FRC Team 3181, the Pittsford Panthers, is excited to return to Open Alliance for the 2024 competition season. Pittsford Robotics is based out of Pittsford NY, with students from Pittsford Sutherland and Pittsford Mendon High schools. Our team is made up of 40 students and 6 mentors, as well as several parents who help out with our team. Many of our new student leadership are stepping up and taking the initiative in roles that mentors had previously taken care of.
Team Updates
Charged Up was the best season 3181’s ever had. We placed in the top quartile – according to statistics – for the first time. We plan to continue this growth.
Our team has made extensive use of our CNC router table, milling large pieces of our A-frame on our robot, Rattles. Also, we’re actively training new students for the upcoming 2024 season, Crescendo!
We competed in our local Rah Cha Cha Ruckus off-season competition, and we had a lot of fun competing with our local teams, as well as a few Canadian teams!
Team Goals
Some of our main team goals are:
Create a safe and welcoming environment for new team members
Introduce new members to different fields in STEAM
Get a functioning robot completed by week 4, and start drive team training early
Working on new methods to win the Spirit awards…
Improve our robot’s reliability and make it further in the elimination rounds
Increase the size of our programming team
Competitions
Our team will attend the Greater Pittsburg Regional (Week 1) and the Finger Lakes Regional (Week 3)
2023 Charged Up Season Recap
Last year, our team started fresh with a mostly brand-new leadership team, and we set off to make a competitive robot using a 4-bar concept some of our students designed and demonstrated.
Our claw this year was efficient at picking up both cones and cubes from the double substation, and placing them with the aid of the 4-bar arm on all tiers of the nodes.
Swerve Drive
This was the first year we decided to tackle swerve drive. It was a change of pace, but it was also pretty successful. The mobility was beneficial for the competition, and we were able to leverage our swerve drive and new aluminum wheels to swiftly maneuver around the other robots.
At the Finger Lakes Regional, our first competition last season, we were consistently in the upper echelon of the rankings. We were scoring well, but due to some unforeseen robot issues in the final qualification matches, we ended at Rank 22.
Last year was our first time attending the Greater Pittsburgh Regional in 7 years! We finished Rank 16, and we intend to continue our success in this upcoming season. Our record was 6-5-1, with our tie being against some of the top teams at the event.
Team Spirit Awards
We were thrilled to receive our first Spirit Award from FIRST at the Finger Lakes Regional, which was largely due to our team’s cheering, and our electric energy! We won our second FIRST Spirit Award of the season at Pittsburgh, where we paraded our bright LED 3181 sign and our team flag around the field. We also received another incredible spirit award from Team 4085, Technical Difficulties, that we are very grateful for!
We’re excited to begin this season as a part of Open Alliance! If you have any questions on what our team is doing, feel free to comment under this build thread!
Off-Season Updates
This season we are committed to keeping our Chief Delphi threads up to date on what we’re working on. This year, our student leadership participated in a leadership training boot camp that was led by team 1511, Rolling Thunder. The training will hopefully give us a better prepared leadership team this season.
CAD
Our team has switched from Fusion 360 to Onshape, which is a more accessible software platform for our team to use. Working online allows our CAD team to work more efficiently, because we had issues with our previous software, which was not efficient for multiple people to work simultaneously on pieces/ projects. We also have some off-season projects being worked on, such as our prototype button board concept, which was proposed by one of our students.
(Our Onshape link is coming soon)
Programming
We have several programmers in training, and they’ve all learned how to make their own simple robot project, where the “A” button on an Xbox controller turns on a certain motor. We’ve introduced our new members to our current robot code, as well as train them on our swerve code. We’re working on improving our swerve drive code with the help of our programming mentor. Recently, we’ve tuned our PID used to orient the robot, and experimented with alternate driving methods!
Here’s an example of the project:
Mechanical
We ordered 8 of Rev’s MAXSwerve modules in order to use them for the 2023 season. However, some of our kits were missing a few specific bearings, and we were unable to use 3 swerve modules last competition. We have since ordered a pack of bearings so that we can get them working.
Electrical
Our electrical lead has been training the sub team on the basic tools, as well as soldering practice. Our electrical sub team as a whole has been working on a prototype electrical board that hopefully our programming sub team can use as a test bed.
