FRC 3136 O.R.C.A. - 2024 Open Alliance Build Log

[Noah9F]

Hi!
We are team 3136: Official Robot Constructors of Ashland (ORCA for short) from Ashland, Virginia. We’ve been around since 2010, making it to districts for the first time in 2018! We had a significant team rebuild back from 2016/2017, and are on our way to becoming a stronger team! Our current mentors are mostly alum or parents of alum, so we are a very tight-knit community over here. Open alliance has been an extremely useful resource for us, so we are excited to continue with it!

We currently operate out of a small closet in the engine workshop of our local high school. We also have access to spaces like the cafeteria and gyms that we use for testing. We currently have around 12 members, but we’re growing!

Even though we have a small team, we are well known for our team spirit, especially our infamous ORCA Squats (pictured below)! We’ve won many spirit awards, including winning them from both of our main competitions in 2022.

Last season we did extremely well! We placed 6th and made it far in playoffs at our first comp, and then placed 3rd while making it to the finals at our second competition. We also received the Excellence in Engineering Award at our second competition for our elevator on an elevator design from last year.

Our main goal this season is to make it to worlds. Last year, we got super unlucky in districts and we overall did badly at it despite how well we did at the regional events, so we want to push ourselves even harder this year and make it farther than we ever have!

Our events this year are as follows:
Ashland (Week 1)
Glenn Allen (Week 3)
(And hopefully CHS districts and worlds!)

I’ll post updates in this thread and in our channel of the Open Alliance discord. I will try to keep it weekly, but sometimes I get busy and may have to delay a build log. You can easily reach out to us through a reply to this thread, a message on Chief Delphi, an email, or a thread in discord for the fastest response. If you have any suggestions for what we should add to it please let us know, feedback is always appreciated!

Important links (also in our linktree):
Google drive link to this season’s build logs
Open Alliance Discord Channel
CAD Model

Code
All other necessary links and resources from previous years are in the linktree for convenience.

[Noah9F]

Build Log 1 - Kickoff Weekend

Meeting 1 (Saturday, 1/6, Kickoff!)

It’s Kickoff day!!! Unfortunately, I wasn’t there as I was flying home from a trip, so I’ll cover today as best I can.

• We had a joint kickoff with the other teams in our county, hosted by 1599 Circuitree
• From what I heard it was a great time, and it served to further the great relationship we have with our local teams.

We had some major takeaways with the new rules and game:

• The amp is important, even for only 10 seconds, over doubling your scoring capability is powerful, so you can’t just rely on the regular speaker points.
• Autonomous should be more simple this year as there’s nothing to balance on.
• Human player is very involved, having to know when to amplify the speaker, know whether or not to use the coopertition bonus, and having relatively significant points for landing the microphone throw means that human players need to be trained and knowledgeable about what’s going on, unlike last year where you just placed cubes and cones.
• The amplifier is harder to score than initially thought, as there is a slope at the top preventing you from shooting it in from below, it has to be placed in or shot from above.
• The trap is similar, but less necessary. It’ll be hard to get the ensemble ranking point without it, but it’ll be even harder to design around it without extreme testing.
• The chain is deceptive, it may be easier to climb, but it’s super low, making it really hard to design around without designing the rest of the bot. It’s over a foot and a half shorter than the height limit, and it’s hard to design a mechanism/method for the trap without knowing how your robot will hang from the chain.
  • When you climb the chain, you don’t need to be fully supported by it, all you need to do is not touch the ground
• The rings are deceptive, but they’re easier than they look. Super compressible, super slick moving on the carpet, grippy with intake wheels, and light enough to shoot easily.
• The alliance zones are weird, the only penalty zones are the stage, the note pickup, and the amp. The speaker and the rest of your alliance zone are unprotected.
• Awesome improvements to the driver’s area! A timer on the back of the team number display and the autonomous stop button are wonderful improvements, especially that autonomous button, which would have saved us a couple matches last year.
• Bumpers only allow for a ½ inch gap, so no bumper cutouts this year.
• Only 1 foot for the extension limit, that’s the biggest design hurdle this year in my opinion. It’s super limiting considering that bumpers take up ~3 1⁄2 inches of that and you can’t have cutouts to reduce that impact.
• Pretty average robot dimensions, 120 inch frame perimeter, 4 foot height limit, and must start without extensions past these limits.

To me personally, this game is both deceptively easy and deceptively challenging, feeling like a mix between the past two years in terms of complexity and nuance.

This year is gonna be tough for us as we have less time to build since our school is hosting a competition for the first time ever, and it’s a week 1 event, giving us even less time. Preparing for that will take lots of time that we may not have as we get deeper into build season. Thankfully this game seems simpler than last year’s, so we can hopefully get a working robot sooner!

Overall, we’re excited! This game seems like it’ll be fun and we can’t wait to get working.

Meeting 2 (Sunday, 1/7)

We got a ton done today! We’ve gone through designs and have come to one that we really like.

Before that, we made a list of what can be done in the game, and what we want it to do

We want it to:

• Score speaker
  • It’s the main and easiest way to get points. To me, it’s necessary for most robots
• Score amp
  • It may be hard, but we really feel it’s important to have at least one amp scorer per team, as without it you could get outscored easily by the other team.
• Climb on chain
  • We don’t have a design in mind, but it’ll be easier to design a climber around our robot rather than a robot around our climber.
• Autonomous shot in speaker
• Taxi in autonomous

What we won’t do:

• Trap?
  • If we can easily incorporate it into our design, then we may go for it, but we definitely won’t be designing around it.
• Amp in autonomous
  • It’s not worth it for its precision. The only benefit is the stored note for the amplifier, but (to my understanding) it doesn’t go towards the coopertition point until teleop, meaning it would be more worth it to use a piece we picked up in auto to score the amp in teleop.

We went through a ton of ideas, using a classroom’s white board to draw everything we came up with.

