Hey guys, my name is Thompson and I am the Electrical Lead of Team 7486. We are starting to educate the incoming students about FRC so that we can avoid some of the mistakes that we made last year and increase the utility/usefulness of our new members. I am working on creating a presentation on electronics/circuitry (FRC Specific), but I am starting to realize that I don’t know very much about them since I am a founding member of our team, and we had a very limited budget for Deep Space, so we only worked with basic pneumatics and used the KOP for almost everything. We are trying to grow our club so that it doesn’t die when we graduate in 2021, so I really need to make the new students passionate about Robotics.
Our team consisted of all sophomores last year, and there were only about 7 of us, so we didn’t have very much time to actually learn as much as we had to just finish the robot so that we could compete.
If anyone has any information/tips, or even a presentation that I could ‘borrow’ some ideas from to help teach our new members and grow our team, it would be much appreciated! I don’t specifically need extremely advanced information, but if that’s all you can provide, anything would be helpful to us.
Take what information you find useful and collect it by group so you can teach new students about robotics. Don’t rely on verbally passing all you know down to the next incoming class, you’ll forget something and that knowledge will be lost.
You are better off using a presentation that someone with more experience has prepared alread rather than making your own. It is likely that you miss something important if you try to make your own curriculum.
There are some good resources in the recommendedreading list posted by Spectrum and linked by @swami_dm above. You are also welcome to use the curriculum I prepared several years ago. It contains more practical material covering the construction and layout techniques than the resources in the Spectrum list.
+1 for 3161’s great Control System Layout infographic, its a great cheat sheet to have around in your electrical area. It answers the question of “where am I supposed to be plugging this in?” and should help students learn what these components actually look like.
I would definitely recommend you search here on CD for Wire Management tips, there have been several threads and resources already compiled that will help you keep your robot neat and organized.
I have found that explaining what components do, and why we use them go a long way towards students understanding and internalizing that knowledge. It may not always be clear why motors aren’t just directly hooked up to 12V, or that motor controllers are more than just a fancy on/off switch. More often than not, these discussions will lead to students asking HOW those components do what they do, which is exactly the kind of curiosity you want to be instilling in them.