FIRST Tech Challenge Teams 25636/25637 Build Thread

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Hello All!

We are FTC Teams 25636 (Shockwave) and 25637 (Soundwave), out of Victoria, TX. Our teams were founded to help bolster all of our FIRST programs and create more hands-on learning opportunities for our students. Our teams are run by our non-profit, The Crossroads STEAM Alliance.

Why make a public thread?

The biggest inspiration was our local junior high team, FTC #22771, out of our local STEM Middle School. They were struggling to find teachers in their first year and didn’t fully compete until their second year. When they got to competition, they experienced the same first competition woes the FRC students did in their first year. Only the difference was that there was no real direction (robot-wise) besides the ri30h/ri3d/starterbot.

By the time we found resources like gm0, and the various software resources, it was too late as they approached their league tournament. We wish we found those resources earlier, as FTC was a new concept for us too. The best we could provide was mechanical knowledge and a bit of software help. So what not better way to help the FTC community than to document our FTC rookie year from start to finish, and showcase how we approach everything (robot design, awards, team-building/organization, etc.)

How FTC fits into our FIRST program

FRC is a huge undertaking for us, after an arduous season for more reasons than one, we are spending our resources reevaluating our organization (the FTC teams are part of this), design process, and so on. The most common feedback we found was that FRC was overwhelming to not just newer students, but also our industry mentors. Robotics of this scale isn’t something our town is experienced with, and the FTC teams are what we’re trying to ease them in.

We aren’t necessarily looking to be in the 1% of FTC, rather, we want to use FTC as a tool to engage/train our new members, test new ideas on a smaller scale, and build up both new students and mentors.

Though we’ll remain focused on our FTC programs in this thread, you may see the occasional cameo from our other programs!

Program-Wide Engagement

Since our program is relatively new, we want to make it a point to build our team network and have our local robotics students interact as much as possible regardless of grade level. Going to competitions with our Junior High counterparts, scrimmaging, training, and building together will ultimately contribute to our goal of creating a full-feeder program with confident students.

In short, the creation of these teams isn’t a decision we made lightly, its the result of discussion between both mentors and students on how we can better our overall program.

Goals:

  • Experiment with new concepts at the FTC Level (League by League)
  • Provide Hands-On Learning for new members
  • Document our FTC competitions as much as possible and showcase our League!
  • Increase documentation abilities with Engineering Notebook, and translate that into other documents such as information packets or flyers
  • Have fun!

As of now we don’t have much else to report, we recently got the OK to move into our local university for the time being. You’ll see more posts as we approach kickoff about our setup and current resources.

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Hello All!

Kickoff went by with what was probably one of our more productive meetings. The university set us up in one of the lecture halls, so we had plenty of room to get into our break out groups.

We had a total of 25 students attend our kickoff, we were joined by FTC 22771 (Vipers) and FTC 27043 (Sassy Sisters) from STEM Middle School, their school is down the road from the university.

We also had the dean of the college of natural and applied sciences and recruitment join us and give us their support!

As a rookie FTC team we don’t really have a formula for kickoff, so we stuck with what we know best. Our formula for FRC kickoffs!

The day starts with a slide deck introducing our kickoff process, this is the cumulative knowledge of various FRC resources. Our students are also given their own personal journals to take notes on. We keep in mind that this is a lot of information to dump onto new students, and we found that our students actually take notes!

Kickoff Slides:

After the game reveal we go over a Kickoff worksheet, courtesy of FRC 6328 and the various teams they were inspired from. This sheet has not failed us, and is invaluable to our kickoff planning. It gets the kids to really think, and when given a guiding hand by senior students, proves invaluable in the later prioritization process.

Highly recommend new teams use this when analyzing the game, with any changes they see fit.

In terms of transitioning it from FRC to FTC, there were no changes. We only skipped over the RP part. The senior students were happy about that and some students requested copies for their own study.

Here are our first impressions:

  • Cycling heavy game
  • No auto bonus, but important in getting a headstart on cycles
  • Field Zones relatively isolated
  • Doesn’t seem hard to build a minimally competitive robot (Based on GoBilda and Rev Builds)
  • Strategy Vs. Robot capabilities?
  • Basket Vs. Submersible?

We also worked out a MoSCoW list, or a (M)ust Have, (C)ould Have, and (W)on’t Have list for all four teams. There’s an example in the slide, but our team versions are still being digitized.

Our more senior students have began to mock up a drivetrain. We would not take inspiration from this quite yet, it is in its early stages of iteration.

Some notes on the drivetrain, It is a multi-configuration that can be switched between tank and mecanum drive if needed. At this time tank is the most attainable drivetrain for us, mecanums aren’t high on the priority list as we are trying to build out our inventory for other mechanisms.

This week on our agenda is the design phase and intro to common FTC Mechanisms.

