FRC 1466 Webb Robotics – 2024 Build Thread

[Meecowhy]

Welcome to our 2024 build thread for Webb Robotics - FRC Team 1466!

Based out of the Webb School of Knoxville, we are the oldest active FRC team in East Tennessee. We have ~30 students and ~8 mentors working out of a build space shared between us, 3 FLL teams, and 1 FTC team this season.

Website - webbrobotics.com
YouTube - www.youtube.com/@webb1466
Instagram - www.instagram.com/webb_robotics
GitHub - github.com/FRC1466

Season Planning and Goals:

Team leadership includes juniors and seniors this year, with one team captain and five sub-team leads. They’ll be sharing the responsibilities of posting regular updates here. The leadership team identified a few overarching goals for the competition season:

• Better communication within and between sub-teams
• Visible schedule and task planning in the lab
• Keeping team members engaged and staying on schedule for build season
• All team members participate in at least one team-sponsored service project
• All team members can pass a game rules test by the end of week 1
• Strengthening our team bond and building team relations
• Reliable autonomous routines (to be defined after the game reveal)
• Basic robot CAD by the end of week 2 (drivetrain in week 1)
• Easily accessible and labeled robot wiring
• 100% student participation in team community outreach events before SMR

Build Season Plan:

Our team will meet on Mondays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays throughout the build season, running extended build sessions on some Sundays. We are attending regional events in Week 2 (Smoky Mountain), Week 3 (Magnolia), and Week 6 (Rocket City). Our goal is to finish a V1 robot by February 1st, giving drivers plenty of time to practice. We expect to build two robots—a prototype bot and a polished bot—in time for events.

That’s all for now! You can check out our first Diary of an Innovator blog post here. We will post three more entries during the season with our next entry available in January.

[Jen_Lawrie]

With less than 24 hours until kickoff, we want to share what we’ve done in terms of pre-season preparation and share what everyone can expect from us in terms of our robot build plans.

This is our 3rd year as an OA team, and we’ve adapted our build blog style quite a bit over the last two years. We’ll share extended updates every Sunday. Throughout the week, we’ll share prototyping videos and other resources either here or on our YouTube channel.

We are competing at three regionals this year:
Smoky Mountain Regional (Week 1.5)
Magnolia Regional (Week 3)
Rocket City Regional (Week 6)

Build Philosophy

We’re a mid-resource team. We have access to COTS components and sponsors to help us with machining. Our primary tools we use in our shop are saws, drill presses, and a small CNC. We use a Glowforge laser cutter for prototyping, cutting parts out of cardboard or MDF to check geometry or function before manufacturing robot parts.

We’ll be incorporating a lot of COTS components in our build. We intend to run a swerve chassis with either Falcon 500 or Kraken motors. Obviously, this is game-dependent, but we aren’t the type of team to build a “do everything” robot. Based on our team goals for this season, we’ll build a focused robot on performing specific RP tasks extremely well.

PreSeason Prep

We are a year-round team, so the summer and fall have been busy. We’ve focused on recruiting, outreach, off-season events, and building our non-technical teams.

Our media team has been experimenting with video formats, including vlogs, capcut edits, and reels. We’ve boosted our Instagram and YouTube following by about 25% over the past couple months with instagram reels (ASMR parody, ‘we’re robotics kids…’, and ‘pass the phone’).

We typically attend one off-season event each fall, but this year we attended three. This was a big step for us, and was possible because we built a really robust robot in 2023. Our 2023 robot is still in great shape after 6 events and we have team members invested in improving our event performance in the offseason. We described a lot of what we learned in our 2023 Build Blog. Here are video recaps from SCRAP, RoboRodeo, and SCRIW.

Our team leadership developed a list of season goals for 2024. Like last year, our goals will be posted in our build space through the season. We’re printing it as a poster for the wall to make it very visible.

