FRC 4322 Clockwork | 2025 Build Thread | Open Alliance

FIRST FRC Open Alliance
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Welcome to the Team 4322 Open Alliance Build Thread for the 2025 season!

This is our second year on openalliance and our first year as part of the oa show. We will be competing at the Los Angeles Regional (week 3) and the Central Valley Regional (week 6) (not planning 3 regionals this time :slightly_smiling_face:).

For 2025, we will be having less frequent updates. We will be cutting out more of the “what we do” type information and post more about some of our practices and things we have learned. We are once again aiming to build a simple robot (we mean it this time) like we did in 2023.

2025 SEASON RESOURCES

RESOURCES
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Can’t wait to see what you guys do this season!

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Kitbot Plans

For 2025 we decided to opt in for the kitbot for a few reasons that we will be going over in this post. We will be modifying it to fit on our neo swerve x drivebase (2023 robot frame and bellypan).

  • We do not want to end up like we did during 2024 where we had a robot that did not function for our week 1 and week 4 regionals
    • The kitbot is our fallback if we do not finish in time for whatever reason (not doing a week 1 and building simpler should also help with this)
    • We might end up competing with a modified version of the kitbot depending on what we think of it
  • Early driver practice/testing
    • Can be doing driver practice with the kitbot while the software team is working with the comp bot
  • See how the robot interacts with the field
  • Prototyping platform
  • We get robot parts from it we could use for a comp bot (like the squishy wheels)
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Kickoff Plan

 We are switching up our approach to kickoff weekend for 2025.

DAY 1:

During group rules read, we will be going section by section to go over any questions students may have. During the silent manual review, students will be given paper so they can write down questions as they come up or can write down things to help them remember (for example, they could write down how many points something is worth if it helps them remember it better).

Scoring analysis + RP is usually something we struggle with, so we are giving ourselves a good amount of time to focus on that.

We may or may not do humans play the game depending on how useful we feel it is. Humans play the game should help us get a good idea of how much a robot should be scoring in auto/teleop (the humans will be walking not rushing for this activity). For time-based analysis, we will have students split up into groups for both auto and teleop. The groups will then all come together and go over what they came up with.

The auto discussion will also happen in groups (like 10-15 mins in groups unless people need more time) and we will all come together at the end. Groups will draw auto paths.

We are not going to prototype or decide what the robot will do on day 1 (one of the areas we messed up 2024).

DAY 2:

The einstein and regional finals discussion will be a whole team activity (no smaller groups). It could take a little less time, but we wanted to give ourselves a buffer.

We are going to try to decide what our robot will do on day 2 to allow us to look on cd and get ideas (thoughts from the night). If we realize something later on, we can always go back and make adjustments, but we need to get something to start designing/prototyping.

We have prototyping set to start at 2 but won’t be upset if it happens later. We might end up pushing stuff from day 1 to day 2 if we take a long time somewhere or might extend some day 2 conversations.

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12/31 Football Prototype Update

We only had a couple hours this meeting, so we will be working more on it at our next meeting. For this prototyping meeting the task was to pick up a football off of the ground. Two dollys with an old set of bumpers were used as the robot.

No bottom roller:

Test 1 (1.625 inch compliant wheels):

Test 2 (1.625 inch compliant wheels football perpendicular to intake):

Test 3 (1.625 inch compliant wheels. Football pushed the wheels apart since no spacers):

Bottom Roller:
Test 1 (1.625 inch compliant wheels):

Test 2 (1.625 inch compliant wheels):

Test 3 (1.625 inch compliant wheels):

Test 4 (1.625 inch compliant wheels football ejecting):

The main changes we made from the original test was adding the back roller and having the front roller stick out more to better grab the football and pull it up over the bumper.

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12/31 & 1/2 Drivebases Update

We want to go into the season with 2 drivebases (one for our kitbot and the other we can potentially put prototypes on). Outside of meetings, our tech director (myself) rebuilt our swerve modules and wired up the two drivebases. At our prototyping meetings, we got them moving.

Robot garage party

The first drivebase is mk4is with krakens for both drive and steering on our old 2024 robot (CRUSH) frame. These are the modules we will use during the season. Zombie CRUSH was wired with scraps from TOAST since we don’t want to nicely wire it right now because we will probably want different wire lengths for our comp bot. The hardware on Zombie CRUSH also came from TOAST. We tried putting the Pigeon closer to the middle for this robot as well. The battery pan is lined with ¼” foam rubber sheets. Since it was sitting for a while uncleaned we had some loctite get hardened onto some plates so we just took a dremel to one of the bolts and spacers and swapped it.