In the end, we have one design that we want to prototype and work through over next week, here it is:

Our doodles may be a bit confusing, so I’ll explain it the best I can. We want to use a wide double wristed arm, with both the arm and the intake being hollow so you can use the entire mechanism as a ramp/launcher to shoot them out the back. Sort of like if you took the kitbot, made the shooter move at its back, and put an intake on the front that can also move. This will hopefully allow us to pick up and shoot rings easily, while allowing us to “shoot” them downward at the amp.

• We started planning our intake more, we want wheels and pulleys to pick up the ring then transport it into the arm for shooting. We figured out that 1 inch of compression works super well for these rings, and we tested how well they grip with different wheels we have.
• We tested the compression in this video, and worked on a prototype that we can easily cut out of wood to make a quick intake prototype.
• This could possibly open and score in the trap, but we’ll just have to wait and see after more testing and work on this idea
• This idea isn’t final, but we seem pretty set on it and we definitely want to iron it out as far as we can.

I made some super sketchy cad models of the design:

We’ll use wheels (like in the video) at the end of the intake to pull things in, and have more wheels/belts to push it into the arm. The arm launcher doesn’t have to be too complex, even just what the kitbot has would be enough.

It has its flaws, but I think it could be really cool and unique

That’s the end of our first build log! Let me know if there’s anything I need to change as I get back into the flow of this. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can reach us by commenting on this thread, creating a thread in our Open Alliance Discord Channel, sending an email ([email protected]), or with a message on chief delphi. You can also directly DM me on discord (@noahn9) if you want. We always appreciate feedback and questions!

[Noah9F]

Build Log 2 - ORCAthon.

Meeting 2.5 (2/9, Tuesday)

There was no actual meeting today due to weather, but we took the time to fully sketch out our design in CAD, and we realized, there’s no way our design is going to work well. It could be possible, but the amount of math and physics you would have to fight is too much to be viable. The design is really cool and I would have loved to build it, but it’s just not worth it. So we went backwards while looking at some robots in 3 days’ designs. One of our student’s previous ideas was extremely similar to the Penn State Ri3D design, with the only difference being that we thought about shooting out the back of the intake rather than the front like they tried to. After working out the math in a CAD sketch, we figured out that the math is pretty lenient, especially compared to our previous idea. Then, the next day, we realized we had done the exact same thing as the Unqualified Quokkas Ri3D. Anyways, we set our sights on fleshing out this idea for our next meeting.

Meeting 3 (2/11, Thursday)

Early on in the week, we decided that we wanted as strong an early push as possible for this season, because of our limited time. So, we decided to do the first ever ORCAthon. We had a 4 day weekend coming up, so we decided on an extra long weekend with one goal in mind: have V1 of the robot working. Our meeting schedule for ORCAthon was Friday 4-7, Saturday, 10-8, Sunday, 11-8, and Monday, 10-6. With having no meeting or school on tuesday to give everyone a break after all of that. Today we:

• Began work on a test board for coding
• Introduced new students to what we do (yay)
• Created the 2024 playlist, hopefully it doesn’t end up like last year’s (check last year’s build log for that story)
• Cut frame rails
• Planned ORCAthon
• Designed v1 of the intake

• It connects to the arms, takes in rings with 4 sets of wheels on the front, the shoots them out the back with two flywheels

ORCAthon - Day 1 (2/12, Friday)

It’s just the beginning, but we accomplished a lot today, we:

• Started putting our frame together
• Began designing the arm mechanism
• Finished the test board
• Disassembled much of our previous year robots, mostly electronics and motors so we can repurpose them for this year’s bot
• Learned how to use sensors
• Finished v1 of the intake! It works as expected! It may be huge, but it will also shoot rings out of the back for both speaker and amp scoring, and it needs to be wide for easy ring pickup, here’s some videos of testing
  • We need to do some more testing on compression when shooting to make a “final” version, as this version has a bunch of holes for testing what works best for shooting

ORCAthon - Day 2 (2/13, Saturday)

The longest day of ORCAthon, so good thing we made incredible progress! We:

• Finished building the frame, and uh, our robot is tiny. Someone just said 24X24, and no one questioned it, so that’s what we did all our math around. Looks like we’ve got a baby bot this year
• Tested lots of different compression and wheels for what’s best for shooting the ring. We decided on 4 inch green compliant wheels with 10 inches of compression between them, so we redesigned the intake with that in mind
• Redesigned the intake for the compression, motor mounts, making it a little less wide, and changing the attachment method for the arms. The arms need to connect to the robot somewhere in the middle, not all the way to the edges of the intake like we designed before. We Didn’t have time to finish figuring out how we’re going to attach them today, but it’s on high priority for tomorrow.
• Designed the attachment method for our arms. We bought cheap amazon sprockets for a quick idea of what we’ll do, the teeth amount is non standard (66 i think) so we’ll have to make some adjustments when we get an actual sprocket, we’re planning on 68 teeth.
• Rebuilt some swerve modules as we had some issues with them during the off season
• Began building the speaker
• Did some human player training
• Began learning path planner
• Miscellaneous photos from the day!

ORCAthon - Day 3 (2/14, Sunday)

We are on pace to finish this robot on monday! We:

• Cut and started to rebuild V2 of the intake
• Designed v3 of the intake because of some problems with v2
• Built the arms for the robot
• Began to wire the robot
• Finished the speaker
• Began work on the amp
• Added attachment methods for the arm so we can just place them in on monday
• Began to clean and make the CAD look competent
• Played some smash bros and mario kart

ORCAthon - Day 4 (2/15, Monday)

Unfortunately, today was cut short due to the weather. It was supposed to snow Tuesday night but ended up snowing this afternoon instead, meaning we had to cut our meeting short and we never finished the robot. We are sure that if we had the time, we definitely would have reached our goal. For now, we:

• Finished wiring the drive train
• Finished v2 of the intake
• Got our robot “driving”, it drives, but the wheels don’t turn and one of them doesn’t move at all. It’s progress, and now we know what to think, here’s a video

ORCAthon was a huge success, we are farther ahead than any year in recent memory, especially last year, where we didn’t have a working drive train until week 5. Our students had fun, we worked hard and it paid off.

