FRC 1294 Pack Of Parts | 2024 Build Thread | Open Alliance 2024

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Hello and welcome to Team 1294’s Open Alliance build thread for the 2023 off-season and 2024 season! This is going to be our very first year as a member of Open Alliance, and we’re super excited to be a part of this! We’re associated with Eastlake High School, based out of Sammamish, WA, and hope to contribute some ideas while learning some things ourselves.

Over the Summer:
This year we decided to make full use of our summer by having a meeting each Wednesday to try and improve our bot as much as possible and to try out new things, as well as to continue running our summer camps.

We managed to redo our arm so that it extended and retracted a bit more easily, smoothly, and consistently. We also redid our intake and moved it over from a pneumatic claw with rollers, to an intake with three rollers, similar to the everybot intake. Lastly, we moved over our drivebase from Mk2’s to Mk4’s ()

Regarding summer camps, we hosted three different camps. 1 engineering camp for rising 8th and 9th graders, 1 engineering camp for rising 6th and 7th graders, and 1 programming camp for rising 8th and 9th graders. Students in the engineering camps made hydraulic elevators with indicator lights for their final projects while students in the programming camp used Romi’s to traverse an obstacle course as fast as possible autonomously. All the camps were a success, and everyone had loads of fun!

Engineering Camps:

Programming Camps:

Pre-Season:
We had our interest meeting a couple weeks ago and a bunch of people showed up which is always nice. Last week we held a round robin so that all the rookies can get a glimpse into what each sub-team does to better help them decide what sub-team to become a part of. Moving forward we’re going to start up training for each sub-team (as we train, we’ll try to keep this thread updated on any projects we do)

That’s it for now, but we’ll be sure to keep updating as we go!

2023 CAD: Onshape
2023 Code: FRC-1294/frc2023: repository for the 2023 build season (github.com)
Website: team1294.org
Instagram: FRC Team 1294 Pack of Parts (@frc1294) • Instagram photos and videos

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Pack up your Parts Recycling Initiative '24

Pack of Parts is kicking off its 3rd annual recycling initiative! Each year, hundreds of FRC parts are discarded or unused by teams. The Pack up your Parts Recycling is an Inter-FRC pop-up thrift store to recycle, reuse, and redistribute parts, operating right out of our shop in Eastlake High School!

How it works

During the first week, teams can come to drop off unused or lightly used parts (motors, electronics, raw materials, and tools). Then the following week, teams can come and pick up parts left by other teams, thereby creating a sustainable cycle of FRC parts! We are going to be updating this inventory list so you see what you want ahead of time.

Dates and times

Drop-off dates:

Tuesday, December 5th, 5 PM – 9 PM
Wednesday, December 6th, 6 PM – 9 PM
Saturday, December 9th, 2 PM – 5 PM

Pick-up dates:

Tuesday, December 12th, 5 PM – 9 PM
Wednesday, December 13th, 6 PM – 9 PM
Saturday, December 16th, 2 PM – 5 PM

If none of these times work for you, please contact us and we would be happy to accommodate you.

Location

The Pack up your Parts Recycling Initiative will be operating out of our shop in Eastlake High School, Sammamish. The Eastlake robotics shop entrance is located in the back of Eastlake (reference the image below).

Eastlake High School, 228th Avenue Northeast, Sammamish, WA

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Kickoff Weekend:

Hope everyone had a wonderful kickoff weekend! This is definitely an interesting game and has many different archetypes and ways to solve different tasks.

Saturday:

We started Saturday off by having the entire team meet up in the shop at 8:45 am PST and watch the kickoff livestream together. Following the end of the stream, we all took 15-20 minutes to read the game manual on our own before breaking out into small groups to create individual priority lists. We reconvened an hour later and made this final priority list:

We feel that the SPEAKER and AMP are necessary, especially during playoffs and high levels of play where it’s a scoring game and not so much an RP game. We also think being able to go through the stage is important so we’ll be trying to design a robot that is 2 ft tall. Lastly, we are going to focus on a ground intake and if time allows might discuss a top intake.

We did discuss buddy climb but the 12” extension limit coupled with the volatility of the chain poses quite a few issues so it’s unlikely we’ll pursue it.

We also broke out into groups for an additional hour to discuss robot requirements and made the final list after reconvening:

Sunday:

Today we started with our strategy team presenting their discussions which can be found here. After that, we split into three groups:

• Field element building
• Carpet Marking
• Design and prototyping.

