FRC 2342 Team Phoenix | 2024 Build Thread | Open Alliance

[CS-2342]

Welcome to Team Phoenix’s first Open Alliance Build Thread. We’re extremely excited to join this amazing community, and to share our progress with you all throughout the build season!

Background

Team Phoenix is a community team located in Nashua, NH. We take in students from many different communities and backgrounds, with some members coming from 5 minutes away, and others 45. We’ve competed in FRC since 2008, and are going into our 16th season. We pride ourselves upon being a student-run team, with two co-captains overseeing the large scale operations of the team, and sub-team leads managing individual aspects of the team (e.g. CAD, Finance, etc).

Organization

Team Phoenix consists of 6 sub-teams, each with a critical role on the team

• Mechanical - Fabrication is the ‘build’ sub-team that does the actual manufacturing of parts, and assembles the mechanisms of the robot
• Mechanical - Electrical is the ‘controls’ sub-team, assisting fabrication in installing the electrical components of the robot and with wiring
• CAD designs the robot in SolidWorks, and produces mechanical drawings for fabrication to manufacture
• Software is the other side of ‘controls’, making the robot run and designing our auto routines. In this capacity, they work closely with electrical
• Business - Finance is the administrative heart of the team, applying for grants, reaching out to sponsors, creating award submissions, and arranging outreach opportunities
• Business - Art focuses on our team branding. Over the years, Team Phoenix has placed a very strong emphasis on our artwork and team image, which has allowed us to win the imagery award several times

Over the offseason, we’ve found that having two captains has worked out well, and has greatly increased the amount the team has been able to get done. One of our captains (me) focuses on the technical side of things (mech, CAD, software), while my co-lead focuses on the business side (finance, art). However, we jointly handle the administrative tasks of the team. The Vice Captain serves the key role of ensuring that everything runs smoothly during times when the captains need to focus on admin tasks. The secretary ensures that we have top notch documentation of everything that goes on, with emphasis on the meeting minutes.

Brief Team History

Over our 15 seasons of FRC, Team Phoenix has had a good amount of success, with the last few years particularly being a rollercoaster. Throughout our history, we’ve gone to worlds 3 times (2008, 2011, and 2015, when we were an alliance captain on Archimedes!), and have been the number 1 seed at one event (2015, UNH), and alliance captains at several others. But… the blue banner still eludes us (hopefully that’s going to change this year!). COVID almost completely destroyed our team, leaving us with only a handful of students when we returned in person. Over the past few years, we’ve worked to rebuild, but by Charged Up, we still had a mostly rookie team.

2023 turned out to be one of our most successful seasons ever, being a 1st round pick at SE Mass (thank you to 8013 and 1474), and the captain of the number 3 alliance at UNH (thank you to 4564 and 9055)! At the end of the season, we had an EPA ranking in NE of 37! Unfortunately, District Champs tanked our District Points Ranking, moving us out of worlds range. However, after a very successful offseason (we’ll do another post on that!), and with a strong core of now veteran students, we hope that 2024 will be the year we return to Champs!

Links

Website (work in progress/outdated due to software issues)
Github
Facebook
Instagram
Youtube (also outdated/work in progress, but hopefully back later in build season!)

[tbasil]

Over the offseason, Team Phoenix has been diligently working on getting our team prepared for the season!

Offseason

Competitions

• We attended BattleCry@WPI in June for the first time in several years and had a great time. We were extremely excited to be the captain of Alliance 16 after running a completely new drive team during quals. Thank you to 1153, 2877, and 175 for a wild ride in the playoffs. A lot of new students got great drive team experience, and it was a great sendoff for our seniors, who had graduated just the day before!

Battlecry 2023

Thanks to 1153 for this meme!

• Our second offseason event we attended was Mayhem in Merrimack! It was another fantastic offseason event. Thank you to 246 and 166 for picking us in the playoffs (special thanks to 166 for hosting!); we had a blast, and got to try a few more different driveteams!

• Team Phoenix proudly competed with our robot for our last competition of the year alongside other FRC teams from New Hampshire on October 7th, 2023. Thank you to Team 1307 and Team 4546 for a great time in the playoffs and to FIRST NH for putting such a great event together! We had our open house a few weeks prior, so it was the first event they were able to participate in. It was great to see new members testing the waters of the drive team.

