Pre-Season Update 10 - Kickoff Preparation & KrayonCAD
Firstly, we are super excited to be an Open Alliance featured team for the 2024 Season!! We’re hoping that everything we publish can help someone this season, and as usual, feel free to reach out with any questions or comments 
Today we held our last leadership meeting of the year to make final preparations for build season beginning this Saturday! Additionally, we held a class for those interested in learning how to use the KrayonCAD program.
Kickoff Prep
At the leadership meeting, we discussed some changes that need to be made in order to increase our chances of success this build season.
Here are the points we discussed:
Kickoff and Week 1
Improving upon our schedule for Kickoff/Week 1 I wrote about here, we discussed how to better run the beginning of build season.
Here is an extensive document describing what we look for when strategizing, brainstorming, and prototyping. We are using this document to guide the first week of our season, and I’d highly encourage you to take a look.
Reading the Rules
After watching the game animation, we go and read the rules. We specifically look for: general match play, game pieces, scoring/penalties, field locations (scoring, human station, etc.), and general robot restrictions/requirements. Members are encouraged to take notes on these topics, and the document linked about is used to guide the note-taking.
After, the team will come together in small groups to clarify any questions about the rules. This year, we are planning to designate one or two students as our “rule experts.” While we encourage all students to memorize the rules, we will be setting aside some students who pick up on the rules quickly and they will lead rule releated discussions.
Be careful of interruptions and assumptions about the rules; misinterpreting or strictly adhering to rules can lead to a flawed or non-optimized strategy. For example, in 2022 with the climbing challenge, we automatically assumed that you had to climb the bars in succession like traditional monkey bars, but teams discovered that you could skip one of the rungs, and save time.
Strategy
When discussing strategy, we begin by listing everything that can be possibly done during the auto, teleop, and endgame periods.
These shouldn’t be full match breakdowns of exact paths and specific match details but instead, focus on the capabilities you want the robot to have (Ex. intake from ground, score high) Do not get into specifics! (Ex. use this path to intake this game pieces, traverse over this field element to get to…) We just want to know what the robot needs to do.
After listing every possible action you can take in the game, we narrow them down by ensuring they are legal, and then weighing options by how many points that action will score.
Build Season Schedule
As we have in the past, we established a clear build season schedule so everyone is on the same page as to where we should be.
- Kickoff - Tuesday Week 1: Determine Strategy
- Week 1: Use KrayonCAD to determine robot architecture and begin prototyping mechanisms after brainstorming.
- Week 2: Finalize prototyping, begin Prototype Robot, and begin CAD.
- Week 3: Finalize Prototype Robot & CAD, send CAD to sponsor for machining.
- Week 4: Refine design, driver’s practice and programming with Prototype Bot.
- Week 5: Assemble final robot once parts arrive. Continue driver’s practice and programming.
- Week 6: Refine final robot design, and continue driver’s practice and programming.
Communication between Mechanical Subteams
Our three core technical subteams (Mobility, Manipulator, and Systems Integration) are planning on meeting daily at the beginning of meetings for 5-10 minutes to discuss what they are working on, and what has been accomplished. This will help each subteam to know what the others are working on.
Documentation
Technical VPs have been given engineering notebooks, and will be documenting (at least) what they accomplished in a meeting, and what needs to be done next meeting. Although they are encouraged to practice good documentation practices and document why, how, and when things were accomplished.
KrayonCAD Class
As I’m typing this, we are holding a KrayonCAD class to help new members learn how to use the program. Our VP of Manipulator put together a guide on how to get started for people new to both Onshape and KrayonCAD. After the presentation, members were given time to make their own KrayonCAD robot.
Due to this training time, we are hoping to use the program during week 1 to put together possible robot architectures.
Initially, using KrayonCAD was a struggle since we use Fusion360 for CAD, and no one has experience with Onshape, although we found that with a lot of playing around in the program, students are able to pick up the skills they need easily.
Looking Ahead to Kickoff!
This will be our last post before Kickoff this Saturday. We wish everyone the best and good luck this season!
I’ll be putting out an update after Kickoff documenting what we discussed and learned.