The 2024 goals poster will go nicely between our 2023 posters:

[Jen_Lawrie]

We’ll have our kickoff summary and strategy plan to posted soon, but thought it might be worthwhile to share a video from today of our MK4 swerve chassis from 2023 driving over the notes. Our 2023 robot was designed for maximum ground clearance, so bumpers are near the top of the bumper zone. Robot went over the notes with little difficulty. We were’t able to get the note caught, aside from momentarily having a module in the center of the note before driving off again.

Swerve Driving Over Crescendo Note | 2024 Prototypes

[paulonis]

What is the height of your bellypan (or frame if you are using a brainpan) to the floor with the way your MK4’s are mounted? Any fastener heads protruding below the bellypan if you have one?

[Jen_Lawrie]

The MK4’s on our 2023 bot are mounted on below the 2x1 frame rails. So the belly-pan should have > 3" (I believe it is 3.25") of ground clearance. The belly-pan doesn’t have anything protruding aside from rivet heads. The MK4’s are, I think, all attached with 1/4-20 bolts, so there are either the bolt heads or the nylocs protruding downward. I am 90% sure the 1/4-20 bolt heads face downward. We’ve not decided yet if we’re going to aim to go over the floor notes or put the belly-pan and bumpers at the floor, but both seem possible.

[mochihammer]

Can you share a side view photo on how your modules are mounted to your frame rails in this configuration? Or just a diagram, I’d like to see if you literally just mounted the rails to the top face of the top swerve module mounting plate.

[tn4]

Looked up their CAD from their 2023 Build Blog. Their swerve is mounted to a sheet metal and the sheet metal is mounted to the bottom of the 2x1 frame. Very nice design that give full clearance.

[Jen_Lawrie]

Kickoff

We attended a local kickoff event with 6 other area teams. We had 30 student team members and 8 mentors attend, which was a great turnout for us. We presented two workshops for local teams, one on outreach and one on drive team preparation.

After the kickoff, we reconvened at our lab space and focused on reading the rules together for Saturday and Sunday. We work in small groups for this, and also do a “World Cafe” discussion style, described in our 2023 build blog. Team members are asked to complete 1678’s rules test.

Our “World Cafe” kickoff notes can be found here

Priorities

With the intention of seeding high and putting ourselves in a position to win an early regional, focusing on the RP task that could be completed with just 2 robots (the trap) was a focus as of Sunday afternoon. Here’s an abridged version of our priorities list:

Task (Kickoff Sunday)	Should our robot have the ability to do this?
Climb the chain in center	Demand
Climb the chain from side	Prefer
^ Climb in Harmony with 1 robot	Prefer
Climb in Harmony with 2 robots	Ignore
Lift one robot Onstage	Reevaluate after SMR
Lift two robots Onstage	Ignore
Score with speaker	Reevaluate after Prototyping
Score with amp	Demand
Score in trap	Demand
Floor pickup	Demand
Source pickup	Ignore
Go under the stage	Prefer
Drive over Notes (with high bumpers) or push notes (with low bumpers)	Demand

But after some scoring analysis, xRC gameplay, and CAD mockups? We’ve actually re-evaluated this mid-week. We’ve been in a situation in previous seasons where we focused on an RP task to rank high (2016 and 2017), but in those years the RP task at least had a larger point value associated with it. With running some numbers for possible alliance makeups throughout Week 1, it seemed likely that our robot would need to be speaker-capable to really take advantage of the amplification periods and put up enough match points. The trap was a trap (for us).

Task (as of Friday 1/12)	Should our robot have the ability to do this?
Climb the chain in center	Demand
Climb the chain from side	Prefer
^ Climb in Harmony with 1 robot	Prefer
Climb in Harmony with 2 robots	Ignore
Lift one robot Onstage	Reevaluate after SMR
Lift two robots Onstage	Ignore
Score with speaker	Demand
Score with amp	Demand
Score in trap	Reevaluate after SMR
Floor pickup	Demand
Source pickup	Ignore
Go under the stage	Demand
Drive over Notes (with high bumpers) or push notes (with low bumpers)	Demand

Prototyping

We used our 2023 FRC robot, Larry, to test driving over the 2024 Crescendo game piece. Larry’s drive system is MK4’s from SDS, mounted on the bottom of the frame rails, giving maximum ground clearance. The bumpers sit ~2.25-2.5" above the ground.