That’s the end of ORCAthon! Let me know if there’s anything I need to change. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can reach us by commenting on this thread, creating a thread in our Open Alliance Discord Channel, sending an email
([email protected]), or with a message on chief delphi. You can also directly DM me on discord (@noahn9) if you want. We always appreciate feedback and questions!

[Noah9F]

Build Log 3 - Tons of Testing

Meeting 7 (Thursday, 2/18):

Our first meeting since ORCAthon, so today we:

• Began to plan out some wiring
• Designed a bracket for spark maxes
• Continued learning path planner
• Began to mount the arms

Meeting 8 (Friday, 2/19):

We set ourselves up well for the weekend, we:

• Disassembled Elception, last year’s bot
• Put the arms on the robot
• Fixed the drive train!
  • It turns out, we just suck at wiring. An encoder was in the wrong spot at first, so we had to reassemble the broken module. Then we plugged the turning motor into the driving motor’s spark max and vice versa. Then we plugged the motors in backwards, with white wires to red and all that. Then we realized we forgot to switch the encoder wire when we switched the wires before. I swear we know what we’re doing
• Tested the drive and arms! It works! Here’s a video.
• Put hands on it. Don’t ask why we have hands, or why we put them on the robot.
• 

Meeting 9 (Saturday, 1/20):

TONS of testing!!! We:

• Put the intake onto the arms (and took the hands off), our robot is “complete” for now
• Tested the arm hinge with the intake mounted
  • The temporary 3d printed adapters for the sprocket completely shattered, as expected. We had already planned to swap systems as we are currently using non-standard amazon sprockets, and we want to swap to rev ones to attach them to our arms properly.
  • We also want to switch to a circular dead axel rather than an active one to avoid breaking everything
  • Regardless, it worked! The motors are powerful enough to move the arm up and down, but it can’t hold them up on their own as expected. We’re eventually going to look at Gas Springs like Rex 1727 did last year for their elevator arm.
• Tested shooting, it works, sorta. We had to swap from compliant wheels to stealth wheels, and we’ll need more momentum from our intake wheels, which are currently too far away from the flywheels.
• Tested ground intake, we found that:
  • We had WAY too much compression between the ground and the first set of intake wheels. So much so that it couldn’t pick up rings, and worked better with that set of wheels removed.
  • The front set of wheels isn’t super important, as the sushi rollers we have at the bottom can pull it up into the rest of our intake just fine
  • Here’s a video of testing our intake and shooter after removing the front wheels
    
• Redesigned our intake completely around the tests
• Redesigned our arm mechanism around the new dead axel changes and sprockets.
• Continued deconstructing old robots
• Started building the stage
• Started building test bumpers
• Started re orcanizing our closet
• More path planner learning and a failed test.

We learned a ton today, and from that learning came a lot of redesigning. Pretty much everything needs a little bit of adjusting, so we decided that we would keep the robot intact as we rebuild a new one so we can continue testing code.

Meeting 10 (Sunday, 1/21):

Today was mostly about setting up for remaking the robot, we:

• Started building the new intake.
• Finished orcanizing the closet, it’ll be clean for a week at most.
• Cut new frame rails and arms
• Cut parts for our test bumpers
• Added space for an absolute encoder for our arm, it can’t be fixed to the axel as the axel needs to be dead, so we needed to take a pulley from the arm to the new space to get a value.
• More path planning, it sorta works! It isn’t doing everything we want just yet, but it’s doing more commands than just moving forward like it was before.

We made a ton of progress this week because of how much testing and learning we did. We are well set up to have v2 of the robot up (hopefully) by the end of next weekend.

That’s the end of this build log, let me know if there’s anything I need to change. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can reach us by commenting on this thread, creating a thread in our Open Alliance Discord Channel, sending an email ([email protected]), or with a message on chief delphi. You can also directly DM me on discord (@noahn9) if you want. We always appreciate feedback and questions!

[Noah9F]

Build log 4 - Rebuilding

Meeting 11+12 (Tuesday + Thursday, 1/23+1/25)

I’ve combined both of these days because they had the same goal, continue work on our next iterations, we:

• Cut then cleaned new intake parts
• Began building the new intake
• Cut then clean new arm gussets
• Began building the new arm
• Recut frame and arm rails
• Recut belly pan
• Designed new battery bracket
• Cut new battery bracket
• Continued path planner work
• Looked at gas springs
  • We used this gas spring calculator to get the rough dimensions of the sizing of our spring and the placement, the weight is something we’ll need to work out later.
  • After calculating, we made brackets to hold out gas springs in the correct location
  • We ordered two cheaper pairs off amazon, one 55lb one 15 lb, to get a feel for how these springs will work on our robot before ordering higher quality ones
  • They fit in our model pretty well and they seem completely feasible!

Meeting 13 (Friday, 1/26)

Our goal today was to continue making progress, we:

• Finished this iteration of the intake
• Finished the arms
• Put a pause on building a new frame like we intended, because we want to test as soon as possible, we’re just going to drop the arm into our current frame as we don’t want to have to rewire everything
• Gas springs arrived! Oh boy are they strong. The 55lb ones are completely unusable, no one on the team could compress them without using their body weight, and some couldn’t even compress them with their body weight. The 15lb ones are better, but they still seem a little stronger than we would like, but we can easily test them once we have the robot together
• Continued stage work

Meeting 14 (Saturday, 1/27)

Tons of progress and testing today!!! We:

• Put the new arms into the frame
• Put the intake on the arms
• Made some adjustments to the sides of the intake because of incorrect chain lengths
• More path planner
• Wired everything terribly
• Finished building the stage
• Started rebuilding our speaker, since we built it wrong
• Started to build our new driver’s station

Testing!

