Nice shooting! Just out of curiosity, what is your drive reduction from the motors to the shooter axle, and what speed were you running the motor at?
That was 1/1 direct drive, we just used the VP female output to couple to the hex shaft. That was 75-80% power.
STRUGGLES
I just wanted to post a quick update, as I feel like we are slipping on our promise to post regularly. When we decided to join the #openalliance it was in hopes that we could document our season better and maybe help other teams. The fact of the matter is, is that documenting is hard, and I am struggling to document while also being the involved mentor that I like to be. This build season as a whole has been a struggle outside of documenting for Wave because we are a very NEW team in regards to students on the team. We’ve been shrinking in student size the last few years and just recently started to grow again. Which is great, but we’re a team of 30 students this year and over half are freshman or sophomores and over half the team this is their 1st or 2nd build season. So while the students are learning how to do this robotics thing, I’m also attempting to learn how to document and record more. Goals for the future of this sharing is to rope in more members of the team to help share the load and aid in documenting and get to the level of the other members of the open alliance.
So with that out of the way some quick robot updates. As i said I’ve been struggling to record and take pictures so all i have are words today. Last night we continued to test our shooter prototype. We got in an order of the infamous 4in blue urethane fairlane wheels from mcmaster yesterday. We had some hubs already in so we pressed those in. While that was happening we swapped out the wheels we had in the shooter with some 6in colson wheels to see how they compared to the 4in wheels we had been shooting with. The colson wheels fired just as well as the 4 in wheels, but we felt that the balls were being shot too fast and hard from the initiation line that if we didn’t nail the inner port we had a high percentage of bounce out. We were worried about bounce out from the beginning so we made our goal have polycarb back and top just like it will be on a real competition field. After testing the 6in wheels we swapped the wheels again to the new fairlane wheels. We like the results we got from these much better. We were able to hit all the shots we are hoping to be able to hit during a match with them and the feed and speeds were all very similar that we feel the motors will be able to keep up with our demands.
We also finally agreed on an overall design and started CADing intensely last night. This Saturday our goal is to have CAD at least 90% done so we can start manufacturing Monday. We have yet to cut anything for a robot yet and we are starting to get ancy and feel behind. While there is no bag day this year. We are still aiming to have 2 robots done by the date that bag would have been had it existed.
The end is in sight we are sprinting fast towards it, hopefully we don’t trip before we get there.
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Sorry, I didn’t quite follow what your final results were. With the urethane wheels, did you get less bounce out than before? I’m worried about the same issue for our team – our shot is very high powered and linear from the initiation line, and I think we may have bounce out issues as well. According to trajectory math (and some common sense) a high velocity shot is the least prone to missing, but if it does miss, it will likely bounce out.
Are you willing to share the angle and shot speeds you settled on?
I don’t remember the angle for the 6" colson wheel but the power in which we wanted to shoot balls at the bounce out rate was too high for us. with the 4" urethane wheels with a 30 degree launch angle at ~80% power provided to the 1:1 neo’s we had consistent rate from 10 ft to 18 ft away from the goal.
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THE END IS NIGH!
Its been a few weeks since any Wave updates have happened publicly.
I talked about how I struggle to document, but struggles abound have happened beyond that for Wave this build season.
We build out of a basement of a local middle school. Our in house manufacturing room is a 16’x16’ closet. Inside this closet we have a 4x4 CNC router, a knee mill, an Xcarve, and a lathe. We try not to use the lathe very much, and the xcarve is really only for prototyping. Our main tool, like many FRC teams, is the CNC router. This build season our CNC router has broken down no less than 3 times! It has cost us days and it has cost us material as we’ve had to make many parts several times as the accuracy just hasn’t been there.
We are ecstatically celebrating no bag this year. Wave just got our drive base operational LAST NIGHT. If we still had to bag our robot tonight at 11:00pm, we’d either have almost no robot to bag, or this past weekend would have been a straight up marathon of non-stop meeting. We’ve done stuff like that in the past when we are at the finish line of build season and need to get something in the bag that at least has a chance of competing at our 1st event. With the demise of the bag that stress is no longer there. Don’t get me wrong, the stress is still high among everyone on the team. There is just a calm among those of us who’ve been around that we still have time and we have the skill and knowledge to get this done and still be up to our level of acceptable competitiveness.
I plan to have another update Friday or Saturday this week, and ideally we’ve gone from just a drive base to a finished robot. Seems like a stretch but all our parts are manufactured now, we just too to make the individual parts look like a robot.
Hope everyone’s build season wasn’t as hectic and trying as ours. I can’t wait to see all the awesome things you created.