The second drivebase is our legacy swerve x with neos for both drive and steering on our old 2023 robot (Nemo) frame. Most of the wires for Zombie Nemo were already on the robot and the electrical layout was already done last off-season, so the modules were just added on and plugged in. After a little bit of dremeling and some drive belt swaps we got the modules built and got Zombie Nemo to drive :slightly_smiling_face:

We had to drive pretty slow since we don’t want to make skid marks on the carpet in the room (Zombie Nemo is the robot in the video)

We have now taken everything off of TOAST that we plan on removing before the season.

Avocado toast

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1/2 Football Prototype Update

We decided to keep trying to pick up the football from the floor. Our students were tasked with trying different wheel durometers and diameters and different levels of compression to build off of what we did before.

V1 vids:

Test 1 (parallel 2.25” 40A compliant wheels, 2” compliant wheels, 1.625” compliant wheels):

Test 2 (perpendicular 2.25” 40A compliant wheels, 2” compliant wheels, 1.625” compliant wheels):

Test 3 (Fail parallel 2.25” 40A compliant wheels, 2” compliant wheels, 1.625” compliant wheels):

Test 4 (angled fail 2.25” 40A compliant wheels, 2” compliant wheels, 1.625” compliant wheels):

V2 vids:

Test 1 (parallel 3” 35A compliant wheels spaced with 1” sushi rollers):

Test 2 (rolled into 3” 35A compliant wheels spaced with 1” sushi rollers):

Test 3 (perpendicular 3” 35A compliant wheels spaced with 1” sushi rollers):

Test 4 (angled 3” 35A compliant wheels spaced with 1” sushi rollers):

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1/4 Kickoff Update

I mean at least we prepared for this lol

pvc prototyping 12/21/2024

pvc prototyping 12/27/2024

We kinda narrowed down a few things we don’t plan to do almost immediately after watching the video since we wanna build simple and had pvc experience.

  • No picking up pvc off the floor (not as simple as coral station. We need simple. We didn’t even really need a discussion on this one because we were all just on the same page. We officially wrote down that we were not doing this on day 2 though because that was when we started the robot decision)
  • No deep cage (does not seem simple)
  • No shallow cage (does not seem simple)

Some team may come up with something simple for these tasks that we could potentially look at as an upgrade down the line, but as of right now those are very very very hard no’s for us.

We started off with our hour of silent reading. It went pretty well and we were happy with it (we have never done that before and would def do again).

We then went around to see if anyone had questions. We clarified a few things so we were all on the same page and noted down questions we were all unclear of for the q and a.

Then we moved onto scoring analysis and rp

We did humans play the game this year as well to try and give us a better idea of how many pieces robots will likely be scoring in auto and teleop. We had the students walk to get a better idea of what we wanted to be able to do. We used that information and had our students split up into small groups to work on our time based autonomous sheet. The students did the same thing for teleop.

We wanted to see how the robot would handle the field (driving between reef and coral station) so we brought one of our drivebases down to the parking lot and drove it around a little. It was pretty rough since the floor was uneven so not all the modules were touching the ground and we are still working on getting the robot to drive well, but we got an idea of how many cycles a robot may be doing.

We then talked over some of the autos we think we will see in week 3. Honestly, looking at it now with a day 2 perspective we think some of the more difficult ones might even be too much for a week 3.

We ended day 1 talking about potential match strats.

We did get our kitbot but not the 130t belt, 48t pulleys, or wheels, so we are just going to use the 131t belt from the drivebase kit, some 35a compliant wheels, and print our own 48t pulley for right now. We sent the kitbot home with our tech director (me) to make some progress on it before day 2. After a trip to storage, 2 trips to home depot, 2 trips to the machine shop garage, and 4 trips to the robot assembly garage, we finally got most of the kitbot together (not mounting it to the robot because we don’t think that’s worth it). More on the kitbot and the mods we made to it in our day 2 post!

TLDR
  • Did not prototype or decide robot on day 1 (yay)

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Humans Play the Game (with occasional Zombie Nemo)

Zombie Nemo in the parking lot:

We wanted to see what it was like driving the robot between the reef and coral station. Since we do not have a field or field elements, we just drew it out with chalk in the parking lot. We also did a little humans play the game out here, but the more important humans play the game happened up in the room.

Here was our chalk parking lot set up (only half the field since that was all we cared about).

Humans Play the Game:

Hybrid Cycle:

Far Side L1 Cycle:

Close Side L1 Cycle

L4 Cycle (spin added to show that robot takes some time to align):

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2025 Climb Analysis

Climbing this year seems pretty tricky, especially the deep cage. Since we are lower resourced and really focused on building simple, we did an analysis of climbing on kickoff day 2 for our two events (LA and CVR) to see if it is worth it to climb.

image

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Vanilla

We would like to present our 2025 kitbot, Vanilla (named for being basic).