• The arm works perfectly! It’s super solid with the dead axel and might not even need gas springs. As of right now it’s still not holding itself up for a starting position, but we already planned on increasing the gearbox ratio from 35:1 to 49:1, giving us a total of ~185:1 with our big sprockets. This might give us the difference we need to keep our arm up without the gas springs, as the gas springs are completely overkill, and would probably hurt us in arm mobility more than it would help in just the starting position. We plan on possibly using surgical tubing instead, but we’ll just have to test it later. But it works on the amp, here’s a video!
• The intake isnt working as well as we like, we’re still not getting enough to shoot the ring well. To compensate, we added space for a second set of wheels to help.
• “Tested” trap (we held the robot up to the chain), it’s impossible for us. Because of our intake being angled to score in the amp, we physically can’t go high enough to reach the trap without being on top of the chain.
• We are now planning two ways to climb:
  • A quick on the arm climb, only used for quick climbs as we can only climb in the middle with it, which is not great when you practically need people to climb together to get ranking points
  • A climber-in-the-box style climber for when we need to climb with someone at a slower pace

Meeting 15 (Sunday, 1/28)

After learning so much yesterday, we made some adjustments and did some more testing, we:

• Continued learning how sensors work with our intake
• Recut and rebuilt our intake again
• Tested the intake again, the rings still aren’t getting enough speed, one of the motors is acting strange, so we’re going to replace it, as well as add teflon to the bottom of our intake, but if these don’t get us the results we want, we’re going to have to look into top and bottom rollers rather than the side ones we have.
• More path planning
• Continued building driver’s station
• Began to cad climbers
  • They fit, barely, it’s gonna be tight due to how tiny we made our robot this year. We might have to mess with the climber’s on arm idea a little bit more since the only spot we can put the climbers would hit the bumper
• Swapped our arm gearboxes to 49:1, this just barely isn’t enough as our arm now falls very slowly, hopefully surgical tubing will give it the strength it needs to hold itself up.

That’s the end of this build log, let me know if there’s anything I need to change. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can reach us by commenting on this thread, creating a thread in our Open Alliance Discord Channel, sending an email ([email protected]), or with a message on chief delphi. You can also directly DM me on discord (@noahn9) if you want. We always appreciate feedback and questions!

[Noah9F]

Build Log 5

I’ve combined 2 weeks of meetings into one build log as I have been busy, sorry for the wait!

Meetings 16 + 17 (Tuesday + Thursday, 1/30 + 2/1)

We fixed our intake!

• First we swapped the motor, as it had been acting strange, but after putting the new motor in, the same problem occurred. So we knew it was the software side.
• It turns out, the spark for that motor was limited to 20 amps, the other was set to 80. It worked after fixing that, here’s a video.
• After that finally worked, we added some teflon to the bottom and it gave us even more speed. It’s working exactly as intended now and it’s awesome!
  • We still might go for top and bottom shooters eventually, maybe in between competitions, but for now we’ll stick with side shooters until we have time to play with it.

Otherwise, we:

• More coding, path planner and PID
• More driver station work

Meeting 18 (Friday, 2/2)

We had an extended meeting today as our head mentor would be away for the following week, we:

• Cut the climber bars
• Positioned our climber and its motor in cad
• Created temporary bumpers because our driver keeps hitting things
• More PID work
• “Finished” the never ending driver station, it still needs a strap but the actual station itself is finally complete
• Mapped out goals for what to do while our mentor is away.

Meeting 19 (Saturday, 2/3)

Today we:

• Finished assembling as much as we can of our second frame
• Got PID working!
• Tested some surgical tubing to hold our arm up, it worked, but we are unsure if it was the tubing holding it up, or the specific angle it was at, regardless we would like it to be better and we have an idea of what to do next
• Created a bunch of spacers to replace our PVC tubing ones
• Began work on assembling the climbers
• Started working on a super sketchy prototype of a top and bottom shooter

Meeting 20 (Sunday, 2/4)

More progress, we:

• Finished the climbers, they may be too long. When all the way down, they would barely lift us off the ground, some easy solutions are to create custom hooks that go lower or to replace the tubing with shorter ones.
• Began planning out our wiring for when we rebuild some parts of the robot, both in person and in cad.
• Finished the sketchy intake prototype. It doesn’t do as well as the other intake, but it could easily be due to the fact that the prototype in question is some super sketchy holes drilled into an old intake. A proper prototype would be better later on.

The next week:
Meetings 21 + 22 (Tuesday + Thursday, 2/6 + 2/8)

With our head mentor still away and our task list dwindling, we didn’t have too much to do until the weekend, we:

• Did more testing with surgical tubing
  • We wrapped the surgical tubing around more spacers to hopefully give it more force to pull
  • It still helps a bit more, but it still isn’t holding it up fully. Our next solution is to make our intake weigh less
• Continued building our driver’s station
• Finished our wiring plan
  • We have 16 motors, and therefore a lot of spark maxes. The problem is, our robot is tiny (24x24)
  • We have to do a lot to get all of our wiring to fit, especially since it needs to fit onto our belly pan because of our arm design this year.
  • Our final design for it will be continued to be updated as we make changes, but most of it is in our CAD if you want to take a look

Meetings 23 - 25 (Friday -Sunday, 2/9-2/11)

I was not here this weekend, so I had to compile everything that was done into one list. Sorry about the weirdness of this build log, hopefully we can get back on track starting next week! This weekend, we:

• Finished our driver’s station! Here’s what it looks like!
  

• Continued working our wiring plan, we added more parts and added some holes in the frame to get wires through

• Started working on our bumpers! We have all the parts set up, at this point we just need to assemble everything. We’re using threaded rods that are locktigh-ed into lock nuts that we’re gonna put our bumpers onto, and use wingnuts on top of those

• Designed and printed more spacers, we designed and printed a “cluster spacer” that replaces the tons of spacers that would make it super annoying.

• Designed and printed a new limelight bracket and a spot to put it, we ended up placing it on a peanut extrusion that went between our inner arm gussets

• Worked on and updated our limelight

• Worked on path planner with a mentor from 1599 Circuitree who helped us learn it

• Worked on PID for both the arm and the shooter

• Got our sensor working again, but we still have to physically incorporate it

• Started assembly of our final robot version

That’s the end of this build log, let me know if there’s anything I need to change. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. Once again, sorry for the weirdness over the past couple weeks of the build logs, I’ve just gotten super busy with both robotics and stuff outside of robotics. You can reach us by commenting on this thread, creating a thread in our Open Alliance Discord Channel, sending an email ([email protected]), or with a message on chief delphi. You can also directly DM me on discord (@noahn9) if you want. We always appreciate feedback and questions!