We tested a 2-roller intake system for ground pickup. We moved from 2 2” rollers to using a 2” roller and a 1” roller. Yet after further prototyping in order to make the intake system fit the frame of 11.5,” we shortened the lengths of both rollers as well as substituted some of the sushi rolls from the 2” roller with spintakes looking spacers to secure the note upon intake.

Under-bumper intake tests | Prototypes 2024

Although this slowed this down a tad in comparison to the 2”-1” roller combination, it held onto the note better when it was pulled against while feeding. This was only tested on the lab table top. We were not satisfied with the narrow width roller feed, so we are increasing our intended chassis size from 26” to 28” in order to accommodate a wider intake roller between the swerve modules. We’ve considered the in-bumper setup (shared by team 95), but our CAD team has not attempted this design yet.

We’ve built wooden versions of the field elements in our practice area. One thing worth noting is the spacing on each face of the stage seems sufficient for two large footprint-robots to climb side-by-side. We were able to fit the bumpers for 3 robots across in that space (from two 26” frame size and one 24” frame size robots) but there doesn’t seem to us to be a good reason to put 3 on a chain. Two seems very possible.

We’ve also built a prototype shooter out of compliant wheels (need size) on 2 churros attached to brushless NEO motors spinning in opposite directions. We intended to use CIM motors instead of brushless NEO motors, but the power supply kept saying that one of the CIM motors were getting overloaded before it even moved, so we switched to the brushless NEO motors because they don’t need any code to be controlled, just an app.

Horizontal Roller Note Launch | 2024 Prototypes

CAD

We’ve mocked up several robot design archetypes in CAD with varying levels of detail. We started with trap/amp only designs, but have quickly moved to speaker/amp designs exclusively at the end of week 1. We really liked the Quokka’s Ri3D design, but were looking for an under-bumper solution. We prioritized ways to combine intake and scoring into one mechanism, and to keep everything within the frame perimeter. Our prototype CAD can be found here.

We tried some KrayonCAD with a focus on reaching the amp/trap.

Amp mechanism on elevator

Amp mechanism on jointed arm

Floor intake → scoring on arm

OTB pivot intake to feeder (like Cranberry Alarm Ri3d)

Quokka arm on swerve base:

Ultimately, with some launcher testing and under-bumper intake testing, we want to use a 2 roller under bumper note pickup, with an adjustable ramp/launcher to reach the speaker. We did a little more CAD development on this last concept. We designed a pivot like in the 2022 Everybot design to move the launcher from speaker score configuration to amp score configuration. We can also adjust the launch angle for shots within our wing. When we return to our lab, a high priority will be testing launch angles to hit the speaker from the auto note line and podium.

This design concept gives us some options. We can fix the angle for initial testing and add the pivot for multiple angles as we go through build season. The reach for amp scoring could potentially translate to trap scoring while climbed. We still need to add 2 independently driven climb hooks on either side of this robot. The amp deflector bar geometry is not finalized. We’ll need some additional testing to be sure that it works as part of the full assembly. The ramp will have feeder wheels on top, 2” compliant, mimicking the REV starter-bot design.

For the moment, much of our build has been on hold, though, so there’s a lot more CAD than prototyping. Here in Knoxville, we’ve had a significant snowstorm roll through - about 3x our typically annual snowfall in a short period. We’ve been out of our shop since Saturday and it could be a few more days before we are able to work in-person again. It could mean a full week less of build time before our Week 1 event!

Media

With the season underway, we published a new short-form video about our thoughts on CRESCENDO. Our season timeline has also been finalized and printed, allowing us to see subteam deadlines and project workflows all on one piece of paper:

Here are our 2024 season goals and timeline posters hung around our Scrum board:

Code

We are using YAGSL as our swerve library, and are waiting for the 2024 version so we can get our 2024 drive code up and running. This is our code schedule for the season.