Field element building:

The field element group made decent progress. We cut out all the parts needed for a SPEAKER & SUBWOOFER and assembled the SUBWOOFER as well as the base of the SPEAKER. We also made a cut list for an amp and 1/3 a stage. We plan on buying the chain kit and flap for the TRAP from Andymark.

The hope is to finish the SPEAKER tomorrow (1/8) and start on other elements. I don’t have any photos right now but will share some tomorrow when I can get them

Carpet Marking:

We received a used carpet from an off-season event this year and began marking out lines using chalk while we waited for red and blue gaffing tape to arrive.

Design:

We had some things we needed to decide before we began designing the robot so here’s a snapshot of what we discussed:

This took up a majority of our time after which we discussed ideas for a TRAP + AMP mechanism. This was quite hard for quite a few reasons:

• You need to hang while scoring
• Have a handoff to a separate mech
• Extend out
• Score the game piece when it is effectively vertical
• Be able to push in a weighted flap

We think a lot of teams are going to avoid this but we want to give it our best shot since it allows you to nearly solo an RP. Plus, we have the people and resources to devote time to it.

After a lot of work and many brain breaks this is what we settled on for the mechanism:

It’s a vertical ball (torus?) tunnel with a wheel at the top. If the wheel spins one way (red) it follows the red path into the shooter. If the wheel spins another way (yellow) it goes towards the TRAP + AMP scoring mech. Obviously, nothing in this picture is to scale, but we believe that this method can work out really well.

Anyways. This is the rough Krayola CAD for our bot. Will be interesting to compare the final bot with this:

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Day 3:

Hello everyone! Here’s a really early Week 1 update because we made a lot of progress and decisions at yesterday’s meeting.

Archetype:

After much discussion, we realized that the design we’d decided on earlier (see above post) had a LOT of moving parts and complexity which would mean we might’ve ended up doing everything poorly. So instead, we’re opting for a simpler solution involving four core mechanisms:

• An under-the-bumper intake/indexer system
• A two-flywheel launcher on a wrist with its own storage mech that gets handed off the game piece from the indexer
• An elevator that doubles as a climb and has the launcher on a wrist on top of it.
• A “stinger” or “wall” system to help stabilize the robot at a desired position.

You might’ve figured that this concept is heavily based on @howlongismyname 12-hour robot CAD design, which as he has stated in his thread has some geometry issues. So while we are going with a similar concept, we will be using information from our prototyping and CAD to come up with a geometry that works.

Prototyping:

Yesterday we tested the main prototypes.

1. An intake prototype which worked really well so we’ll be moving forward with a slightly higher fidelity prototype, as this one was really weak and only intended as a proof of concept. This higher fidelity prototype will most likely involve polycarbonate rollers with cat’s tongue grip tape on a laser cut setup. If that works as intended we’ll add in a polyurethane belt indexing system to test before creating the final system.

2. A launcher system using 2 4” diam stealth wheels with 5” of compression and 2 NEO’s on a 4:1 MAXPlanetary gearbox. Using this we scored the season’s first NOTE in our SPEAKER! Following this we’ll test with increased compression as well as a higher speed to improve the range at which we can shoot from.

General:

Yesterday we finished building our speaker system! It’ll be stored in three separate parts (so we can get it through doors) and joined by clamps during testing/practice. We plan on finishing the amp and starting the stage at our next meeting this Wednesday given we get all the lumber needed by then.

Yesterday our programming team got our practice swerve drive working and moving while our build team swapped over from the colsons we were using for demos and outreach to black nitrile tread to achieve a higher COF.

Lastly, I want to thank all the rookies on our team. We have a lot of experienced members graduating this year, and have tried to give work to rookies as much as possible and they have risen to the occasion. They’ve been helping out and doing more than we could have ever imagined. Without them we would not be where we are in the season, so thank you to all our rookies, we love you.

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Week 2

Hello everyone! Here’s a Week 2 update. We have had some snow days through Week 2, so progress has been a little slow. However, we plan to lock in next week to get back on track!

Prototyping

Intake:

We’ve continued prototyping our intake and tried experimenting with geometry such that the game piece is picked up as soon as the intake/robot drives over it. We’ve spent the last week prototyping this design, and it has worked out well for us!

Launcher:

Around halfway through this week, with so many other teams trying out a vertical flywheel launcher with great success, we too decided to try this out. Currently, our setup is a little wobbly but we’re working on adding some hex shafts to help with that so we can get some data and make a decision on vertical vs side-side launcher.