[Noah9F]

Build Log 6

Meetings 26 + 27 (Tuesday + Thursday, 2/13 + 2/15)

Our goal for the week was to switch from our current prototype to the final robot version. We:

• Began to assemble and plan bumpers
• Made updates to our wiring plan
• Began to attach climber motors
• Updated our intake to have lightening holes
• Began to assemble our new intake
• Created more parts to prepare us for switching the robot
• Started learning how to use note detection with google coral

Meeting 28 (Friday, 2/16)

We decided that a few of us would stay late so we could wire as much of the new robot as we could before rebuilding over the weekend, we:

• Continue building our new intake, but two problems arose:
  • The belt connecting our motor to our bottom wheels is super loose, one issue could be the flex in the poly carb as the belt is pulling downward on an unsupported piece, but for now we are trying to print some higher tooth spacers
  • The belts for our flywheel on one side of our intake is dangerously tight. After some investigating, we figured out that our CNC Machine was a bit off and it was an issue we could fix by recutting the plate. Since we don’t have time for that right now as there are other potential changes we would like to make, we will temporarily print a pulley with one less tooth for the tight side.
• Continued working on our bumpers
• Wiring! By the end of the meeting we had most of the wiring in the frame done and had the arm attached to the new robot.

Meeting 29 (Saturday, 2/17)

Today we:

• Swapped everything else over that hadn’t been swapped yet
  • Everything on the arm has been wired, there are some things being janky still, but nothing some debugging can’t fix next meeting
• Rebuilt our test board as we harvested a lot of parts from it for our new wiring
• Continued with coral note tracking
• Cleaned our swerve modules before swapping those
• Prepared new aluminum wheels with tread
• Swapped the stock wheels for the new ones

Meeting 30 (Sunday, 2/18)

Having completed a lot yesterday, we wanted to continue the progress and refine some of our wiring, and hopefully have a fully working robot! We:

• Debugged our intake wiring, got it all working!
• Finished wiring our drivetrain, and it works! At this point everything that worked on the old robot now works on the current robot, we just need to install the climbers and then we’re “done”
• Started installing the climbers, all we were able to do was the actual climber part, and not any wiring or motors, but we got the climber’s in place to finish up next time.
• Finished our first bumper!
  • We have a split bumper using threaded rods that are preinstalled into the frame for our bumper’s to go onto, which we then fasten using wingnuts. Some problems arose after our first pair:
  • The mounting bar on the sides interacts with our motor’s bearing support, we thought of the idea of shaving off corner of the box tubing we are using for mounting and having the bolt sit inside the box
  • The holes for mounting on the sides are off by about a quarter inch, we ended up flipping the bars to redo the holes without having to redo the entire bar
  • Other than that they seem to fit and will be pretty easy to take on and off

• Continued learning how to integrate the note detection into our code

Meeting 31 (Monday, 2/19)

We had today off for president’s day, so we decided to have a smaller meeting focusing on code. But while code work was being done, we did some build stuff to progress us, we:

• Started implementing our solutions to our bumper issues, and they work now! Now it’s just time to build 3 more!
• Finished implementing the climbers, IT WORKS!!
  • At first it was pretty sketchy, since our robot is super front heavy with it’s intake, but manipulating the intake while we climbed seemed to help.
  • We then had the idea to flip the direction of the climber hooks (they were originally facing backwards) to move a bit closer to our center of gravity, and that worked wonders.
  • Currently, climbing from the very edge of the stage, we can stay up for 12 seconds, which is more than enough to score a successful climb.
  • Here’s a video of us climbing!
  • It works better than we expected, as we thought it would be super janky with a ton of fine tuning to make it viable because of how long we had put it off, but it’s already super viable. We still have some adjustments to make, such as testing some custom hook designs to help a bit more, but at our current state we could be competitively viable in a match (besides code)

• Codewise, we got path planner working, a bit
  • It moves in a line then stops, which it wasn’t doing before, but it still isn’t doing the more complex commands we’ll need it to do for an auto.
• Worked on PID for our arm

That’s the end of this build log, let me know if there’s anything I need to change. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can reach us by commenting on this thread, creating a thread in our Open Alliance Discord Channel, sending an email ([email protected]), or with a message on chief delphi. You can also directly DM me on discord (@noahn9) if you want. We always appreciate feedback and questions!

[Noah9F]

Build Log 7 - Week 0

Meetings 32 + 33 (Tuesday + Thursday, 2/20 + 2/22)

We signed up for the week 0 competition at Deep Run on Sunday, so we hoped to get our robot fully working by then. We:

• Began cleaning up our new aluminum belly pan. It’s about 20X heavier than our wooden one, so it’ll help with adding weight to the bottom of our robot.
• Added a limelight mounting spot for our intake and made a mount for it
• Repositioned our sensor to the top of the intake, and it works perfectly!
  • Our rings always feed in on initial pickup where the sensor is at the opening of the ring. We then back the ring off our flywheels to rev them up, an the sensor is in the perfect spot to see the top of the ring as it backs out and stops it in the perfect spot to rev up our flywheel
• Continued working on bumpers.
• Began organizing backup parts for competition
• Lots of code! It’s what needs to be finished the most as most of the physical robot is done

Meeting 34 (Friday, 2/24)

We stayed later tonight to get some extra code work in, while doing some build touch ups. We:

• “Finished” the second red bumper. The attachment points were done wrong, but technically it’s done for now.
• Began organizing our toolbox for comp
• Attached our aluminum belly pan! Again, 20 times heavier than the old wooden one
• Began making new batteries for comp
• Lots of coding, as always. We decided to put pathplanner on hold, as it was more important to get the PID for our arm working in time for competition, as we were just stuck with the pathplanner.
  • Anytime we tried to get it to go somewhere, it would go left for about 1 meter, then go to wherever we wanted it to go. It’s been doing this for a while and we just can’t figure it out, we’re gonna have to skip it for now

Meeting 35 (Saturday, 2/25)

We had to get ready for week 0 today, we:

• Finished our bumpers! A lot of the attachment parts had to be redone, and the fabric had to actually get put onto our blue bumpers, but we had them finished and working by the end of the day, yippie!
• Continued organizing for competition
• Made more backup parts
• Finished building our batteries
• Coding Coding Coding! We made lots of PID progress. It works outside of the fact that we have about a 4 degree margin of error, which gets super scary at the end of our arm where every degree makes a difference.