Thank y’all for reading!

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Love seeing this!

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Hello All!

Last week not much has happened aside from our training days. On Monday we recapped our kickoff day and week to keep everyone up to date.

We gave the following presentation:

Simple slides going over mechanisms, put together by 25636’s team captain. We speak more on the mechanisms and topics rather than put it on the slide for engagement purposes. It also makes it less cluttered.

Again, Game Manual Zero was an awesome resource when we were creating those talking points and contextualizing these mechanisms in FTC:

We also received our field game elements this past weekend, Thursday and Friday will be for reorganizing our room and Beginning our Design phase. The senior students have been analyzing a lot of the RI3D/30H builds, but we’re also super excited to see the Robonauts FTC Everybot build!

Finally, here’s some pictures of our FTC/FLL setup in the university!

Dubbed the “Robotics Lab” the university hosted summer and after-school camps in this space. Right now those plans for the Academic year are up in the air, and there are discussions about our role in helping to facilitate those in the future. As you can see, we have some rearranging to do, and computers to take out that we don’t need since we bring our own devices.

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These are the two printers the University has received on grants from the Alcoa Foundation. The faithful Bambu X-1C, it has been used to create some parts on the FRC robots. They also have a large volume QIDI I-Fast, it may give us an opportunity to experiment with larger 3D Printed parts.

Bonus picture, We fully moved out of our old build space! A majority of our stuff is still in storage while we figure out some other logistics, but we did bring in a few essentials… Here’s to new beginnings with the university!

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Hello All!

Apologize for the delay, we were busy outside of robotics! Over the last 2 weeks, we began to narrow down the prototypes we want to make for the next couple of meetings.

Here are some the mechanisms we were exploring the week before:

Lifts:

  • Double Reverse 4 Bar (DR4B)
  • Hybrid Elevator + Swing Arm
  • Double-Jointed Arm
  • Linear Slides

Intakes:

  • Custom Molded Claw
  • Wheeled Intake
  • Hybrid

Climbers:

Revisit, this is dependent on Lift Mechanism. Need not anticipated until League Meet 3. Inspirations are 3847 2022, and 604 2022

Drawings

This past week we decided on Archetypes:


25636 - Double Jointed Arm

Pros:

  • Potentially quick and snappy on Chambers
  • Lightweight
  • Reach Submersible Samples

Trade Offs:

  • May not reach Highest Baskets
  • Mechanical execution may be a little more complex
  • Arm Programming will require a lot of refinement

Considerations:

  • Arm Cannot be too long, balance Reach vs. Stability
  • Integrate climbers with arm or separate the systems?
  • Do we want to add an extender on the main joint

Inspirations: FRC 2056 (2023), FRC 971 (2016), FRC 971 (2018)

[No CAD Mock-Up yet]
25637 - DR4B

Pros:

  • Stable Lift Mechanism
  • Room inside of DR4B mechanism, room for a second stage climber?
  • High Lift to highest basket

Trade Offs:

  • Intake mechanism will not have a long reach
  • Larger Footprint on Robot
  • Heavier mechanism, more motor usage

Considerations:

  • Keep end effector weight low
  • Integrate climbers with arm or separate the systems?
  • Quality control!!! Asymmetric construction will remove all benefits

Inspirations: FRC 33 (2018), FTC 11115 (2020)

We also selected the RI30H 7974 Great Scott and Gobilda RI3D bot as runner-up designs. Those two are probably going to be more effective and more efficient than the ones we are running with at the moment. But again, we’re placing an emphasis on experimentation and skill building with these FTC bots.

Protobot → Confidence Robot → Final Bot

While we figure out our final design, we have selected the Rev Channel Drive as a prototype chassis for our newer students to build. This is part of a new process to help integrate training and productivity for newer students. This takes inspiration from how FRC teams utilize alpha bots in their design process and usage of the kitbot as a hands-on tool for freshman students on their team.

The chassis will turn into the Protobot, where we use the chassis for programming training and test very basic prototypes.

Then we enter the Confidence Robot which will either turn into the FTC Everybot or Rev Starter bot as a learning bot with integrated mechanisms to…build confidence in working with those mechanisms. Mistakes are fine and expected at this stage!

Afterward, we hope to transition them into the Final Bot once the parts and details are worked out.

Of course we expect this to change in some aspects depending on how our new members perform at each stage and the timeline. Our PDP has not released dates for our meets yet, so we’re just chugging along until the first meet is scheduled…

Outreach

We visited our junior high FTC teams, 22771 The Vipers, and 27043 The Sassy Sisters. We gave them the training we had and checked up on their progress. We’re planning to visit them every week to see how they are doing and help whenever we can.

This week is just the continued builds of the chassis, we’re on track to start the electrical and programming trainings this week!