If you’re interested in more of how our team operates, here’s our 2023 Season Build Thread: Team 3181’s 2023 Build Thread
Our team held a “mock kick-off” this weekend to introduce our new students to game videos, the process we use to develop our strategies, and robot characteristics. We have had an emphasis on working small groups with 2-3 leadership members per group to facilitate development of ideas, as well as make sure the groups are following the rules guide.
The competition we chose for our mock kickoff was the 2011 game, Logo Motion.
We started off with first watching the game intro and then hearing suggestions specifically for what drive chassis should be used, as well as the key objectives for each time period: auto, teleop and endgame.
Next, we broke into groups and brainstormed ideas for possible robot archetypes and their characteristics that we should explore. This step is important for us to eventually develop a high level strategy. The general premise was to develop different robot types that could be designed for specific roles, such as offensive or defensive, and where each bot should score, and its overall role in an alliance for the 2011 game.
Here’s an example of what we came up with:
We regrouped and compressed our types into a select few that we would explore further. Then we split into new groups and developed strategies for each archetype we made. Autonomous, scoring positions, and minibot deployment were key factors that played into the strategies that were being developed.
Our high level strategies that we came up with were:
We reconvened again to debate the characteristics of each bot idea that the groups came up with, and many factors were considered. The amount of points that could be scored and where we where we would score were the two most popular ideas. We also considered OPR and other statistics that could play into a possible defensive robot, as well as an offensive oriented robot. The method we use to choose a good strategy was stressed to our newer students.
We made our choices by having someone from each group introduce the main ideas their group had, and then each other group gave their input. We discussed what parts of the game we felt were the most important to focus on for this game, such as a good minibot, mid scoring vs low scoring and where to intake pieces.
Our mock kickoff ended with our team leads wrapping up our development process and a lead into our design processes.
Looking forward to working with another openalliance team at Greater Pittsburgh in 2024! I’m sorry we missed that connection this past season. Maybe we can do a big Open Alliance group photo!
Preparing for Kick-off
Our team has been working hard to make sure that we are prepared for this season. We’ve been finishing up subteam training, and making sure we’re ready for this year’s music themed game. We look forward to learning more from other OA teams, as well as offering our own experiences to Open Alliance!
Kick-Off
We started off the beginning of kick-off by doing a quick introduction of all our members, leaders, and mentors. We also followed up with how the competition works, and essentially how the alliance selection works.
Build Season Plan - Beginning
This season, we intend to have a fully functional robot for the first week competition that we are attending. To do that, we are watching the livestream closely, and following the video carefully. We will be trying to follow a more concise schedule, and get our CAD done early.
Thoughts on this year’s game:
First remarks: This year’s game looks tough!
Initial Impressions:
There is only one game piece
The Kitbot is basically the everybot
Climbing the chains
You need to have a system that works with a range of heights in order to be able to climb with another robot.
The Speaker is at an angle, so it should be easier to score when pressed against the amp and shooting up
The Kitbot maybe a very good starting place, especially since it will have the angle to best score in the speaker
It will be difficult for the human player to score on the stage, specifically on the corresponding “microphone”
The notes are foam rings
Strategies should account for constantly amplifying the speaker for max points
Our team typically does strategizing before we begin to think about design. We follow a certain process that allows us to develop a useable strategy, and then practice testing it out. Today, however, our team will mostly just be watching the video, and going over possible strategies.
Point Strategizing
We split into groups to go over the rules and start to figure out what points were necessary to be scoring, and what points were best to go after.
From those Archetypes, we broke into groups once more to synthesize a few of the ideas into more concise archetypes that the team as a whole would decide on.
Here’s the 6 final Archetypes that our team has come up with :
We’ve prioritized both intake areas, and scoring at speaker and amp. Climbing is an important factor in designing our bot. We also plan on using a swerve drive this season.
This is where we ended our first day of Kick-off, but we will continue our strategizing and designing tomorrow.
Today we started off at around noon, talking about how we could merge some of the archetypes into a few that cover more functions in one robot. We set up a design matrix to begin working through what we would decide on for alliances of robots that would have the best scoring capabilities.