Week 0 Competition (Sunday, 2/26)

We learned a lot today! The event was essentially 8 teams using the official field for testing, which ended up being super helpful. Here’s the rundown, we:

• Started the day working on more code to get our pid working better for testing
• Got our robot on the field for a bit and tested a few things
  • The error I mentioned earlier is a real problem, as it’s causing our shots to be inconsistent.
  • We can pick up from the source! It was always a maybe before since our arm was a bit far from the source at its level, but it picks up just fine.
  • Climbing is harder on the real field than the practice one. The truss is bigger and means you have to climb from a bit further down, which hurts us currently. We need to do more testing, but we still have new hooks to try to help us a bit.
  • The amp works as expected
  • Our bearings pop out of our intake. We had to add washers to two of them for now as we forgot to bring all of our washers. A bunch of other bearings popped out later, but we will fix it once we replace our intake top
• After getting on the field for the first time, we went back to add the washers and do some more coding work.
  • A mentor with a lot of coding experience from 1599 circuitree, and later a mentor from 2363 Triple Helix, helped us with tuning our PID
  • It was a lot of trial and error, and the tuning was how we spent most of our event, but it was extremely useful!
  • Our mentors are way less experienced with this, so it would have taken even longer on our own to tune it. We really appreciate the help!
• We got back on the field after reducing our margin of error to a degree or less. It worked awesomely!
  • Our second driver is new this year so he had a lot of learning to do with hitting the right buttons at the right time, but he’s starting to get the hang of it!
  • Both of our drivers used the time to figure out what angle our arm needs to be to shoot into the speaker at different distances, and as they learned more, our shots were becoming super consistent!
  • Here’s a video of us practicing! We didn’t make a lot of shots in this video, but I swear we got nearly every shot in after this!

Week 0 was a great use of time, even though we were only on the field twice, we still learned so much more than we would have if we had just spent the time coding in our shop.
We feel super good about our robot, seeing us against the other robots at the event really put into perspective how far we’ve come with this design.
We then went back to our shop afterwards to start work on some basic trajectory based autonomous, as well as hack away at some minor build stuff. We:

• Re measured a lot of our practice field, as we realized that some of it was just off after looking at a real field.
• More comp organization
• Cleaned out our new intake top
• Finished designing our new hooks, with a second design where the hooks are pushed farther out to move our center of gravity closer to our middle.
• Made some basic progress on the autonomous

That’s the end of this build log, let me know if there’s anything I need to change. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can reach us by commenting on this thread, creating a thread in our Open Alliance Discord Channel, sending an email ([email protected]), or with a message on chief delphi. You can also directly DM me on discord (@noahn9) if you want. We always appreciate feedback and questions!

[Noah9F]

Build Log 8 - Week 1 Competition

Meetings 36 + 37 (Tuesday, 2/27 + Thursday 2/29)

Competition is this weekend! We need to fix some code stuff before then, specifically our auto, since we don’t have one yet. We:

• Worked on autos! By the end of thursday we had a two-shot speaker and amp auto working for the blue side
• Changed the climber hooks for custom ones, they help a little, not significantly but it’s still an improvement.
• Made buttons! By the end of the week we had about 150 buttons ready!
• ORCAnized our supplies for competition

COMPETITION 1 (Ashland Week 1, Friday - Sunday, 3/1-3/3)

Before heading down to the competition on friday, which was in our school, we took the time to copy our blue side autos to the red side, as well as an auto that makes the preload shot then moves out of the way, and pack up for the competition.

After arriving we got inspected and helped prepare the school for tomorrow

The next day, qualification matches started:

HOLY CRAP WE DID AWESOME. We:

• Ran out of buttons before lunch on the first day

• Ended the day in 3rd! That’s amazing!

• We were consistently one of the best scoring robots at the event, scoring upwards of 11 notes on our own per match, with an average of around 9

• Found out that our amp auto doesn’t work on the real field.

  • The first note goes in pretty consistently, but the second note always gets bounced away by our intake before we pick it up
  • Good news though, our speaker two shot auto and our shoot and move auto work great!

• Made tons of friends and did tons of orca squats!

After doing so well on saturday, we had high hopes for sunday, we:

• Stayed in 3rd after qualifications, which guarantees us a spot in playoffs!
• Started alliance selection. We ended up as captain of the 3rd alliance, as we were pretty sure the top 2 teams had plans that didn’t involve picking us.
• We ended up picking 1895 (Lambda Corps) and 1522 (Defenders of the Multiverse/DoTM) for our alliance, and we were pretty happy with the team.
• We started strategizing and came up with a plan, mostly tailored for our second match as that would be our first real challenge.
• We won our first match with some minor issues from our teammates. 1522’s arm broke and 1895 got a ring stuck to their climber, but we managed to win and move on.
• After both teams got their robots working again, we went into the next match. Unfortunately, this is where things started to go wrong. We weren’t able to keep up with the other team as 1522’s, our amp scorer, intake broke, and our limelight broke as well. We lost the match and moved to the losers bracket.
• The next match was unfortunately even worse for us, as 1522’s intake broke again, 1895 got a note stuck in their intake for most of the match, and our intake broke for the rest of the match.
• We lost and got eliminated, we really feel we could have done better if we hadn’t gotten so unlucky, but it is what it is, and we still did really well for ourselves!
• Not too long after getting eliminated, we won Gracious Professionalism! We always try to help out teams in need so this award means a lot to us!
• Thank you so much 1895 and 1522, we had a lot of fun playing with you guys during the playoffs, despite the issues we were all having with our robots!
• Even though we ended up as 5th in playoffs, we are still super happy with how we did, and we are confident in our ability to get better for next comp, as we can work on fixing our autos and adding more automation for our drivers
• We’re in a good spot, we can definitely make districts if we keep up our momentum.