Drive Team at Governors Cup

Training

• Our fabrication lead and veteran members have been hard at work training the new members on our machines. This year, we got an unexpectedly high number of new members, and a majority were interested in joining our fabrication sub-team. They have been thoroughly trained, and are excited to start working on the real deal! We had some initial setbacks, including some unexpected issues with moving our mills to our new space (more info below!), but our sub-team leads stepped up to the challenge and adapted. We placed a strong emphasis on assembly training this year, and have been pleasantly surprised at how easily so many students have picked up the concepts. We had quite a bit of work for them to do, including repairing last season both after some damage sustained at offseasons. Our fab lead also had the clever idea to do ‘repair testing’ for the students, having experienced students break things on the robot so new students could learn how to identify issues

• Our software sub-team has been diligently training our new members on all the software-related subjects in FRC. This includes but is not limited to autonomous actions, teleoperated controls, flashing and rebooting radios, and how to properly use the driver station. Aside from some basic training, they have been working on getting our new swerve drivetrain up and running. This year, we have decided to go with PathPlanner for programming our autonomous routines, as well as implementing a vision system running on the LimeLight 3. We’ll be sure to make a lot more software updates after kickoff!

• The CAD team has been achieving some amazing things in the offseason! In a fairly short time period, all the new members were trained and comfortable with Solidworks. Afterward, they began designing some concepts that could be worth looking into, for example, octagonal bumpers or a drivetrain with swerve modules facing inwards. Our team has previously used GrabCAD for version control, and we were pretty shocked to hear that it was shutting down this year. We considered the possibility of switching to Onshape, but with all of the veteran students and mentors already experienced with SolidWorks, we decided to push shifting to Onshape back a year or two.

• Immediately after District Champs, we made the decision to invest in swerve. Over the past few years, we’ve bought pretty heavily into the Rev ecosystem due to their reliability. Because of this, along with the fact that they already have a swerve library written, we decided to go with MaxSwerve, originally with Neo v1.1s. However, we purchased Kraken x60 motors soon after they were announced, and now plan to use them on our swerve to get some extra torque. Since we’re going to have to adapt our code to CTRE motor controllers, we’ve decided to use our Falcon 500 motors from last year’s drivetrain if our Krakens don’t come in soon enough.

Swerve!!!

Outreach Events

Alongside training and competitions, we kept ourselves busy over the offseason with doing outreach events!

• Every year, we host an open house at our shop for anybody with interest to show up and learn more about the team. We had major success this year, with a very large turnout. We started with a small presentation about the team and FIRST. Afterwards, we demonstrated our 2023 competition robot. To finish out the event, we had the new students spread out and visit stations that each sub-team had set up beforehand, allowing the students to learn more about the specific sub-team that they were curious about.

• In order to show our appreciation for everything that 4H does for us, we attended the Hillsborough County Agricultural Fair in New Boston, New Hampshire. We were honored to receive a blue ribbon! (Hopefully, we can win some blue banners too this year, haha.)

4H Fair

• We were very grateful for the opportunity to attend some FLL Events! We attended an FLL Expo at the Nashua Girls Inc. alongside our friends at Team 811 and demonstrated our 2023 competition robot. We got the opportunity to mentor some FLL teams, which was an awesome experience. Finally, we sent some members to the FLL New Hampshire State Championships, hosted at Windham High School!

Demonstration at Girls Inc. FLL Expo

• One of our favorite outreach events that we hosted this year was the Great American Ribfest in Merrimack! We hosted this alongside Team 166. We demonstrated our 2016 bot, and it was a huge hit with the kids. We worked extremely well with Chop Shop, teaching parents about FIRST while the children played with the robot and worked on crafts. Later on in the offseason, Team 166 offered us the chance to demonstrate our robot at their annual FLL competition, which we are very grateful for.

Picture with 166 at their FLL Event

• In November, our team initiated our Thanksgiving Dinner Basket food drive. For about two weeks, we had members donate Thanksgiving dinner items until we had a couple of bins worth of food items ready to be donated to charity. Overall, we had a great turnout and it was a lot of fun!

• We decided to continue one of our favorite traditions, our partnership with Ben’s Sugar Shack! Ben’s Sugar Shack is a family-owned and operated maple syrup store, located in Temple, New Hampshire. We work together in order to simultaneously fundraise for our team and support local businesses! This year, we held a competition between our sub-teams to see who could raise the most money. It was a massive success, and we look forward to hosting it again next year!

Misc.