Point Rankings
We spent a lot of time working through a multitude of possible alliances and which robots would be best at scoring where, if that makes sense. We kind of got bogged down in the technical scoring, as evidenced by our notes:
We began to refocus on the matrix that we were planning on using, since we were drifting from our end goal, which was voting on which strategy our team should do.
Complexity Matrix
We worked on a new matrix that goes over prioritizing different scoring places, and how it can contribute to alliance scoring, RPs, and MPs.
The boost of points from the amp relies on a team with a bot that can either focus on just the amp, or be able to score in the speaker and amp. I think it might be worth looking into scoring in both, maybe using a part that holds the 1 note that can turn vertically and drop it into the amp. That could possibly use the flywheel similar to the kitbot? I may look into that when we start looking into designs. Combining the ideas will be useful for simplifying the strategy for later on.
Deciding Phase
We noted that if we focus on being an amp cycle bot, we would be a good 2nd pick, due to our ability to be mobile, and our alliance would rely on us more to keep the amp bonus going.
Personally, I think the amp and trap are so similar, so it would be easy to just cycle amp, and then climb and trap score. A high scorer would likely be a 2nd pick, and the amp cycler would likely be a 3rd robot in an alliance, so it would be less favorable to do the amp cycler.
We think 2 speaker focused bots and 1 amp bot are able to score more points than 2 amp bots and 1 speaker bot. We are basically guaranteeing that the ability to climb will be an essential aspect of our robot, and making sure that we are able to score more points in quals.
Next, we voted on either the amp or the speaker, which one we wanted to start off focusing on, and the speaker won.
Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, Won’t Have
Then we did a Must have, Should have, Could have, and Won’t have table. It essentially summarizes our strategy.
Note: Anything left blank will likely be a won’t or something we figure out later.
After that, we went through our prototyping steps and what past games would be good to look into for ideas.
Designing Phase
We broke up into groups and began designing possible intakes, shooters and climbers. There were lots of good ideas, such as a single “tube” shooter and intake. That group also had a climber idea that used a rack and pinion system, and it extended below the chassis: (Sorry it’s rotated)
The next group had a 4-bar type design, that is difficult to describe, so I’ll just put in a picture:
The demonstration involved a video of a 4-bar that explained in better detail how the “claw”/ grabber could be attached to one of the 4-bar arms. Basically it was a 4-bar with a grabbing attachment on the end.
Another group had a conveyor belt type system, that would use a belt to intake and hold a note inside the robot, and then it would be shifted up to the top of the belt, to get shot out.
Some of our groups took inspiration from @FirstUpdatesNow, which had Youtube videos from Ri3D teams that figured out the optimal angles for shooting a note into the amp.
We broke up back into our groups to further develop certain ideas that we felt were simple, and easy to start with. We plan on adding a bit of complexity to our ideas, but we’re going to simplify our designs, test, then add complexity, and then test again. Hopefully this idea of starting simple and adding more on once we know it works will help us design a robot quicker, and keep us on track for that week 1 competition.
In the past, our ability to add too much complexity to our initial designs has been a significant problem for our team.
We’ve established that we will have 3-4 groups that will further expand on certain designs that have been agreed on. We now have access to be in our school’s work space everyday of the week, so we will be taking advantage of that time.
That concludes our Kick-off weekend meetings. Overall this seems like a pretty interesting game, and I look forward to seeing what other openalliance teams do!
Our team broke up into 3 groups that are prototyping the essential parts of our upcoming robot design. Those teams are an intake and shooter group, a climber group, and a group that is working on a pivot system to see if an arm can flip an intake system into a shooter system.
The Arm Group
This group has our team’s CAD lead and programming lead, and has been testing possible gear ratios that would be able to lift our intake/ shooter combo system.
Their design basically uses motors to rotate the intake/shooter about a fixed point in the middle of the chassis (upper left hand corner). This will allow for quick turn around from ground intake to a shooter that can score in the speaker and possibly the amp.
Intake Group
Our intake group has been working on disassembling our teams’ rapid react intake, as well as laser cutting new intake pieces that will be used in our new intake design. That was the plan anyway, we ended up having issues with our laser cutter, an Epilog Zing 30 watt, so we were unable to get their pieces cut out Thursday night.