Drivebase

This week we also began assembling our Drivebase. We ran into some issues with mis-drilled holes and messing up the assembly a little bit but we got there in the end. We do not have any current pictures of the drivebase, but will feature them in our next post.

Additionally, we also cut out a pocketed bellypan for electrical to figure out where they want to mount things before we create a final steel bellypan.

While all this was happening our electrical team drew out the bellypan on a sheet of paper to plan out what would go where, and mounted some swerve covers to our mk4 modules

Elevator

We finished our elevator CAD this week and began manufacturing tubes for the elevator today on our CNC with a tube jig from WCP. We plan to continue the construction of the elevator into Week 3.

General

Field Elements

Midway through Week 1, we finished our amp! The amp is small enough to be stored in one piece at our shop. We also began work on our stage system. Like the speaker, we are constructing the stage in three parts: the base/legs, trap, and chain (to fit through doors and save space in our shop). We built the base piece/legs late Week 1 and started the exterior of the trap. We are buying the final parts - trap and chain - from AndyMark.

Batteries

Throughout Week 1 we discharge and load tested our current batteries and recorded the results. We consulted the rest of our board and decided to order 4 more batteries from AndyMark for the 2024 year.

We’ve also begun designing custom battery handles. This is our second iteration from last year, the new WIP design is much more low-profile and compact.

Pits

We have been working on our pits for the last couple of weeks. Our design consists of a custom 80/20 design. We have two carts (labeled A and B), (A) is a ~53” tall cart storing Milwaukee packouts and batteries. (B) is shorter, with storage for spare parts and Milwaukee cases, doubling as a desk designated to programmers in the pit.

Upcoming Schedule

As mentioned earlier, we have had a couple of snow days in Week 2, which put us a little behind our planned schedule. We have slipped a little behind on our drivebase and prototyping and are now planning to finish this by mid-Week 3 and begin the construction of our intake/launcher late Week 3.

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Week 3

Hello everyone! We made solid progress this week and heres our update.

Launcher Prototyping

We completed our launcher prototyping, using additional hex shafts to keep it stable, and clamping it down to some 2x4’s. We ran it using two drills (one per set of wheels) which spun at ~6k rpm. We initially tested the system with 12.75” of horizontal compression and 0.5” of vertical compression, and achieved a distance that averaged around 33 ft. We then tested a horizontal compression of 12” and the same vertical compression and achieved a distance averaging 38ft and a higher consistency.
Due to the more compact nature as well as the higher consistency and shot range of the second configuration (12” horiz, 0.5” vert. compression) that’s what we’ll be going with.

Drivebase

We continued and finished our drivebase mid-week 3. We had to change the geometry slightly to accommodate the vertical fly-wheel design of our launcher (shifting the elevator a little ways back in the process). As for bumpers, we began the CAD for them this week and plan on continuing into construction week 4. Electrical began working on wiring the drivebase, and got most of the ways done! We’ve also added swerve covers to the front to help guide notes in towards our under the bumper intake

Elevator

We began building our elevator this week. We have two groups, labeled A and B. Group A had tubing cut out week 2, so had a headstart in construction this week. They got most of the way done with the elevator, and plan on completing it in week 4. Group B had to start with cutting out the tubing, and got most of the tubing CNC’d this week. They plan on continuing this process into next week.

Launcher

The CAD for the launcher is basically completed. For the pivot, we’re running a belt driven pivot at a 62.4:1 gear ratio with two NEO’s to allow for low backlash. For the flywheels we’re running two rows of flywheels with each row having 4 3” AM stealth wheels (pls come back in stock faster ) at 12k rpm run by a falcon.

Reaction Bars

Now that our major mechanisms have been CAD’d completely we’ve begun to improve our reaction bar design based on the cog and such. As of now they’re the only thing that needs to have major CAD revisions/review and will be the last thing added to the robot (Ignore the floating wheels)

Field Elements

We attached the chain from AndyMark to the stage this week and are still waiting on the Trap. We began stapling April Tags to the field elements for programming to iron out vision. We also made copies of April Tags and stapled them to standalone stands, to remove the hassle of taking out the entire field elements just for April Tags.

Pits // Batteries

We continued process on pits, cutting out L-channels to hold milwaukee cases in both Cart A and B. We also machined the worktop and attached casters to Cart B. For Cart A, we began designing and cutting the MDF and L-channels for the battery shelves. The design involves the battery sliding and snapping into place (complementary of the battery handle) and plugging into the charger.