• The school that hosts Team Phoenix moved this year, so we had to transport our shop over the summer and into the school year. We finally got everything up and running last month and are ready to have a strong start to the build season!

Shelves of material at our new location

At the time of writing this, there are less than 24 hours until CRESCENDO begins. (Yes, it’s a little late for us to be talking about our offseason endeavors.) In a couple of days, we’ll be back to talk about our build philosophy and strategies. We’ll see you all soon, and good luck!

[CS-2342]

Hi everyone, we’re so sorry we couldn’t get an Open Alliance post out sooner, things have been crazy between snow days and our meeting schedule. We’ll be sure to make it up this week with more CAD and Software updates though!

Strategy, Planning, Alpha Bot Design

Planning Strategy

Wanting to have a robust strategy before we started talking about robot design, we decided to go with 125’s game breakdown strategy. We began our meeting talking about what our goals for the season should be. We got a wide range of responses, from build philosophies to competition goals, all of which have already helped to influence our direction.

After watching the game video, we gave everyone a small break for lunch before they would have to read all the rules (we’re not that cruel!). Historically, we’ve split up into small groups, each of which read a small section of the rules. These groups would then come back together and share what they’d learned. We decided against that this year, instead splitting up into two large groups, and discussing the entirety of the game manual rule by rule so everyone has a good idea of how the game is played.

Some things that we noticed with the rules:

• Only 1 ft of extension seems very small
• No gaps in bumpers, which may pose some design challenges
• G422 has some interesting wording, and at first glance, seemed to imply that robots could contact opposing alliance podiums in the last 20 sec of the match. This is explicitly forbidden by G424, but caused some confusion for team members
• The rules regarding how coopertition points contribute towards ranking are fairly limited, which confused some team members
• There’s no rule about not scoring in the amp during auto, so we could start immediately amplifying right after autonomous starts, but we’re not sure if this would be smart strategy wise.

Priorities

We’ll have our priorities list put in a more organized form by Thursday, but for now, here’s what we see as our general priorities lists:

1. Scoring in the speaker from within the wing – We’ve judged that this will be absolutely critical to being even slightly competitive. While we believe that scoring in the amp is also critical to being a strong robot, we’re placing the speaker slightly above it in out priority lists
2. Intaking from the ground – this is probably tied with the speaker (since one is necessary for the other). Given the layout of the field, we believe that the vast majority of pieces will end up being on the floor, and that floor pickup will be much quicker and more reliable than direct source pickup.
3. Scoring in the amp – absolutely critical to be a competitive robot. Having a robot that can score in the amp is important for our goal of being able to fully support our alliance, and being able to adapt to any situation or strategy necessary
4. Hanging from the chain – we played in several matches this season where even getting only 3 rank points could drop you several places in rank, so we definitely want the ability to get that second rank point
5. Scoring in the trap – Even though we’ve ranked it pretty low (just because of how difficult it is), we are definitely attempting to design a trap mechanism. We think that trap scoring will be very important to getting the rank point
6. Intake from the source – even though it will very likely be slower for us than ground pickup initially, we’re still open to the possibility of picking up from the source in the scenario that ground pieces are unavailable, but it’s not a priority.

Overall, from what we’ve discussed, being able to score via all elements of the game will be extremely crucial for a bot capable of going to worlds.

Ideas and Progress

CAD has almost completed our initial ‘alpha bot’ design for the robot, and we’ll do another post to share more info on that very soon.

Fabrication has spent two weeks prototyping different mechanisms for the future robot, mostly based on Ri3D archetypes.

We initially tested a shooter similar to the ones in the Kitbot and Cranberry Alarm design. However, since we decided that an arm was likely the way to go, we realized that this sort of design was impractical for us (too big). Because of this, I don’t have any photos of it.

We also tested an over the bumper intake (we though under the bumper was impractical for us, mostly because we wanted to have a small frame. We based our intake design mostly on that of Cranberry Alarm with some alterations, but overall determined that the concept would work if we went with a seperate intake mechanism.

Next, we tested a shooter design similar to that of Team 95. However, unlike their design, we tested it without the ‘spin’ they put on the note by angling the hex-shafts. So far, this design has shot the farthest, mostly because we used 6” Colson wheels on it (we decided that this was also likely impractical for the real bot, since it was very heavy).

