Team 103 has decided to create a continuous build log of our build season of 2020. We are extremely excited to share our progress, help out and receive help from other teams, and make friends with other teams from around the world.
Hopefully, a couple times a week we will be posting and updating about our progress of our robot. We wish each and every other team good luck on building and planning their robots!
Looking forward to this thread!
Continuing the discussion from Cybersonics FRC103 Build Log 2019-2020:
This is our manufacturing team hard at work today. They are all working on the index, intake, and shooting mechanisms. Currently they are brainstorming and building prototypes. 
Today, our team was and is still hard at work putting forth effort in every aspect of brainstorming, prototyping, and trying to set up our playing field. In the first picture shown, they are creating the prototype launcher that is shown in action. The link below shows you just how amazing the prototyping phase is going for our team.
Here is the link to our online CAD that we will be updating periodically.
We did an experiment to see if vacuum sealing the power cells for shipping overseas would work.
Here is a link to our successful shrink down and re-inflation of the power cells.
This should make the boxes much smaller to ship to oversea team.
Hey I was just looking at your CAD and i saw you have both a hooded shooter and a double wheel. Are you guys leaning towards one or the other and why?
Look closer at the assembly. The hood you’re seeing is still part of the conveyor system leading the powercell to the dual wheel shooter.
Ah yes I see, thank you
@Akash_Rastogi is correct. What may resemble a hood is simply a continuation of our vertical indexing assembly which will help feed our side-by-side shooter a bit more consistently. The feeding of this style of shooter is the most important factor in it’s accuracy in our experience.
This is also set up so if we decide later in the season that a hooded shooter is a better way to go, it’s a relatively easy changeover from the side-by-side style. Hopefully we won’t need to make that change.
Nearly all of the CAD you see on here is done by myself, a mentor, as we don’t have a strong base of students who are interested or capable in CAD the moment. All ideas and layout decisions are made by the team which are then divulged to me, the CAD monkey. Every day the students open up the document, see what has changed, give input and feedback, and make drawings for parts that need to be made. Onshape makes doing this incredibly easy.
Our school doesn’t really do CAD it’s due diligence, and we didn’t put aside the time to train more heavily in the offseason, but hopefully we can take the time this coming year to bring our team a bit up to speed in that regard.
This is what @thefirelily02 is referencing.
Very impressed by the use of rod ends on your shooter pivot mechanism. Less stoked about the DART…
Thanks for posting and maintaining this great resource!
Are you guys worried about the durability of your swerve modules as the season progresses? I think the berms will be very hard on swerves after going over them ~10+ times every match unless you go under the trench. Look forward to seeing what you guys come up with at HH!
Trust me, I am less-than-stoked about the usage of a DART as well. In fact, there are many, many things about this design I have reservations about, all of which I have voiced to the team. At the end of the day the decisions are not up to me. I do my best to be a guiding voice of reason, but once decisions are made I do whatever I can to make what the team decides to be as good as possible.
There is a reasoning behind the use of the DART though:
Yes, this was a big concern for us this year. We have upgraded to the SDS MK2 modules (with a decent amount of the parts being manufactured in-house) which are significantly more robust than the S&S modules, but we also have a little trick up our sleeves to help prevent damage.
We are machining these wheel guards out of UHMW. They are designed to take the vast majority of the impact from the berms and transfer that force through the frame rather than the bearing and wheel in the swerve module.
Lots of progress today, including a bunch of shooter testing after we got our new design assembled. Tested a bunch of wheel spacing and feeding heights. You can see how much the feeding effects the trajectory, but we’re still very happy with the shots we’re getting. We noticed that if you shoot onto the far side of the goal, instead of bouncing out it bounces against the backside of the outer port and stays in which might be really useful on the farther shots.
The indexer and shooter assembly finally got integrated together. We’ve learned a lot about how to set polycord together as well with many thanks to the tips posted in other threads here. I designed the elevator so some of the cords needed to be assembled in place, which certainly wasn’t ideal. Some changes were definitely needed from CAD, but everything came together with some elbow grease and percussive maintenance.
We’ve been using a lot of the thrfty bushings to save weight and space, but I think we went a bit overboard, especially because we are using them with polycord under tension. We’re at the point where the drag might force us to switch to bearing blocks as we can’t get the speed we want out of the elevator
The intake came together absolutely fantastically, though we can’t take out the bottom shaft without either removing a drive or unbolting the plates… whoops. We may be able to make it short enough where we can weasel it out of either side.
Fortunately the shooter and indexer bolt right onto the vertical tabs on the frame that you can see in the picture above. Today was huge though. 3 systems mostly completed with plenty of bugs to work out. Still trying to figure out where that climber might go, but at least it looks good in CAD.
