FRC 1418 Vae Victis | 2023 Pre-Season Build Thread

FIRST General Forum
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Hello, this is team 1418’s first build thread! we’re excited to be part of the #openalliance community, in the coming weeks we hope to post vigorously about our massive reorganization efforts as we gear up for the next season. Our team is almost two decades old, based in the little city of Falls Church, VA in the new Meridian High School.

Having gone through the harshness of the past few years we are on our way to picking up new sponsors after losing all but one. We are ready to get back into the competition, we’re participating in the upcoming Battle of Baltimore and are focusing on student outreach, organization, and fundraising. While that may sound generally boring and unappealing we hope to share some experiences we’ve had along the way so that you might be able to learn from it as well!

Some of our main upcoming projects include:

  • Preparing for the Battle of Baltimore

  • Inventory (everyone’s favorite part)

  • Fundraising and Sponsor Outreach

  • Teaching Freshmen the basics in a magnificent series of presentations (we’re 60% freshmen this year :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes: )

  • Designing and (hopefully) manufacturing “Pit Pit” (Pit^2) since our previous scaffolding-based pit drew blood from a mentor.

I hope to be able to share all of our beautiful spreadsheets, documentation, CAD models, and Code as soon as I have it. As this is still the off-season we won’t have a ton of work days but we usually meet on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The most exciting project we are looking towards is the construction of Pit Pit. Given that we are a DIY-heavy team we plan on constructing a folding road case style pit from scratch using specialized online vendors and Home depot my beloved. We hope that you stop by a couple times to see what we’re up to, until then, thank you for reading this far, have a great day!

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welcome :slight_smile:

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Battle of Baltimore Recap

Hi all, today 1418 participated in the Battle of Baltimore pre-season competition and we’d like to share some thoughts on our performance and how that changed and hopefully improved from our last real competition.

TL;DR - Driving was smooth for the first 3 matches with no major comments to be made, in our last 2 matches we switched to a new driver. As such the driving in the last 2 was a bit stop and go, however such is the learning experience, again no major problems.
Shooting was slow to start due to some confusion about our shooting abilities, after the first 2 matches the alt-driver was able to hit shots fairly consistently losing only a few balls each match.
On the programming side of things, autonomous worked (properly) for the first time this season!
As far as the structure of the robot the most major damage was the bending of one of the side plates of our intake. The side plate was one sheet of pretty thin aluminum that had replaced a sheet of polycarbonate reinforced with said sheet metal that snapped in our last competition. The second item was a crack that ran the entire length of our second intake side plate, neither item harmed our ability to intake. Other than being pretty banged up from previous events the robot remained completely functional save one broken radio (which we replaced).

Pre Match 1: Programmers were having issues with our webcam which is our primary vision for our intake. The source of the problem wasn’t exactly clear however it was determined to be a radio issue (sorry I can’t go into depth I’m not really sure what happened).

Match 1 - Loss: For the first time this game 1418 deployed successful autonomous shooting one ball into the high goal and leaving the tarmac. At this point the drive team believed that we could only handle 1 ball at a time so we were a bit slow when it came to shooting. Our overall play was also a bit stop and go due to some communication issues between the driver and alt-driver.

Match 2 - Loss: The drive team deployed the same autonomous routine as our first match. The biggest issue during this match was the alt-driver wasn’t quite letting the flywheel get up to full speed causing many of our high goal shots to fall short of the rim, as well a bit of positioning confusion that caused a few shots to hit the rim of the upper hub.

Match 3 - Win: Once again the same autonomous routine was deployed. During this round the driver and alt-driver took their time to place almost every single one of their shots, losing only one ball. During this match however one side of the intake did sustain a few hits resulting in some minor bending.

Match 4 - Win: Same autonomous routine again. Shooting was smooth, losing only one ball due to a premature shot by the alt-driver. For this match we also switched in a new main (not alt) driver, which resulted in a bit of stop and go but nothing too serious. We did however lose our back bumper popping a wheelie into the hanger during the last 30 seconds which resulted in our robot not making the climb.