That’s the end of this build log, let me know if there’s anything I need to change. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can reach us by commenting on this thread, creating a thread in our Open Alliance Discord Channel, sending an email ([email protected]), or with a message on chief delphi. You can also directly DM me on discord (@noahn9) if you want. We always appreciate feedback and questions!

[asha_forever]

Did not know 3136 had a OA blog!

Y’all are an awesome FRC team. I never had as much fun at a robotics competition as I did this past weekend at Ashland!

[Macfraser]

Thank you! I love how Noah in the post completely glosses over the fact that we hosted an event - there was so much work involved by the team, mentors and our event partners team 1599! Thank you for sharing your experience! Hopefully if we host again we will install all the April Tags in the right location!

[asha_forever]

Yeah that hurt me deeply as a programmer who volunteered there

[Macfraser]

Yes. You can see how our Auto went crazy - as soon as it saw the the wrong april tags - and we had to A stop in our first match. We had not tested that auto fully as we did not have a large enough carpet in our shop. So we assumed it was a problem with our code rather than the field so we adjusted our limelight to ignore those april tags. We really should have thought about the cause more.

[asha_forever]

Making mistakes is an essential part of the learning process

I still stand by my statement that you guys put on an awesome event, and I hope to maybe come back next year if there aren’t enough local events for us.

[Noah9F]

Build Log 9 - Automation

Meetings 38 + 39 (Tuesday + Thursday, 3/5 + 3/7)

Back from competition! We have lots of plans to add more automation to help us do even better at competition. We:

• Began working on automating our shooter more
• Added new sensors to the side of the robot so we can more consistently track if a note is in our intake
  • This allowed us to make a system where the notes are automatically pushed off the flywheel to avoid making our second driver have to do that every time we pick up a note
• Figured out an issue with our arm
  • Since building it, our arm has been weird, one side ahs chain slack on the top of the chain, the other has it on the bottom
  • We originally tried to fix this by changing the sprockets on the motors to two identical ones, and adding a stronger tensioner to the side we could reach.
  • This made it worse, as it angled the arm due to one side having lots of tension and the other having none
  • We finally fixed it (mostly) by using two non identical sprockets, as we realized it was the big sprockets on our arm that weren’t lined up
  • Our arm is now a bit more precise!
• Swapped our swerve wheels, as the tread had worn down a lot during comp
• Added the old tread to our cart, as the hard wood was scratching our bellypan.
• Began studying our old matches

Meeting 40 (Friday, 3/8)

Our goal was to do as much as we could between today and tomorrow, as our head mentor would be away from Sunday until the day of comp. We wanted to get to a point where we only had drive practice, we:

• Began CADing a new intake version with top and bottom rollers for districts, as we wouldn’t have the time to do it before week 3
• Added note detection to our amp auto, it now works consistently!
• Swapped our hooks on our climbers and tested them
  • When we made our new hooks we had two designs, the normal one that was on the robot for week 1, and another pair with the hooks farther out to move our center of gravity while climbing.
  • We added the second design, and it works slightly better, but not significantly so.
• Drive practice!

Meeting 41 (Saturday, 3/9)

A lot of today was testing autos and getting some code work done, we:

• Made it so that if we have a note in our intake and we are in our wing, our flywheels spin at half speed to help our ramp up later
• Put our climb routine on a button to make it easier
• Finished scouting our old matches, here’s what we learned:
  • Amplification is only hard if we make it hard. We need to start storing notes in our wing to help get the 4 shot amplification, as it’s nearly impossible to make a second cycle during the 10 seconds.
  • We take a while to shoot, revving up our flywheel is taking up too much time, and it’s why we added new automation like the half rev up mentioned earlier.
  • We can climb fast, we just don’t. We climbed very quickly in one of our first matches, but we had a hard time climbing afterwards, so we added new automation
• Finished our pit scouting form and respective sheet! We hope to be able to do more with scouting over the next few comps to improve our alliance selection and strategy, as currently our scouting consists of one of our mentors watching matches and giving us suggestions.
• Started preparing more backup parts as we used some during comp
• Got a 3 note speaker autonomous working! It shoots our preload, pickles up the one in front, shoots it, then grabs the one by the amp. The third note isn’t as consistent, but it’s only because we haven’t added the note tracking yet.

Meeting 42 (Sunday, 3/10)

Today was simple, we:

• Did a lot of drive practice, our second driver unfortunately caught covid, so we used the time to train up our backup driver a bit, in case he’s still sick when the competition starts (but that’s looking to be unlikely)
• Added note tracking to our 3 note auto, now it’s incredibly consistent! It only ever missed the first shot, but only from variability in setup. Here’s a video of it working!
• Started preparing and organizing for competition

That’s the end of this build log, let me know if there’s anything I need to change. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can reach us by commenting on this thread, creating a thread in our Open Alliance Discord Channel, sending an email ([email protected]), or with a message on chief delphi. You can also directly DM me on discord (@noahn9) if you want. We always appreciate feedback and questions!

[Noah9F]

Build Log 10 - Week 3 Competition

Meetings 43 + 44 (Tuesday + Thursday, 3/12 + 3/14)

Our next comp is this weekend! We:

• Did lots of drive practice
• Broke our roborio
  • At first, it just turned off after we browned out, so we swapped the battery and investigated. The power wires were loose so we tightened them up and it worked.
  • But then our navx stopped working, it just wasn’t receiving power.
  • We cleaned out the port, but still nothing, doing some research, another team had a similar issue, and they had to completely clean the port, which we don’t have time for
  • For now, we switched to our backup rio
• Participated in a pep rally for 8th graders!
  • Our school had two 8th grade visit days that ended in a mini pep rally for them, we were able to show off our robot and our team for them, and hopefully we made some kids interested!
• Packed for comp
• Finished our scouting information so we can use our own data during comp
• Made buttons

COMPETITION 2 (Glen Allen, Week 3, Friday - Sunday, 3/15-3/17)

Friday

This competition is going to be much harder than Ashland, as more teams here have experience with their robots, but we are ready! Our predictions are that we are going to end qualification matches in the top 10, likely around 6th or 7th.