Before I officially end this post, I would like to shout out to all the other Open Alliance teams for sticking to the plan and sharing often. All their sharing and openness has kept me sane and even keeled so that I didn’t lose it and scrap everything Wave has been working so hard for this year. I know I’m not the only person to be inspired by these other great teams, i just hope to be more inspirational in the future like them.
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Like all of you, our seasons ended earlier than we would have liked. I’d been expecting this outcome for a couple of weeks, but it still hit hard when it finally happened.
Thankfully everyone on Wave has kept a positive outlook and in what might have been our final meeting for the foreseeable future last night (our district has cancelled all extracurriculars and after school activities indefinitely starting Monday the 16th), we made plans for this spring, summer, and fall.
SPRING and FALL
Plans moving forward for the immediate future should we get the green light to start meeting again, is to improve our Infinite Recharge robot to be all that it can be for any potential off-seasons. We also believe that there is a ton to still learn and teach the students by continuing down this road. There are some other projects we are looking to do as well to learn and grow too. We’d like a good test bed robot that we can put prototypes on and easily test other software & systems components. Like many other teams, i’m sure, we are looking at potentially diving into the swerve pool and learning about that drive system. We have a whole new pit cart system and the parts and materials for 1 of the 4 of those is cut and ready to weld together.
SUMMER
This summer construction will begin at one of our local high schools. As part of this construction a new space for Wave will be built. We had an “open house” this past Tuesday morning and local leaders and business owners in our community came and the district and Wave stakeholders gave a tour of the school and discussed the new partnership between Wave and the school district.
Some history on how this increased partnership came about. A little over a year ago the tech ed teachers approached us to help them create curriculum for some robotics classes they’d like to start. After several meetings and discussions the teachers mentioned they’d love if Wave would be able to move into one of the schools (Wave is a community team with a partnership with the school district through our local recreational department and our build space is in the basement of a local middle school) to really help bolster this new program. After a few tours of each school to determine if there was space for us to actually make this happen. An open space in Oshkosh North was offered up for us to build out our own space. The robotics classes officially started this January with ~50 kids enrolled between 2 classes, 1 at each high school, and there are currently double and counting that registered for them next school year.
So once the space was offered up the Board of Directors for Wave have been frantically and furiously working to make this dream a reality. It’s finally come to a head with a joint grant application with the school district and them getting on board to help pay and build for this new construction as well as some upgrades to the rest of the tech ed wing. Below are some renderings of the planned space build out for Wave. It includes a total 1120 sq ft of area split into a ~750 sq ft build area and a ~300 sq ft showcase manufacturing area. Wave will also have access to the graphic arts lab, electronics room, wood shop, metal shop, TV studio, and tech ed computer lab already in the school. The goal is to have construction start right after school ends and be finished in time for school to start this fall and us to move in shortly there after. We are all very excited about this project and what it means for the future of Wave.
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Nice! Can I come over and play when it is all done?
Seriously though, I would like to talk with you on how this all came about. We are sitting in similar spot where are build space is not conducive to robotics - especially FTC and FRC. Nice job Wave!
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Very jealous. Definitely a well-deserved space, hope we can visit some time.
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so incredibly pump over the new space for y’all! That’s going to be incredible once it’s all done.
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Very cool Eric!!
Looks awesome!
Construction on our new build space started this week!!! PDFs at the bottom is a blueprint layout of what is being constructed as well as built in cabinet layouts. There will be a hidden piece of rolled up carpet that we can roll out to practice on. The big room in this area is slightly bigger than half an FRC field.
A1-21.pdf (135.6 KB)WAVE_REV-3_6-10-2020 (1).pdf (682.7 KB)
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Some progress pics. We are at about 98% complete. Still have some more equipment to order, set up the equipment already received, get all the graphics and signage on the walls, and move all of Wave’s stuff from our old space to this one.
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Congratulations! Things looking great for you folks.
Show me more of that mural with the classic compact Mac.
That mural no longer exists, it was painted over.
Looks awesome Eric! What kind of manufacturing tools will the team have in the new shop?
So brand new machines
ShopSabre Pro404
Tormach 770
4 Markforged Onyx Ones
Stratasys F170
At least 4 Prusas
A TBD CNC Plasma cutter
New to Wave as the school already has it
Universal Laser Systems CNC laser engraver/cutter
Many lathes and other metal machine shop equipment
Full stocked wood shop with a sawstop table saw
Graphics art lab, which has a screen printing set up, cnc vinyl cutter, various other things I don’t know what they do 
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Will you adopt me?
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