Match 5 - Loss: Autonomous was the same as the previous matches. Minimal shots were made during this match due to both general confusion and a heavy defense from the opposing alliance. This lack of communication with our alliance partners meant we all got tangled up in the hangar resulting in no climb.

Conclusion: Unfortunately 1418 was not invited to form an alliance with other teams. We appreciate the opportunity to show new members what it is like to compete in a competition. Now how does this competition compare to our previous competitions? We certainly ended with a more intact undamaged robot. Specifically our intake which has been on its last legs since our most recent competition, the repairs made before Battle of Baltimore definitely made a huge difference in the survivability of our intake. The autonomous routine was also a great success for us. As far as the lessons we can learn, 1.) Drivers need to practice more, especially communicating with each other and the ability to communicate with alliance partners, 2.) Designing for failure (and breakage) the ability to easily repair or replace parts on the fly is critical. We will continue to do our best to improve and we hope to see many familiar faces in March!

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Hi again,

This week was short but there are a few things worth mentioning.

First, the assembly of our MK 2, we have 2 nearly complete (no wheels yet) and have not started the other 2 yet we hope to complete the current 2 and start the remaining 2 in the next 1-2 meetings.
Secondly, we have begun to harvest electronics and motors from our 2022 robot as well as testing the spark maxes that we have in reserve to ensure that they are all in proper working order.
Our main goal for the disassembly of the robot is to use it as a teaching device/experience for our new members so they can see the thought process behind the design as well as begin to understand the basics of robot assembly.

In the foreseeable future we hope to start a more formalized crash course in all things FIRST and robotics. Also stay tuned for an update about Pit^2 coming hopefully in the next 1-2 weeks. As for right now we will continue to work hard and hope everyone continues to have a smooth preseason.

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Hi,
Sorry for the late update, but this is another short week

We made a little progress on our swerve modules no wheels yet but the other modules are half completed and just need NEOs with shaved down shafts
We have finalized a date for an interest meeting before we start official training. The meeting will be on the 15th and training for specific sub teams will start the meeting after.
Robot disassembly was temporarily put on hold.

We are still waiting on a Pit^2 update, but other than that this was a short week with most of our work being behind the scene and off the clock hours so thank you to all our members for working tirelessly.

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Hi,
Some very exciting things happened this week. On tuesday we had our official interest meeting, we had relatively good turn out with both new faces and returning members. We started with a powerpoint that gave a comprehensive overview of our team and the structure of the FRC season in addition to what we plan to and have been working on already.

After the presentation we split everyone into 2 groups of mechanics and programmers. Programmers went over the basics of robot code as well as getting anyone that was interested set up and familiarized with github and other applications. Mechanics gave an overview of the mechanical, electrical, and pneumatic components of the robot as well as discussing the decision making that goes into the design process.

On the topic of out Pit^2 project we are in the process of finalizing some last minute details before we order the first round of materials.

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Hi,
This week we began disassembling the robot and organizing the electronics for use this upcoming season. Because we have started harvesting parts we have been able to resume assembly of our MK2 swerve modules which now only need to have wheels attached before they are complete.

Disassembly will continue to till kickoff but hopefully by then we will have all motors and other miscellaneous electronics ready to be re-used.

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Curious, why is your team going for MK2 modules instead of some more modern module?

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Before covid, we had bought MKII modules intending to use them in the next season, but we never got around to it. They were quite literally brand-new parts sitting on our shelf collecting dust for a couple of years, rather than buy a new set of modules we decided to use what we already had and what should perform just as well as any other module. Additionally, we are in a bit of a financial conundrum right now with weirdly managed and placed funds so to get new modules would be a lengthy and bureaucratic process with our school board and mentors.

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, and these certainly can’t be broken as they’ve been sitting on a shelf for a hot sec.

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That’s fair, good luck with those :))) I can’t imagine they’ll put you at any significant competitive disadvantage considering 1706 used them IIRC and they went crazy this year!