Saturday

WE ENDED THE DAY IN 1ST??? And it is unlikely we will fall out of first given our lead. We got a little lucky with our schedule, but we also were consistently getting 3-4 ranking points per match, so it wasn’t just luck.

• The main reason we kept winning was our new strategy: Stockpiling.
  • We stockpile notes in our zone for our teammates to score in the speaker and amp, while also preparing for a 3-4 note amplification.
  • This strategy allowed us to score lots of notes and points regardless of our teammate’s abilities, and having a good climbing plan allowed us to get the ensemble ranking point nearly every time we could.
• Our scouting data was also super useful, as we were able to see what our teammates and opponents could do and prepare for them better
• We also were not the highest scoring robot, that title goes to team 2106, Junkyard Dogs, who got 3 more notes on average than us, according to our data.
  • We even got to play with them, (and 2890, the Hawk Collective), and we got (supposedly) the highest clean score of the district, with 104 points.
• The main reason we did so well was that not only were we a good shooter, we were also incredibly consistent. We never broke once today, while most of the other high scoring bots had their own issues every couple of matches.
• Today was incredible, and we are likely to continue our streak tomorrow

Sunday

We finished qualification matches in 1st still! So onto alliance selection and playoffs!

• We chose 2106, Junkyard Dogs as our first pick, because we work well together, as seen by our 104 match yesterday.
• Our second pick was 404, Art who many regarded as a “sleeper pick” since they weren’t working for most of the competition, but got themselves working fully by the end of qualification matches.
• We made our way through the first few matches, with only some minor robot breakage, including our arm chain breaking off, but we kept going.
• We eventually faced Alliance 2, the only alliance that could outscore us. We ended up losing against them, but we were able to quickly make our way back to finals for a rematch.
• We unfortunately lost both matches, both of us had a super even teleop and autonomous, but they had 3 climbs and a trap, something our 2 climbs couldn’t even come close to.
• We also won the autonomous award! The credit goes to our programmer Derek, as he did like all of it. Congrats Derek!
• Thank you so much to 2106 and 404, we had so much fun playing with you guys and we could not have gotten all the way to finals without both of you. And congratulations to 346, Robohawks; 5804, Torch, and 4821 CyberUs for winning, you all deserve it!

I’m still in awe of how well we did this competition, it’s by far the best competition we’ve ever had as a team. No matter how well we do from here, this has already been the best season our team has had, and we are locked in for districts!

Seriously, 1st place in quals and staying there for the entire event is crazy, being the captain of the first alliance has been a dream of mine, and we finally got the skills to make it a reality.

We still have room to improve, and we’re going to need it if we want to make worlds, which is our main goal this year.

That’s the end of this build log, let me know if there’s anything I need to change. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can reach us by commenting on this thread, creating a thread in our Open Alliance Discord Channel, sending an email ([email protected]), or with a message on chief delphi. You can also directly DM me on discord (@noahn9) if you want. We always appreciate feedback and questions!

[Macfraser]

A special thank you to our awesome Alliance partners 2106 - the Junkyard Dogs who have a really impressive robot and skilled drive team! And 404 A.R.T / Not Found who have overcome so much this year and just keep going!

[ztcollazo]

Thanks for giving us the opportunity to be on your alliance! We had a great time with you guys at this competition and a great playoff run.

Also, l love the shared refusal to accept our name change, our mentor did it without telling any of us.

[asha_forever]

Not Found is iconic, I hope y’all can find a way to get it back.

[Noah9F]

Build Log 11 - Improvements

Meeting 45 - 47 (Tuesday - Friday, 3/19 - 3/22)

We started the week with listing out any improvements we wanted to make before districts, then we chose ones to prioritize. Our priorities ended up as:

• More autos, specifically a 4 note auto, and an auto that grabs from the center line as we’ll definitely compete with other teams for the 3 or 4 note center speaker auto, so having one that stays out of their way while still getting points would be perfect.
• Faster shooting, any way we can
• Drive practice
• Increasing shot accuracy
• Increasing our flywheel speed via different pulley gearing
• Increase our swerve speed via new gearing
• Make new climber hooks
• Update all our software versions
• Fix our intake (there is a crack in our bottom pan)
• Fix our rio 2
• General maintenance and replacing parts

After making our list, we started working on our intake, it got pretty beat up, so we ended up replacing the entire bottom pan, which took up most of the time on Thursday and Friday.

Meeting 48 (Saturday, 3/23)

Today was a simple meeting, we got the upgraded gearing for our swerve modules, and we needed to give them a clean, so we spent the entire meeting taking them apart and rebuilding them. We found a few things, such as a loose bolt taking a few chunks out of the casing of the module’s absolute encoder. But we got them all back together, and they should be faster now!

Meeting 49 (Sunday 3/24)

Today we tested a lot! We:

• Tested our new swerve upgrade, and it works! It is noticeably faster, we trade off pushing power for speed, but with our light bot, we didn’t have any to begin with. We usually fought off defense by just moving around, so this will make that easier.
• Put on and tested our new climbing hooks, our old ones were hooks that went all the way around, which meant we missed our climb a few times as the chain hit the hook. These new ones are just slight angles into a slot, much simpler and will mean we miss less. They work, and make our climb both more consistent and faster! Here’s a video
• Built version one of our top and bottom roller intake, and holy crap, we should have done this from the start. Even at 50% power we can shoot a note from the center line, we are definitely making this new intake a top priority, it has so much power compared to our side rollers. Here’s a few videos of our testing
  • We marked down all the adjustments we need to make before we make our “final” version, so we still have to build it one more time

Our week was simple but we accomplished a lot of improvement. If all goes to plan, we will have upgraded 3 major aspects of our robot. The climb and drive are already done, and the shooter is super promising, we just need to put in the work to get it ready for districts.

That’s the end of this build log, let me know if there’s anything I need to change. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can reach us by commenting on this thread, creating a thread in our Open Alliance Discord Channel, sending an email ([email protected]), or with a message on chief delphi. You can also directly DM me on discord (@noahn9) if you want. We always appreciate feedback and questions!