January

• Jan 16, Drive Base Driving
• Jan 19, Auto Taxi Written
• Jan 23, Controller support implemented
• Jan 26, All sensors implemented

February

• Feb 2, All Subsystems operational
• Feb 13, Full Auto support
• Feb 23, All bugs on subsystems squashed and subsystems doing what they should

March

• Mar 1, Clean Successful Autos (up to 4 notes in speaker, centerline steal, amp auto)

Drive Team

Drive team has been focused on early practice with basic robot control drills as well as human player practice.

The first of the two control drills is to focus on precise tracking while in motion. The second drill focuses more on speed and the ability to both traverse a distance and spin at the same time.

Drill #1 Drill #2

For human player practice we quickly put together a basic microphone setup focusing on the correct height, distance, and angle.

Crescendo High Note Toss Practice

An important part of improving is tracking performance. To better help with this we have made spreadsheets that help depict progress and performance. This is especially useful for the task of human players as we are better able to see the chance of spotlighting.

[nstrike]

I released the 2024 edition but haven’t publicized it yet until i finish the documentation. Good luck!

[Jen_Lawrie]

Week 2: Snowmageddon? Snowpocalypse?

Priorities

We wrapped up week 1 building field elements and getting a half-field practice area ready for testing prototypes, drive practice, and autonomous routines. At the end of our Saturday 1/13 meeting, our practice area was set up and we’d assembled a basic 2-roller launcher and a 4-roller under-bumper intake.

We’d planned for a busy week 2 of prototyping and a design freeze & chassis build on 1/20, but the weather had other plans. With an unseasonably deep freeze covering Tennessee in snow and ice this week, we’ve been out of school since 1/12 and have lost about 12 hours of build time over 4 canceled meetings.

So we spent our Week 2 reading OA, reading the FIRST Q&A, working on submitted awards, doing CAD review, outreach preparation, and media projects. Our Impact essay and executive summaries got a lot of attention this week. As did our STEM outreach curriculum. We all worked from home and stayed off the icy roads.

We’ve had very little in-person work time this week. Sometimes, the build season doesn’t go as planned. This is one of the longer stretches we’ve lost to snowstorms in recent memory, but we’ve had to close the lab for snow, illness, schedule conflicts, lack of faculty support, etc. It happens! We’ll adjust.

Media

Week 2 Recap video: https://youtu.be/LYXeQuzYh4A
Week 1 recap video: https://youtu.be/yrzr7h9HlWc

We’ve continued to focus on making YouTube shorts (random fun stuff, prototyping videos) and Instagram reels. These formats have been easier for us to produce quickly and have boosted our online following.

Watch for another Diary of an Innovator entry from us soon on the FRC Blog!

Prototyping

We continued work on an under-bumper requirement. We cut support plates using our Glowforge to adjust the spacing quickly. With further testing, we adjusted the bottom roller to 1” diameter, top roller is 2” with AndyMark “spintakes” added. We also added two additional rollers to funnel the note upward. The spintakes are great for grabbing the note, but too many of them will shred the notes pretty quick. We cut back from many in our outer roller to only 3 or 4.

Roller intake for Crescendo #shorts

Intake Testing:

Intake roller testing | 2024 Prototypes

Knowing that we’ll likely have notes sliding on an incline on their way to our top/bottom rollers, we wanted to check the friction coefficients. We did a pretty basic friction coefficient test: placing the note on a plastic on a flat surface, lifting the plastic to make a ramp, and measuring the angle at which the note slides. The tangent of the slip angle is the static friction coefficient. Of the plastics we had on the shelf, Orange Peel HDPE (also called marine grade or starboard) showed the lowest friction with the note.

A rough launcher prototype we constructed used 4” compliant wheels to successfully fire notes from the podium to speaker.