However, I do have some screenshots from their cad work to show here:
There are 4 positions, intake, amp, speaker, and stored.
Intake position
Amp position
Speaker position
Stored position
Personally, I think the intake and shooter combo that the University of Minnesota (https://www.youtube.com/@umnrobotics) Ri3D team has is very interesting as it incorporates a ground intake, under the bumpers, and moves the note straight into a launcher that is already set to shoot into the speaker or amp. It’s a very compact system.
Their robot “Apollo” seems to have a fairly simple climber, just a hook that grabs onto the chain, and their intake/shooter is impressive.
It seems like the speed of the flywheel changes for scoring in the speaker, and scoring in the amp. I’ve noticed that this years’ game doesn’t really need that many motors to cover the basic functions. (The screenshot is from: Ri3D 2024 - Robot Reveal 0:38).
Our Climber Group
Our climber group was unable to meet last night, so I’ll get updates from them when we meet again tonight. I know that they have some plans on how to tackle the challenge of grabbing on to the chains and lifting the robot. I think they were looking at some materials from Ri3D, specifically looking into the climbers.
Last night’s meeting was very productive! Our climber group got a prototype started, and our intake group has made progress in their prototype.
Climber Group
The design that our climber group is pursuing utilizes some components that were similar to our teams’ 2019 climber. However, they made many improvements that made the design more usable, and it’s more based on the 2020 Everybot by Team 118:
It uses a spring coupled with a string that operates a telescoping “arm” that will reach up and grab onto the chains to lift up the robot. We’ve seen similar designs from Ri3D robots that look like they are able to climb consistently. (Look back at the Apollo Robot from UM’s climber in my previous post).
Intake/ Shooter Updates
Our intake/ shooter group has been working on a prototype that uses old pieces from our “stasis area” in our 2021 robot from Rapid React. That design was intended for the over-sized tennis balls, but the system for turning compliance wheels is still applicable.
The design works well to compress the notes using compliance wheels, much like the tennis balls that it was previously used for. Also, the orange “belts” are actually soldered elastic pieces. It was kind of janky but it did work for what we needed.
The design changed slightly to make use of some new sugar wheels that we recently got from Rev.
The intake group made a lot of progress in their intake/ shooter prototype that I posted the CAD to in the last post:
The initial design didn’t work out as well as we thought it would.
Our solutions
We’ve looked into how to modify it to get it working. It seems like we’ll need to get more 3in orange compliance wheels in order to make the note take the turn in the intake better.
It works much better, turns out not all of our compliance wheels were making contact with the note, so it wasn’t making it around the sharp bend.
A Note on Notes
Our notes have not held up, undamaged during our testing and prototyping. They have tears and cuts in them, and they have only been through moderate use. I don’t have a lot of confidence in them staying in good condition throughout the competition, if our prototyping is anything to go by.
Team Update
Our team has gotten our preorder of the new vortex and spin motors from rev! We got the preorder package, which has 2 of each of the 2 motors. We are hoping to try out these new motors in our designing/prototyping phase that should give us a better picture of where to best use the new motors.
We started finishing up our CAD prototypes, and we are fully transitioning into the building phase. We are still on track to reach our goal of making a fully functioning robot ready for a week 6 competition. Our building phase is entering full gear!
Shooter Group Progress
Our shooter group finished their prototype, and demonstrated a launching at the angle of the Speaker. They will be mounting their prototype to our new swerve chassis that is being wired up tonight. Their prototype will be wired up and tested with our new Vortex Flex Motors that we got from Rev. Onshape Shooter.
Note: Our CAD may be incomplete. We are rushing to get our physical pieces completed.
Climber Group
Our climber group has used their cad as a proof of concept. They are finishing CADing the hooks that will hold our robot on the chains on the Stage.
Here’s our climber groups’ CAD: Onshape Climber.
(This is just the right side, there is also a left side).
Pivoting Arm Group
Our pivoting arm group has been working on integrating our shooter/intake with our chassis. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of it, but I’ll have them in the next update post.