Soon, we realized that our robot archetype was experiencing convergent evolution to the Unqualified Quokkas Ri3D design, with an arm and a shooter/intake hybrid. Because of this, we decided to try and replicate their intake/shooter mechanism. Out of all the designs we’ve tested, we’ve liked this the best, and will likely be moving forward with it.

The other part of fabrication has been busy building field elements. We got the amp, speaker, ⅓ of a stage, and a driver station all built within a week, mostly thanks to how large our fab team is this year. Since then, we’ve worked to build a rudimentary frame for the other ⅔ of the stage, so we can accurately practice driving under it (as well as place AprilTags), without needing to add on all of its unnecessary components.

Electrical has been working hard on getting our competition drivetrain done. Fortunately, we have 2 sets of MaxSwerve modules, and were able to use a NEO drivetrain during the preseason, but have decided to assemble the second set with the Falcon 500 motors from last year’s drivetrain. Once wiring is complete and we’re able to test it, we’ll have a much more detailed drivetrain (maybe a comparison of our NEO and Falcon bots).

[CS-2342]

Again, sorry for the big gap between updates, enough has been changing design wise that we kept pushing off our post

Robot CAD Update

About 2.5 weeks ago, our CAD team finished the 1st iteration of the ‘alpha bot’, heavily inspired by the Quokkas. We’re a SolidWorks team and don’t use OnShape, so here’s a GrabCAD link to that iteration of the design: https://grabcad.com/library/frc-2342-open-alliance-v1-1

Fabrication didn’t take too long to build it, one of the advantages of a relatively simple design. We finished assembly last Saturday, and began some practical testing. Immediately, we noticed a few major issues with the design:

1. The intake-shooter mechanism is extremely heavy, messing up the center of gravity for the robot
2. Because of this issue, the robot can get close to tipping at only half speed
3. Lining up for the amp was difficult, as the arm was not very easy to control
4. We would prefer a wider intake, as picking up pieces seemed a bit slow
5. Shooting is somewhat inaccurate, with the note tumbling being the main issue
6. When the intake is down, it’s unprotected, which makes us fearful that it would be hit

With only so much time left, we decided to pick and choose which issues to prioritize for Week 0, and which for Week 2.

Week 0 Changes

Overall, we determined that the biggest issue was center of gravity, and the moment of inertia of the arm. This issue was the easiest to solve: we cut the arms almost in half, and moved them closer to the center of the robot. This should theoretically greatly reduce the amount of tipping we were experiencing, and hopefully make the arm easier to control.

Luckily for us, CAD was already working on a fix for issues 4 and 5. We decided to go with a wider, but still arm-mounted, intake. This involved widening the intake by 8 inches, and mounting it to blocks on the side of the arm. We also decided to go with a 6328 style shooter, to impart spin on the notes. So far, we haven’t had much luck with tuning this properly, and don’t know exactly how much spin we should impart.

Week 2 Changes

We also decided that having an exposed intake was a major issue, particularly in higher levels of competition. We initially had the idea of extending out the frame to have a place for the arm to drop down and pick up pieces, but we determined that this did nothing to help the c.o.g. situation, and significantly messed up the arm geometry.

Instead, we decided to go with a 95-style under-the-bumper intake, which will be added on to the robot for Week 2 (hopefully assembly will begin right after Week 0). We think that this will significantly increase our cycling speed, after watching some videos of other teams with similar designs.

About a week ago, we finally got our Krakens, and plan to work on adapting them to our MaxSwerve modules very soon after Week 0. We already have modified the gears necessary, which was very difficult to do properly since they’re hardened steel. All we have to do now is print out a spacer to prop the motor. We also hope to run one of the new ratios available for MaxSwerve. We have the 16t SplineX gears necessary for extra high 5, but we’re not sure if we need that much speed yet.

Build Updates

After a few setbacks regarding our shooter, mainly due to some hardware mismatches. Fortunately, we’ve found that shortening the arm makes it significantly easier to control, and we haven’t seen any issues with tipping yet.

The new intake also appears to work great. We have two plates that ramp the note down from the wide intake to the narrower shooter, meaning that we can essentially pick up notes along the entire length of the bumper. The only issue we’ve noted so far is how much the intake wheels tear up the note after it hits the shooter and can’t go any farther. We plan to fix this by adding a note detector, which will stop the intake once the note is loaded.

We’ve been able to test most of the basic functions of the robot, including speaker and amp shooting. We’ve noted some issues with accuracy, mostly due to the note flipping in mid-air, but are so far satisfied with the consistency. We’d love to post videos, but we’re still working on recovering our youtube account after the students who set it up left the team.