Programming

Although we don’t have any game mechanisms just yet, the software team has been working on several key features such as:

• Integrating feed-forward and closed-loop control for chassis speeds along with characterization commands. We’ve added several more layers of control to ensure the robot moves as expected.
• Second-order kinematics to reduce rotational drift
• Path following using PathPlanner
• First drafts of game mechanism code ready to test
• Research into our TOF, Beam Break, and Limit Switch Sensors
• Research into game piece detection with ML

CAD

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO doom music

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Week 4

Hello! Welcome to our week 4 update.

Drivebase

All of our Krakens arrived (wooo!!!), and we replaced the drive motors on our swerve drive with Krakens. We ran into some troubles with one of the Krakens, but after some troubleshooting, we fixed it and handed it off to programming. After a couple of minutes of testing their auton paths, the robot was driven into a wall, bending our front 1x1 aluminum tube. We plan on fixing this early week 5 by replacing it with a solid 1x1 bar.
In a sense, it’s a blessing since we were going to take off the front modules on Monday anyway to change our swerve gearing from L2 to L3, and now we’ve stress-tested the beam and can replace it at the same time, rather than taking up extra time later on.

Elevator

Our first iteration (Group A) of the elevator was completed and given to programming mid-week 4. Our tubing for Group B was all cut out, however when assembling we noticed an issue. Unbeknownst to us, our chop saw was not square ( ). We decided to decommission that chop saw due to it being un-sqaure and for safety reasons. We were kindly donated another chop saw (Thank you so much!!!) and set it up late-week 4. We plan on re-cutting the tubing for Group B on Monday, and hopefully having it assembled by late Wednesday or early Friday.
While the assembly for the elevator was on hold, we were able to get the main mounting plates cut out of ¼” aluminum.

Launcher

Before we go ahead and cut everything out of aluminum, we’ve decided to test a couple of core systems for the launcher using MDF instead. We already know our launcher setup works from our prototypes, but still need to test our handoff as well as our wrist system. In order to do this we’ll assemble everything on the launcher except the flywheel system. Not putting on the flywheels saves us a fair bit of manufacturing and assembly time and allows us to get the system to programming for testing much earlier.

Pits

For the pits, we attached all L-channels (for carts A and B) that were cut for holding Milwaukee packouts. Cart A had all of its battery shelves laser-cut with MDF. We plan on continuing this into week 5 by cutting all of the L-channels for the battery shelves. For cart B we plan on bolting the A butchers block to the top early week 5 as a workspace for the pit crew.

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Week 5

What’s up, guys and gals! Welcome to our week 5 recap.

Drivebase

We started week 5 by replacing the bent 1x1 tubing with 1/8". We returned the drivebase to programming to test their drive and auton paths (much more carefully this time). After a few minutes of testing, our programming subteam (yet again ) broke the robot. While testing on a carpet, they got string stuck in the gears of the swerve (see the image below). This, was an easy fix for the build subteam, returning the drivebase back the same day. We received L3 gearing and decided to put them on our swerve modules next week (we’ll keep you updated)!

We’re having some issues with CANBUS and worked on fixing those late-week 5.

Bumpers

We started work on our first set of bumpers mid-week 5. We got the outer frame done this week and plan on putting the noodles and fabric on throughout week 6.

Intake

We completed and began mounting our first iteration intake to our drive base mid-week 5. After mounting we ran some tests and found bolts on the roller were hitting the ground and used epoxy to secure the rollers. We also found the note would get stuck in the gears on the sides and used spaces to fix that issue. We mounted our revised intake late-week 5.

Elevator

We continued the assembly of our second iteration elevator and got it done and mounted late-week 5.

Launcher

We began construction of the launcher this week. We had some technical problems - finding issues in the cut MDF, but ironed those out and continued work. We mounted it to the drive base and tested the handoff from the intake to the launcher. We found we had to make some adjustments to the intake.

Field Elements (Stage)

We received the flap from AndyMark and began assembly mid-week 5. The assembly was fairly straightforward and we completed it fully (attached it to the stage) within a day or so.

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Week 6

Hello hello! Welcome to our week 6 recap.

Intake

We began and completed the construction of our finalized intake week 6. This version of our intake had 1/8th metal plates instead of the MDF. We also retaped the rollers (trying our best to leave no gaps). We fully mounted it to our drivebase yesterday (2/19).

Intake Feeder

The intake feeder is our new addition to our robot inspired by Team 95 to help vector the notes into our UTB intake from a large width. It is now completely assembled and ready to be mounted. We plan on mounting this mid-week 7.