Electrical Team Updates
Our electrical sub team took inventory of our neo motors and spark maxes:
(Yes, every box has a motor or a motor encoder in it).
Also, our electrical lead has been working hard to make sure that our batteries this year are in proper working order. We found out that some of our batteries from previous years were poorly wired, so we are going back and fixing all of our batteries in the hopes of ending our team’s battery issues, and in the process improving our robot’s reliability.
Sorry for the late post! This past weekend, we had made a lot of the game elements, and began testing for our human player. A key aspect of being a human player this year is frisbee throwing ability. Our overall progress has slowed down a little, but we’re still on track. We’ve been working on creating our robot pieces and putting it together. We are getting a lot of work done very quickly, much quicker than we have ever done before. Hopefully that doesn’t affect our reliability at Pittsburgh.
Programming Team Updates
Our programming team has been hard at work making our new swerve code and programming our two vortexes for our shooter. They also have been working with our electrical team to make sure we have our working swerve chassis and prototypes.
This is our current in progress swerve code, and it’s being developed by our new programming lead. We’re redoing our whole swerve code and the way we do the offsets because last year we had code that required our former programming lead in order to use. Once it’s a bit more complete, then it’ll be on our Github.
This is our shooter code that utilizes our 2 vortex motors.
Other Updates
Our electrical team is still working on wiring up all our new and older batteries for comp.
Our CAD group has been hard at work making sure all the pieces will fit together and making sure that any minor issues are fixed so that we can be ready for Pittsburgh. Our full robot CAD on Onshape will be coming soon.
Our team is still on track for Pittsburgh. We’ve been machining the final pieces for our robot using our CNC router table. We’ve been working strenuously to get our electrical and CAD finished up so that we can move on to the stress-testing phase of the build season.
Mechanical
Our mechanical team, and everyone that was drafted to mechanical, has been working on finishing up our final chassis for this year.
Our team is using the same Rev 3 in Max Swerve modules that we used last year. They worked really well last year, at least as my team’s driver, I thought they worked really well. They were fairly low maintenance, reliable and easy to assemble/ disassemble.
Electrical
We’ve been reorganizing and reflashing our motors and our spark maxes in order to keep track of our CAN Ids. We’re trying to make sure that it’s easy for us to keep track of which motors are going where and what they’re doing. Our electrical team has gotten our electrical board built for this year’s robot. We’re doing the same thing with our electrical board as we did with last year’s robot, Rattles.
Essentially, we have a lexan piece that is the bottom of our robot that will hold all the major electrical components that we can put there (battery, PDH, rio, etc). This approach worked well last year and we didn’t have any major electrical issues during last season.
Here’s what our CAD of the layout of the bottom Lexan piece looks like:
Programming
Our programming team has been hard at work making all of our code largely in house as well as All of our preliminary code for all of our systems is done and they are ready to start testing the first iteration of with codes. They also got the 2nd order kinematics made, as well as future path planning. They are desperately waiting for the parts of our robot to be machined and put together, so that they can start programming.
CAD
Our CAD team has been finishing up their design and are also wrapping up the machining of parts so that we are ready for our final assembly.
Here is the link to our fully assembled CAD model:
It’s been a little while since I’ve posted. Our team has been machining parts for a while, and some other smaller bits of the robot have gotten finished. We were testing our prototype shooter earlier, and it’s now put together and mounted on the chassis. This year, our team is farther ahead in the building process than we have ever been before. We have started to lag behind our initial schedule, however we do have plans to make up that lost time.
Chassis Update
Our electrical team finished putting all of the electrical parts onto the bottom of our chassis, and our mechanical team got these metal cross beams put on as supports.
If you saw our CAD that I posted a link to in the previous post, we have made some adjustments, such as getting our pink lexan side panels designed, and some brackets to hold them on (These may be hidden, as we are still referencing our CAD). These will have our sponsors on them, just like last year.
CAD Updates
We’ve been working on wrapping up our machining and we’re making sure that we clean up our CAD model a little bit (Our CAD lead is working on it). Most of our CAD is done, and we just have small edits to make to a few parts. Our side panels are pink, because of course our team color is pink.
Shooter Complete?
