FRC 2468 Team Appreciate 2025 Off-Season Project Publications

Technical
1

Happy New Year! In the spirit of rule R303, FRC 2468 Team Appreciate and all of Westlake Robotics would love to share this year’s off-season projects with the public. Along with this post, all of our files and links will be available on our website soon.

Every off-season, we assign projects to complete throughout the course of the fall semester to further develop our technical skills and prepare for the season. With these projects, our main focus is teaching our students as well as our beginner and transition teams—2689 Team Alpha and FRC 2687 Team Apprentice, respectively—about design, programming, and electronics.

Design:

  • 2017 Steamworks Fuel Flywheel Shooter:
    This offseason project was designed to be used by future students as an example/template of a basic flywheel shooter. The shooter was initially designed to be as simple as possible. It features a simple motorized hood, and a basic 2:1 reduction for the flywheel. Ironically, but unsurprisingly, in the process of making the design as simple as possible the work became more and more complex. In the end spacing and packaging turned out to be the most time consuming part of the design.

Electronics:

  • CAN Distribution Boards using Custom PCBs:
    This project is an iteration of the student designed CAN Distribution Boards that were made last season. These boards serve as hubs to connect all our CAN devices and make our wiring more efficient and reliable. This new iteration uses the WAGO 2601-3104 connectors instead of the previous WAGO 250-204 connectors.

Programming Projects: (via GitHub)

  • Crescendo 2024 Dashboard
    The dashboard used by Appreciate for the Crescendo season.

  • Path Tracer
    Logs robot positions on the field to set waypoints in Bordeaux using live locations.

  • Crescendo 2024 Code
    Team Appreciate’s robot code for 2024 Crescendo Season.

  • OpenMV87
    OpenMV camera code as first used in the 2024 Crescendo season by Team Apprentice.

  • ChapCam
    Tracking our autonomous paths from a camera on our shop ceiling for comparisons.

  • 2024 Off Season Alpha Template
    A robot project template to potentially be used during Alpha’s 2025 season.

  • Bordeaux
    Team Appreciate’s custom path planning software.
    Latest change: Integrated built-in path pushing to robot

  • Sextant Angle Localization
    Tracking sextant angles with AprilTags to determine the robot’s position on the field.

  • Swerve Template
    Library for Swerve Math and Utilities.
    Latest change: Updated VIs and adjusted PID values

If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, please feel free to contact us. Good luck to everyone this season!

15 Likes
2

Can you tell us more about sextant angle localization?

3

Other 2468 electronic experiments and offseason files in s1900ahon’s GitHub collection of experiments in PCB and CircuitPython fun.

1 Like
4

We have found that tracking robot position relative to a single tag can be a noisy approach to localizing. However, if you see multiple tags with your camera simultaneously, you can get precise data on your position.

We are calculating position relative to multiple tags using the sextant angle formula. Think of it like a ship’s distance to a lighthouse. If you are surrounded by lighthouses then you will have a really good idea of your latitude any longitudinal coordinate. The cool part of this is in FRC we generally don’t care about our z-height to objects on the field so this data is not wasting compute with our approach.

Also, if you can find a way to process sextant angles prior to unwarping your camera image, you can process a lot of high resolution data very very quickly from nearly as many cameras as you can fit on the robot (or maybe just one very wide angle camera :thinking:).

1 Like
5

We also have done testing on 3D printed and polyurethane molded wheels. Attached are links for our plastic hubs and polyurethane tread mold.