We originally didn’t think that amp scoring would work after our redesign, since shortening the arm greatly affected where it lined up to the amp. However, we figured out that by rotating the arm around backwards, so that the intake points up into the amp (see below), we can shoot into the amp. This has also been mostly consistent if the robot is lined up properly.

We were so busy getting shooting working that we realized last week that we didn’t have a method to climb. With the longer arm, we had originally planned to climb on hooks attached to each side of the arm. With the redesign, this is no longer possible. We’re currently exploring whether or not we can climb off of the shooter, but most likely, it will end up having to be a Week 2 fix. However, we figure that climbing won’t be too critical at Week 0, and we can likely just focus on doing cycles during the pseudo-endgame.

With Week 0 only 2 days away, we’re also ramping up drive team practice. Last week, we tested prospective drive team students on their knowledge of the rules. Those who passed will get to move on to some sort of practical testing before Week 2.

We’re all looking forward to Week 0 (only 2 days away!). We’re lucky enough to have it as an actual practice/testing opportunity for both the robot and the drive-team, and I’m sure we’ll have a lot more to share afterwards!

[CS-2342]

Week 0 Updates

Team Phoenix went into Week 0 planning for it to be entirely a learning experience, and while we did learn valuable lessons, they weren’t necessarily the ones we thought we would…

In summary, the robot at Week 0:

Luckily for us, almost all of our issues were electrical or software related, not any major mechanical flaws

In match 1, we learned the value of using Loctite on the bolt that holds the hex-shaft into a MaxPlanetary gearbox. This was likely an oversight due to quick assembly. About 45 seconds into the first match, the shaft came out, causing the gear and belt driving the intake to fall off. We also had communications issues that stopped the arm from working that match. However, we were able to play some defense, which was great practice for our driver

The second match was much more… scary. We started off my making an impossible shot, getting a note lodged between the back panel of the speaker and the chute:

The solution to this is most likely reducing the speed of the shooter, something we’ve already done. The big disaster came later in the match. After some communications issues, our driver unplugged the controller and plugged it back in. We believe that this caused the robot to be stuck driving at full speed. Pinned up against a wall, neither us nor the FTA could realize what was going on, until we saw smoke coming from the robot. Luckily, our coach recognized what was going on, and pressed the E-Stop. After the match, we discovered that the wheels had burnt up and essentially melted into the carpet:

Unfortunately, because of how the schedule worked out, we were only given 2 qualification matches, and after being unable to play in our first two matches, we weren’t chosen for an alliance. However, we did get to play in practice match with the other teams who only received two matches. During that match, we didn’t have any major failures, except for some CAN issues due to loose connections which rendered our arm unusable for some of the match. We were still able to do ~6 cycles into the speaker, and likely could have done more if we had no issues.

Ultimately, we learned a few lessons:

• We needed more time for software and drive-team to practice to discover any issues
• We need to be sure to check and reinforce all electrical connections on our comp bot
• When we don’t have electrical issues, our archetype works very well, and the combined intake-shooter reduces faliure points over an under-the-bumper intake (notes getting stuck inside the robot because the intake doesn’t hand-off properly
• We can likely do 10+ cycles per match. If we were able to do 6 with arm failures and only shooting from the subwoofer, this could be greatly improved with more practice. We’ve already seen on our practice field that we’re able to shoot with okay accuracy from as far as the wing line, we just weren’t able to try that during competition
• We have a strong drive-team that should be very competitive throughout the season

The combination of these lessons has influenced what changes we’ll make for Week 2

New Week 2 Changes

Overall, we determined that our archetype, a modification off of the Quokkas design to implement a better intake and shooter, will likely end up performing the same as (or in some cases, perhaps better) than an under the bumper design. We’ve decided to make the following modifications to our current design for Week 2:

• Lengthen the arms to enable us to shoot down into the amp
• Add an A-Frame for more rigidity
• Fixing week points on the frame
• Switching to Krakens and a faster gear-ratio for the drive-train
• Focusing on software improvements, including auto-shooting and aligning, as well as high scoring autos.

Software wise, we’ve already make several improvements from Week 0, including putting spin on the notes to increase accuracy, starting making a lookup table for arm positions at different distances.

We’ll have another update likely towards the end of the week once we’ve made more progress on the competition version of the bot!