Elevator

Programming had time with our first iteration elevator and used the time to fine-tune the software (ending up breaking it in the process). We found some minor flaws in the old design and plan on making some modifications to our final iteration. We are going to put a soft limit, to prevent the elevator from overextending. Electrical spent time setting up the wiring for the elevator and routing an energy chain along the side for the launcher.

Launcher

We completed our first iteration launcher very early week 6, mounting it alongside our first iteration intake. We found the handoff of the note from the intake to the launcher to be very clean. After conducting some tests we were satisfied with our design and began the construction of the final launcher. We completed our launcher late week 6 and mounted it to our elevator yesterday (1/19).

We are working on changing the way the abs encoder receives its values so that it’s driven directly from the dead axle, helping account for any belt skippage that might occur.

Robot

Most of the robot is coming together! What we currently have mounted are: Drivebase (does this count? haha), Intake, Elevator, and Launcher. The final things are the reaction bars and intake feeder.

Reaction Bars

We cut most of the aluminum tubing for the reaction bars, we plan on machining them out mid-week 7 and continuing the process from there.

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Week 7

What’s up! Welcome to our week 7 recap

Electrical

Starting Wednesday 2/21, the robot was handed off to electrical to wire the robot. They used two of our meetings and completed the wiring on Friday 2/23. They made some minor improvements in the first half of our Saturday 2/24 meeting and handed our robot off to programming.

Mechanical

Mechanical made some slight improvements/small changes before handing the robot off to programming. We added some 3d funnels to direct the note towards the center for our intake. Throughout this week we found some problems with the Intake Feeder - it isn’t directing the note properly. We do not have a final solution to this problem yet and are going to continue to tackle this into week 8. While testing we also discovered some problems with handoff (from intake → launcher). Our temporary solution is to modify the intake - while our permanent solution is to install a polycarb plate along with the reaction bars to help guide the note.

Programming

The robot was handed off to programming to test mid-way through our Saturday 2/24 meeting to test their V1 subsystem code and further test our subsystems. We found our intake feeder compression to be slightly too much, and our working to reduce the compression. Beambreak tests on the intake (to hold the note in our intake) were a little too fast - we fixed this by adding a couple more rotations in the intake before stopping the rollers. Beambreak tests on the launcher had a similar issue. Programmatically, our V1 code is almost finished, with a few QOL improvements that still need to be done, such as improving our control systems on the wrist and elevator. We are also on track to begin our transition to V2 code by this week. All that being said, the software is technically operational, and programming is waiting on mechanical fixes to finalize things.

Reaction Bars

We machined out our reaction bars mid-week 7 and started assembling them. We found them to be initially cut incorrectly. Due to this, we began recutting the reaction bars late-week 7, this time out of 1/16th inch tubing as intended. The tubing is all cut out and ready to be assembled. We started some assembly late-week 7 but plan on continuing this process through week 8.

Backup Subsystems

We started machining out the first of our backup subsystems - the intake plates. We plan on creating backups for all subsystems on the robot, in case we need to swap out the entire system (either for easy repair or if it is unrepairable). We plan on continuing this process through week 8.

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Week 8

Howdyyyy! Welcome to our Week 8 Recap!

Electrical

Electrical worked on normal maintenance, including fixing issues that arise. We began documenting our electrical system so it is easier to fix in competition. We spent the latter half of the week testing/checking batteries to ensure they are comp ready.

Mechanical

Mechanical spent this week improving the Intake Feeder, we came up and tested a couple solutions - such as iterating over note funnel designs - and plan on refining these into week 9. We decided to remove reaction bars from our robot because the original plan for scoring Trap and doing Climb added too much confusion to the drive team. We’d rather complete multiple cycles at the same time. We designed a solution to the handoff issues, using a polycarb plate to help guide the note, which will be implemented through week 9. With our competitions quickly approaching, the rest of the crew and time was dedicated to bumpers for the robot.

Programming

Now that we have a (semi)completed robot, programming has characterized the different mechanics, from PID tuning the wrist to finding intake and indexer constants. Programming also began debugging its v2 code, including a new state-machine-based way of handling each note position and autos.

Upcoming Schedule

We have our first competition at Auburn week 9 and are excited to see our robot compete. We’ve set up a, while mildly jank, mock field in house, we are booked to test at Royal Robotics’ field early next week. We plan on completing our handoff guide rails and refining our intake funnel design.