Our 4” compliant wheels launcher prototype was raised to the robot’s height (38 inches with the arm fully extended) and was shooting well. We tested it from 3 different positions on the field, one from the podium, one from against the front of the speaker, and one from the far scaffolding on stage left (16’ 6” from the speaker). We had a high percentage made from the podium and up against the speaker, but scoring by the far scaffolding on stage left was only around 15-20% made.

Speaker shot testing from various distances | 2024 Prototypes

We also found that the wooden prototype can score in the amp at around 10% power. We looked at launching the note upward into the amp. Initially, we were hoping to launch the note downward into the amp, but our designs so far are sitting low to the ground. We tried firing upward at a relatively sharp angle, then made it a bit steeper, then added a bar to trap the note into the amp.

Amp Shots:

Amp Scoring Test #shorts

Code

The code team began to work on a code base for the robot and has begun to implement YAGSL. With the break, members of the code were hard at work reading Java docs and learning Java. WPIlib, YAGSL, and Pathplanner were all studied to quicken the process of coding the robot once the team managed to be in person again. We are coming into week 3 ready to establish a strong code base with Swerve quickly.

Outreach

We’re continuing to develop our STEM curriculum for our local Boys & Girls Club program. Our spring semester visits start this week. We bring an activity to the club on a different topic every week. One goal this season was to formalize our activity rotation, build the materials and instructions out into kits, and publish our lessons for future use and use by other teams. We are leaning heavily on resources from LEGO to create the activity and materials list for each kit. For each topic, we are making a worksheet with a story or game. We are targeting a 4th grade level for these kits. This is a work in progress, but we’re happy to share. Request access using this form.

Awards

We’re continuing to work on our impact essay and the executive summaries that go along with it. We have been brainstorming different ideas on how to structure them while still getting the information across. Along with the writing portion we are trying to make the video and presentation cohesive and have the same theme throughout all parts but also provide different information throughout each.

Drive Team

Drive team used this time to work on communication skills and teamwork by using video games as a medium. By playing Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes we were able to practice driver coach communication skills that will be valuable during competition.

[BryceHanson]

@Jen_Lawrie

By playing Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes we were able to practice driver coach communication skills

So glad to see other teams doing this! I’ve had such great success woth KTaNE and Overcooked to drill driveteam communication.

Practice field is looking great! We may have to take a trip out from Nashville to visit and prep together.

[Jen_Lawrie]

Mechanical

So this is a fairly late update, so a summary is probably worthwhile here. After we lost a week+ to snow/ice, we modified our previous design ideas to narrow in on something that looked a lot more familiar and feasible to us. We moved the pivot upward on our note launcher, making our superstructure look a lot more like our 2023 robot. This meant we were able to build with some COTS sprockets, chain components, gearboxes, etc that we had on the shelf already. Mail delivery was disrupted due to weather for quite a while here, so we had to simplify our plan to get back on schedule. We connected with two local machine shops, which has helped us to get some brackets made locally as well as our intake and launcher plates.

We’ve continued working on our “in bumper” intake, and have adjusted roller spacing, motor and belt placement, etc. We’ve seen some issues with notes getting stuck or being difficult to intake from the side. We added some 3D printed guides to help steer the notes around the intake motor and into the indexer. This is our first iteration, and seems to help. The 3D print bolts into the front of the frame box tubing.

The arm geometry is something we’re pretty comfortable with and has allowed us to have an adjustable shot angle for the speaker and to launch the note downward reliably into the amp. We’re still optimizing the indexing rollers and launcher wheels. While we can easily hit the speaker from point in front of the subwoofer, we need to continue testing spin-up time for the orange stealth wheels and the pulley tooth count ratios from the Falcon 500’s running them to get the range we’re looking for. We’d like to be able to hit the speaker from positions throughout our own wing.

