Welcome to the Team 4322 Clockwork Open Alliance build thread for the 2024 season! This is our first year on openalliance and our 13th season as a team. We are a student-led community team from Orange, CA. We currently have 24 students across 4 different school districts and 7 schools. We will be competing at the Hueneme Port Regional (week 1) and the Aerospace Valley Regional (week 6). We plan to post after every meeting. We plan to meet for around 32 hours per week in person, but this may change depending on if we are behind or do not have student/mentor coverage.
Goals
We are aiming to build a simple and reliable robot in 4 weeks to allow for lots of testing and practice so we can fail faster and fix issues early on. During kickoff, we are going to find a specific niche in the game and aim to get really good at doing that challenge since it is not within our resources to do everything. We are also aiming to be a first pick at the events we attend.
Came back together as a team so groups could present findings (had rookie students share their group findings to make them feel more included/welcome to participate)
Strategy
Split back up into groups to determine qualities of a bad, mid, good, and elite robo
Came together as a team to share our characteristic lists
Came up with a combined strategy as a team based on the lists that students came up with in groups
Brainstorming, researching, and prototyping
Split into subsystem groups to brainstorm and research mechanism ideas
Subsystems: climber, outtake, intake
Climber group ideas (put a pause on the climber group since it depended on the intake and outtake groups)
GreyT Telescope with hooks (WCP)
Custom telescope with hooks
Winch and pulley hook
Custom cascading elevator with hooks
GreyT cascade elevator (WCP)
Custom continuous elevator with hooks
Buddy climber on both sides (pick up both alliance partners)
Buddy climber on back (pick up one alliance partner)
Currently leaning more towards a telescope or winch and pulley hook than an elevator
Outtake group ideas
Dual flywheels on 1 side
1 flywheel of both sides of note
Spring loaded puncher
Pneumatic puncher
Pivoting launcher that can angle up or down
Turreted launcher
Intake group ideas
Funnel ground intake with horizontal wheels
Intakes note into circular cutout which gets pushed down into outtake mechanism
Internal belt/pulley system to hand off game piece to outtake system
Added all ideas to technical documentation with pros and cons
Prototyped an outtake
Prototyped an intake/outtake handoff
Continued working on 2023 Nemo drivebase to get it ready in time for mounting prototype intake and outtake
2 horizontal shafts of 4 inch compliant hubbed wheels with ½ inch compression on the note (5 wheels in a 2-1-2 pattern with 3.5 inch spacing between the wheel groups)
2 horizontal shafts of vertical 4 inch compliant hubbed wheels in a 1-1-1
Outtake subsystem vertical side wheel outtake
2 vertical shafts with replaceable wheels and adjustable compression
Wheels are attached to falcon motors and are connected to 2023 nemo drivebase
Testing out on varying wheel speed on each side to create spin so note won’t wobble in air
Intake subsystem
2 long horizontal shafts with replaceable wheels and adjustable vertically and horizontally
Wheels are driven by two drills, one for each shaft
Testing out varying wheel types and different vertical and horizontal distance between the two shafts.
Added all ideas to technical documentation with pros and cons
By any chance, are the sizes you’re referencing here the radius of the wheel, rather than the diameter? Typically in FRC wheels are sized by diameter, and the size of the wheels compared to what I assume is a 1/2in hex shaft would indicate those wheels aren’t 1.5in or 2in diameter (rather 3in and 4in diameter).
Juat clarifying while I research ideas for our team. Im enjoying the blog posts, keep em coming!
The spin shows more when we run the shooter at lower speeds. Since we mainly will be running the shooter at higher speeds, it doesn’t matter too much.
We found slightly better results using a space of 1.75" (.25" compression). Did you do any thorough testing on the differences between the two? Half inch compression would be more resilient to damaged NOTEs I think, however.
We have mainly been testing with .5 inch compression because we think it will hold up better throughout events as notes get damaged and compressed. We are still testing different compressions and wheel configs though.
We are also testing a spring tensioned compression with stops at 1.5" to see if that gets us the best of both for handling fresh notes and damaged notes, but due to lack of notes, this testing isn’t getting much time at the moment.