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Hi,
This week not much to report on the status of our swerve modules. Our robot disassembly though has been very productive all that remains is the chassis and our shooter superstructure. on the front of organizing, we organized all our zip ties by color and length, and started to sort through our pistons labeling them by length.

Next meeting we will also continue do all the same things a this week.

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We personally really like the mkII modules. They hold up extremely well and they haven’t given us any real issues. They’ve absorbed a couple of big falls and they’ve held up great. Traction is sometimes an issue since the wheels are only an inch wide, but that only really appears when getting into pushing battles. This year our bot was incredibly slow due to rate limiters because of the top heaviness of the bot, so sometimes pushing or rolling off an opponent was the only option.

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I see, you were still incredibly performant so I’m definitely not doubting the power of the MKII’s.

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Hey guys,
So this update is a combo of the event of 2 weeks of meetings with a summary and a real update on whatever programmers have been doing.

December 6: MK2 swerve modules complete (for real this time)! As of today this is all that remains of last year’s bot, shooter superstructure was taken off completely, a few rivets need to be removed but that’s it. “officially” tested our one and only NEO 550, which we hope we can put to use next season. One last note on the swerve modules, since our programmers are eager to get their hands on the modules, next meeting one team of mechanics will be working on putting wheels on the module while another builds a simple wooden frame to test with. (Video of working swerve coming soon!?) . Side note we accidentally attached one of the plates the wrong way (wires were facing out side frame instead of in) not a huge problem just noticed there was no directions warning about it that I could see, 3/10 slightly inconvenient. Also more organization, specifically pneumatics, all pistons were labeled with their size and relocated to an empty tote rather than being loose in a workbench drawer. Programmers will also be starting to explore April Tags in preparation for this upcoming season (hopefully).

December 13: I have some updates from our meeting today, but before I get into that I will be pushing the combined update back another day or so because we have decided we need to meet again tomorrow to get things more adequately prepared before we leave for winter break, so it will be bigger than I expected, no problem though. So we finally put wheels on the swerve modules. 1. Unfortunately these wheels didn’t end up working out for us, we mostly had issues with the wheels being a bit too loose on the axles and just a bit to big when it came to clearance with the test frame, as well as contacting the top of the swerve modules themselves.
Regardless of the state of the swerve modules however, the test wooden frame that we discussed last week was built, without any major issues to be reported.

December 14: The purpose of today’s meeting was to address the issues that the wheels we had initially brought for the swerve drive presented. Between the blue tread wheel and the versa wheels that we initially ended up using we tried on other set of hard plastic wheels that ended up being too wide, and currently our belt sander is broken so we ended up just dremeling the locking bits of the versa wheels and they fit perfectly. We decided to meet again tomorrow, just the small group that came in today, to fit the modules to the test chassis, create an electrical panel with just control systems, and start testing swerve code. Also as a new side project a few mechanics will be refurbishing an old chassis so that the newer programmers can test troubleshooting, deploying code, most of the basics of actually running a robot in general. As well this will give newer mechanics an opportunity to experience retrofitting the chassis.

December 15: Finally got everything right and attached our swerve modules to the wood frame we got it powered but we have yet to actually run the modules on the ground yet.

Basically we have got swerve mostly working and official testing will begin after we return from break.

Courtesy of our President an overview of what programmers have been up to:
This preseason the programmers had three major objectives. Firstly, teach new programmers how to install necessary software and basic programming skills. Our traditional first project for programmers is adding themselves to our website, which involves knowledge of HTML, image editing, and Git.

Our second objective was writing code for a swerve-drive robot. This is our first year experimenting with swerve drive, and the programming requirements are very different from our previous years of tank drive. This was a project given to second year programmers, for whom this was their first experience with robot programming. They had to research Java implementation of swerve drive and look at previous code to learn how to set up a Java robot project.

Our final objective was updating the rest of the website. Unfortunately, this is a project we’ve neglected for a couple years, which means we have a backlog of Github issues to go through. Many of these were updating minor graphic details, but also updating the content of the website to reflect our most recent season.

Also definitely follow our channel on the Open Alliance discord for these updates ahead of time.

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