We only made 1 mod to it and that was trying to add a split funnel down the middle. Since the intake is wide, we wanted to try funneling the coral into either side of the intake. We are mainly looking at orienting the coral in that config so it can be scored on other levels on a different mechanism that can reach up there. Again, the wheels are different since we didn’t get them. The mod uses alternating 1.625” and 2” compliant wheels. Vanilla was made with hardboard instead of poly because it was cheaper.

Funneling Success:

Funneling Fails:

So yeah as you can see it kinda failed a lot. It would need some more wheels or something on the sides to help funnel it better and not just spin out horizontally and get jammed.

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1/5 Kickoff Day 2 Update

We started off by continuing with our match strat conversation. We ended up doing this as a team and not small groups because we had 4 kids. We did some more humans play the game in the room to get a better idea of cycle times as well.

We had a sheet that was clamped to a white board that we projected the reveal and our sheets onto for this weekend.

We then jumped into the section we had been waiting for since the reveal, the Clockwork robot WILL.

That is the priority list we came up with but honestly we are not too sure about it anymore. We will be going over our strat more at our 1/8 meeting (still doing a bunch of stuff in concept land regardless of this though).

We drew out some potential robot archs

Elevator l1-l4:

Even more complicated for no reason l1-l4:

Nemo in the Bot:

We don’t want to do something super crazy with a lot of dofs, but we still had some drawings with some for inspiration and to look at potential archs we could see this season.

We ended the day by making some mods to Vanilla and testing them. We are not planning on doing as much prototyping as we did last year because there is so much testing from other teams that is getting posted already and we did testing before the season started. We also just don’t has as many resources as we did last season (no shop).

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This guys helped me a lot to understand what are they trying to do.

Btw the bonus head guy make our life better

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1/8 Strategy Update

We wanted to review our strat to decide if scoring L4 was really the move for us. We are not the fastest at build and do not have in-house manufacturing abilities which is one of the many reasons why having a simpler robot is important to us. We think a lot of teams will try L4 and not be the fastest at it, us included, so we decided to just do L1-L3 and get super fast and good at getting algae out of the way and scoring L3.

The new Clockwork robot will list is:

1. Drive (straight line, no heading drift, no brownouts)
2. L1-L3
3. Algae*

We are still not focusing on endgame as of right now.

We spent a lot of the meeting looking at elevators and an arm with a passive pivot from concept land. We are currently leaning more towards the arm with a passive pivot due to easier manufacturing but are still looking at some other options (waiting for the wcp cc and the everybot to drop)

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image
image535Ă—570 59 KB

We decided to do a slanted 1 stage elevator for our robot this year. The elevator will be custom, not cots, using scraps from TOAST (saves us money because we already have it). The slant should allow us to reach a little over the bumpers to remove algae from the reef.

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1/11 Update

We designed a rough v1 end effector that we wanted to test out, so we built a super scrappy version of it to test it.

The vision:

Designed to use a good amount of parts we already have (pinion, 24t pulleys, wheels, 53t belts, 43t belts, etc) to save money.

The prototype:

Left side end effector testing:

Right side end effector testing:

Wide angle end effector testing:

We didn’t have the 53t belts where we were meeting, so we couldn’t power all the shafts. The end effector cad was made based off of vibes, so we were pretty happy that it worked. We made the prototype better and got some better vids on 1/12 so we will post them in that update.

We also had some students take apart parts of toast. We are going to run a custom 1 stage chain driven elevator (changed from slanted to vertical) and will be using the bearing blocks and tube plugs from toast to save costs.

Elevator:

also designed to use a good amount of parts we have. Geared 4:1 and we are adding cf springs.

The bearing blocks we stole from toast

Planning on running a 26x26 drivebase because we already have tubing cut to size for that

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How do you plan on wiring the radio on the elevator cross bar? My team is thinking of a similar placement and don’t know if it should be run through anything.

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From the radio, the wires will probably run along the top of the crossrail (fits in starting config height). We will probably have them run along the upper gusset to the stage 0 verticals. The elevator is designed to fit inside our frame rails, so the wires are free to run along that side of the stage 0 tubes (not in the way of the bearings) and then onto the frame rails. Yeah I personally don’t like routing wires through tubes if you don’t need to (doesn’t sound fun if you need to swap the tube for whatever reason or if the wire gets pinched) so we try to just run them along tubes. We have routed in tubes (2024 off-season bot) and just make sure to wrap all the edges in noise dampening velvet tape or use grommets

Our 2024 bot also had some stuff up on a crossrail we routed down. That robot didn’t have an elevator so we could route the wires down the side face and into a 3dp channel that I designed to guide the wires down the robot toward the rest of our electronics. You could maybe make some sort of 3dp channel that runs down the face of the tube with the bearings that is offset from the tube so it doesn’t get hit and route the wires down that but that is just not necessary for us.

We sleeve all of that wire for extra protection and to keep everything bundled up so it is easier to route.

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