any documentation or help beyond it, I think to myself how these teams could better support the FRC community in their 3 days of incredibly hard work.
Let me be clear, I appreciate that hard work and motivation to support the FRC community, just think that lots of the people who put in that hard work could be using those three days to better support the FRC community and themselves at the same time.
What would I like to see?
Strategic analysis in three days (Cudos to Ryan Swanson for making that doc)
Rookie/low resource team success plan in three days
Compile your outreach into an effective chairmans effort in three days
Prototype everything in three days
Wiring your robot cleanly and avoiding electrical issues in three days
How to get driving WITH BUMPERS in three days
These are just a few ideas I had as I wrote up this post. I guess the main point here is that it’s very difficult as an RI3D team to build that entire robot and then go beyond it like Ryan Swanson or Nick Aarestad have done with their teams. By focusing on something smaller, you can create resources that support teams both in the coming season and beyond, can more directly help teams be successful in season, and avoid investing crazy amounts of time and money in doing so.
Modified Karthik’s golden rule 2 for ya:
If a new potential RI3D team has 30 units of helpful things to do and those things have maximum of 10 units, better to have 3 things at 10/10 instead of 5 at 6/10.
Scrambling to get a robot made in three days for a sweet reveal video isn’t that helpful to teams. If you’re really good, you can do that and create documentation that directly helps teams learn and get better. Or, you can just create documentation that directly helps teams learn and get better.
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The community would probably get much more benefit if you found other Ri3D teams in the area and did something like the MCCC. The posts from the people (Cooper and Jack) who helped build the robots participating in the event provided a lot of good insights.
Just wanted to chime in having started and ran a robot in 3 days team for the first time this season. I want to add a reason why you should start an Ri3D team if you have the resources to.
A lot of people chime in that Ri3D is meant to benefit the FIRST community - which is completely right. But at the same time, a lot of people think that the only way to do this is by providing resources to FIRST teams that help raise the competitive floor. This is one way to benefit the FIRST community, and it is the primary way Ri3D is sold as a good thing.
Unfortunately, your first time - you won’t put out resources that are as good as what is already provided by Ri3D veterans like Ri3D 1.0 and FRC powerhouses like 118. Unless you have help from people who have done this in the past, you simply won’t have the experience necessary. I had the desire to do all of this, but I just didn’t know everything it took. I do now, and I have put a ton of work into making UWRi3D a more beneficial resource in raising the competitive floor next season.
However, there is another way that Ri3D helps the FIRST community, something that isn’t being utilized to it’s fullest potential yet. Ri3D brings FIRST more volunteers. It’s no secret FIRST has a volunteer problem - every event is always looking for more volunteers. Just a few days ago all volunteer referees received an email asking for help in filling referee positions in Houston, which was only 73% full when the email was sent. Just visit https://www.firstinspires.org/ and scroll down a second to have “Volunteers Needed” front and center.
This is, in my opinion, because FIRST has an alumni problem. FIRST alumni (often) head off to a higher education, join their schools FIRST alumni group, and make the first meeting. There, they talk about how fantastic FIRST was, crazy playoff stories and hotel adventures, the whole shebang. They go to the second meeting and… the same thing. After a third meeting, this cycle gets a little boring, and most stop attending. Here at Waterloo, we are full of FIRST alumni. My class alone has over 20! It was a surprise for me, then, to attend our FIRST alumni social, planning to advertise my brand new Ri3D team, only to be faced with… the organizer and 2 other alum who had attended. That’s it. Chief is a really bad sample size for this - because in reality, most FIRST alum get bored just talking about FIRST. They want to build robots.
That’s why, when I checked my Ri3D application logs after coming home that night, I noticed I had over 60 applicants. After a few days, closing a week later, that number had doubled to over 120! I had FIRST alumni and people who had never heard of FIRST alike applying, and over half of the alumni that applied, I had never met at an alumni event. I still get jokes about how notoriously long I made the application process (roughly 2000 words) but still, 120 people went through that just to have the chance to build a robot again (or, for some, the first time!)
Then came the Waterloo district event. Of course, many volunteers were long time FIRST Canada volunteers, part of a big extended family here. But many of them, about 20 or so, were from my Ri3D team. That’s half of the team - which included 8 who had no intention of volunteering prior to Ri3D and 2 who had never even heard of FIRST before Ri3D. Seriously, one of my best friends who didn’t know what FIRST even was applied and joined our team. He used a drill press for the first time, and he enjoyed it so much, he desperately wanted to volunteer. And he did, he was our very own Pit Announcer the entire weekend and ended up loving it, expressing how he can’t wait to do it all again next year. Come on, how cool is that?
This is another thing Ri3D does for the FIRST community - it helps keep alumni involved so events can continue to run smoothly for the ever growing number of FIRST teams by providing the volunteers FIRST desperately needs. And it works.
Start an Ri3D team.
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This was something I was idly thinking about in the months before I decided to mentor 3146, since my university could potentially support a Ri3D team, but it would be much, much easier, and much, much less wasteful to do something like a “CAD In 3 Days” - similar in concept to the F4 Cadathon but with the official game when it comes out. I know for sure that there’s a lot of skilled college FRC alums out there that watch kickoff from the sidelines, itching to help teams and to give back to the FRC community in some way that can’t afford the time to mentor during the season.
Although, a huge part of Robot In 3 Days is the actual engagement and prototyping with the game piece - I’d imagine you don’t want to present a design that teams might use a reference that isn’t grounded in some degree of testing with the real deal - so you could start with some basic prototyping trials with the actual game piece, publish some test videos, and then spend the remaining time CADing out a robot idea that you could then present as a whitepaper.
It’s certainly not as flashy as building a whole robot in 3 days, but it’s also certainly significantly less wasteful, requires significantly less manpower, and would result in somewhat more refined ideas since less time would be spent scrambling to build a rudimentary robot.
With a well documented whitepaper explaining strategic analysis, design decisions, and technical details, one could certainly contribute more to the FRC community without the waste of starting another Robot in 3 Days team that requires a costly amount of funding, manpower, and support to execute successfully and in a way that contributes to the FRC community.
Although - one issue that I could see from this would be teams copying CAD in 3 Days without properly parsing the decisions and the thinking made by the authors - but the same issue exists with Robot in 3 Days to an extent. I’m sure there’s plenty others, but it’s an idea for people to try if they want.
One concern I’ve always had about Robot in 3 Days teams is that they inherently displace students/teams from the creative process to an extent. I think Ri3D and similar alumni and mentor efforts are best served when they either help teams reach a baseline like Everybot or emphasize demonstrating skills and practices. For that reason I don’t think I’m really fond of “CAD in 3 Days” because I think that generating, sharing and adopting designs is something teams should be doing for/with each other. On the other hand focusing on best practices and achievable processes/methodologies in design, fabrication, assembly and testing can really help rookie and new teams.
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This thread is two years old… and while I think your advice is generally good, I think SPang has probably forgotten about this thread by now 
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Yes please. The times we had to scrap our work because bumpers weren’t included in the build process…
I would like less ROBOT in 3 days and more robot in 3 days.
Not that interested in the end result most of the time other than “good for them”. I’m more interested in their analysis and prototyping
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Wasn’t there already a Case team a year or three ago?