We have our shooter mounted onto our chassis and we’re ready to start wiring stuff up. Our other pieces are being worked on, so the shooter is the only working piece, but it has been fairly successful.
Programming
We ran into some issues with the Vortex motors and their flex controllers, but we’re working on fixing it and we hope to have our shooter fixed very soon. Our programmers have been adjusting our PID and Swerve code, as well as working on autos.
Climber
Our climber group has been working on putting together the Rev 90° gearboxes for our climber. We’re using either 125:1 or 100:1 gear ratios for our climber, which we think will be enough to lift our robot on the chains.
Not finished
We have yet to finish machining it out, but we are working on it! It has a lot of pieces made, but we still need to put it together.
A few members of our team attended a Cabaret at one of our high schools. It was a good opportunity to raise money, and a great way to raise awareness for our team as well as FRC. We got to demonstrate our last year’s robot to a younger group of students that may be interested in joining FRC in the future!
Overall, we’re still working hard to make sure that we are ready for our week one comp at Pittsburgh Greater Regional. We do have a bit more to machine and test, but we have made solid progress. Can’t wait to see other fellow openalliance teams at competition this year!
We’ve got our robot mostly together. Our shooter and intake have been mounted and we are just making some minor adjustments right now. We were able to get our intake and shooter mounted on our chassis and they are getting wired up.
Shooter
Our shooter is fully put together, and it is ready for testing. The pivot however, is still being worked on. It seems like the 3 5:1 gearboxes on our 2 pivot Neos may not be enough to keep our shooter and intake assembly lifted up.
Intake
Our intake is fairly complete. Complete enough for us to put it onto our shooter. It also has 2 Neos with 125:1 gear ratios, just like the pivot for the shooter.
Our intake picks up notes from the floor, then it rotates back, as shown in the pictures and CAD, to shoot into the speaker. The robot is taking shape and we’ll be testing it all next week at practice fields to get our new drive team prepared for our Week 1 competition.
Climber
We are finishing up our climbers, and they are almost ready to be mounted to our chassis (I’ll post photos later). We are almost to the testing phase with most of our pieces of our robot, and we have all of our game elements made and ready for use.
We are almost done with this year’s build season! We’re excited to be competing at the Greater Pittsburgh Regional, week 1 this year, then we’ll be heading to our local competition, the Week 3 Fingerlakes Regional!
We’re in the finishing stages of our robot build. We’ve been testing our intake and shooter to make sure that we are ready for Pittsburgh. We’ve redesigned our intake since my last post, and the updates will be in our CAD soon.
Shooter
We were able to test our shooter and it looks like it works very well. Our consistency was very good when we were testing on our speaker element.
Intake
Our original design for our intake was not very effective. It had some difficulty picking up from the floor. We found that the belts we were using weren’t getting enough grip on the notes to move them through the intake.
Our new design incorporates new compliance wheels to get better grip on the notes.
Redesigned Intake
Our Redesign
We met Team 340’s (Greater Rochester Robotics) warehouse to test our shooter and intake on their field, and we found that our intake needed some adjustments.
We’ve redesigned it to use different size compliance wheels, 2-2.5in in front, and 3in towards the middle to maintain constant grip on the notes.
Climbers
Our climber has been relatively untested, but we plan to test it more as we get closer to comp. We know that the motors are able to move them, and that our 90⁰ gearboxes are working properly.
Overall, we are nearly ready for week one comp. Our shooter is very accurate, our intake has been improved, and our climbers are almost ready! We’re looking forward to competing at Pittsburgh and then at RIT!
We’ve been through our Week 1 competition, and it was a great learning experience. We had some fun, but we also learned about several improvements that we need to make.
First of all: We are moving away from rev’s Vortex motors. We had resetting issues that messed up our CAN IDs, which was catastrophic during our matches. We’re switching to regular NEOs and SparkMAXes that are more reliable.
Secondly, we are now looking into adjusting our power distribution. We’re adding in a VRM to hopefully mitigate the browning out issues that our drive team experienced. We were gifted one temporarily to help us at Pittsburgh from a friendly CSA from a fellow Rochester team. A huge thank you to frc340!
We are making significant improvements to make sure that we are ready for FLR competition!
(Sorry it’s rotated)