Subwoofer to Speaker & Amp Shot Testing | 2024 Robot

We noticed that the intake wheels were still gripping the note while it was being launched. In order to reduce the stretching of the note that occurred as a result, we removed the silicone tubing from the highest two indexing rollers. The note now slips away from those rollers a little easier, though they still do a good job centering. With more time, we may try to improve the spacing of the intake to index to launch rollers for better performance, but this fix seems to be enough for right now.

Over the last 2 weeks, we’ve been able to bounce the robot between mechanical, code, and drive teams… tuning parameters in code, getting some drive time, and adding in modified mechanism parts based on previous testing. This has given us a chance to get some cycling practice even as we’re not quite done with the robot.

Crescendo Robot Cycling Practice | 2024 Robot

The last few details we are waiting on at this point would be the ⅛” aluminum intake plates that are being machined for us by a sponsor and construction of our bumpers. We’re expecting that both of these things come together this week.

CAD

CAD this week has consisted mainly of the finalization of the intake and shooter designs. The intake has been configured to take 0 tensioners, enabled by the implementation of a 48 tooth belt. We experimented with adding 0.02 inches to the pulley spacing to improve tension, inspired by a thread on Chief Delphi. It worked shockingly well, improving belt tension substantially.

Code

A ton has happened in code since our last recap! Our robot drives, all the motors have successfully been wired and given CAN ID’s after much trouble. We spent a good portion of time rewiring CAN wires, as the connectors were very unsuccessful. We eventually switched to WAGO lever nuts for our CAN wiring, as they are both very strong and can be swapped and reused. Code has implemented basic code for all four subsystems. We have a consistent intake, we implemented a beam break that controls our intake and indexer, and have a powerful shooter. Recently, code has implemented a basic auto with pathplanner, and written arm code for the arm. The first tests of the arm were very unsuccessful, due to values being far too high in our PID constants. After the wooden hard stop plates broken by the initial slam were repaired, PID began to be tuned. We now have 3 successful stepoints for intake/subwoofer-flush shoot, amp shoot, and podium shoot. Code will soon start to work on implementing vision processing with PhotonVision and work on more complex autos.

We added note detection within our indexer using a beam break sensor. There was some great documentation from an order CD thread that helped us get this up and running quickly: Code for IR Break Beam

We’ve run into several issues in getting our robot up and running, from losing CAN devices to random shutoff issues while driving. We seem to have tracked most of these issues down with firmware updates and improved electrical work, but we still have some additional code fixes to complete. We really appreciate the help we got in the YAGSL threads about these issues. Yet Another Generic Swerve Library (YAGSL) Beta - #1302 by JamesOverall1466

Currently, we are seeing some drift in the swerve driving using field-centric drive. We are looking into drive kinematics to figure out how to reduce this. Our now graduated programmer from last year spent some time on this issue, so we’re looking back over older documentation to see if there’s an implementation to reduce the robot drift while spinning.

Outreach

We’ve had a few Boys & Girls Club program days, including lessons on gears, pulleys, and binary numbers.

We’re continuing to develop our STEM curriculum for our local Boys & Girls Club program. Our spring semester visits start this week. We bring an activity to the club on a different topic every week. One goal this season was to formalize our activity rotation, build the materials and instructions out into kits, and publish our lessons for future use and use by other teams. We are leaning heavily on resources from LEGO to create the activity and materials list for each kit. For each topic, we are making a worksheet with a story or game. We are targeting a 4th grade level for these kits. This is a work in progress, but we’re happy to share. Request access using this form.

One of our FLL teams traveled to the East TN State Tournament last weekend as well. We had several team members travel with that team to offer support as they prepared for judging and their table runs. We also brought an FTC robot to demonstrate at the event, allowing lots of FLL participants to check out the robot and drive it on the Centerstage field.

Strategy

We watched the Kettering Ri3D competition and focused on reviewing most common cycle paths as well as general cycle timing with the understanding that the matches may not match perfectly with actual competitions. We also watched Week 0 events this weekend. We’re using Scoutradioz again for scouting this year, and took Saturday to work through the user interface, set up scouting rotations, and plan how to import data for analysis during our events.