FRC 4329 2024 Build Thread

Hello there teams, team 4329 will start yet another build thread for the 2024 Crescendo!

I will upload…

  • F360 STL Files
  • Github is here
  • Pictures
  • Design Concepts
  • Documented Notes
  • Future Projects

I personally have still been learning the best way to properly make a build thread for our team and I hope I can finalize with useful and shareable topics in this thread, I will also have some help with collaborating with my partners and get some other insight through other teams

@nobody5690 Will be a person I will work with on this thread as one of my early strategic design friends.

I am also going to graduate this year so I will get another 4329 student to help on this thread to carry on the student leadership within the online scope of FIRST Robotics

4329 will help to bring a great deal of thought process and information for the 2024 FRC Season, Counting down only uh, 69ish days away!

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@Kraigo I’m excited to see what 4329 comes up with this year!

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I am very excited to work on some unique strategic designs this year

We have our 1st iteration of our new MK4in Swerve Frame!

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Through work learned from our Thriftybot Telescope tube we have made and worked on a Sprocket Fed Extension arm.

Got a working video currently with a 50:1 Gear ratio off of a neo 550

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Our Team finalized one of our last Team Building sessions before Kickoff and set some team and crew goals for our next season!

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It’s interesting your team has a GPA requirement, how strict is it and do you have to meet that standard to be on the team?

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Yes it is an interesting and unique standard to our team.

We established it into our team to better work with our school considering with how much students might be taken from school for robotics meetings and competitions. We have expectations to have a good GPA considering how our school is also a College Prep school.

We ensure that we follow our 3 main rules
Safety 1st
Homework 2nd
Robots 3rd

When it comes to cutoff we it’s around when students have C- s we have to have them get a parent and teacher to sign a Recover plan to get to leave school for competitions.

Any grade lower than that then our students can only goto 2 Meetings per week.

Realistically it doesn’t have to be implemented too much as we have our students prioritize being a Student 1st

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Kickoff!!! Woo Woo

4329 has had a great time starting to break down the game and we are now rising up with the CRESCENDO

We have had some preliminary strategic discussions and designs considered.
We also finished one Field Element (The AMP) which we will soon join with a model of a speaker and a slimmed down stage.



First thoughts/needs from the game

  • Ground Intake needed for Auto
  • Low for under the stage (akin to trench run 2020/21)
  • reliable funnel/intake for source
  • NOTE wars? centerline fighting over elements
  • need for shooting and placing in synergy
  • simple reversible climber for stage & coming down to harmonize with another team, or wherever a spotlight might be

Strategic Pointers!
This is an exciting game, but theres going to be some very hard things to work around. “The Trap is a Trap” Climbing then scoring in the trap seems simple, but the rocking will be painful to do successfully and also being able to precisely open the trap to place a note rocks your robot further with a move in CG

No game element recycling. With no recycling all points matter, it doesnt matter if you can fire faster if you never amplified your shots you will be missing out on points

Large Coopetition focus, not only with the coopertition points from the amp but also with the the cooperation through teams to min max the amplification.

I was discussing with @nobody5690 on a theoretical in match tactic. a perfect cycle would be up to all 3 teams of an alliance to get the amplification, but also be ready to score in the 10 second period. We devised a plan that with two strong shooting robots, they could easily be paired with an Amp bot that could ready the amplification, when shooting robots got into position the teams coordinate to fire as many notes as possible and maybe even the amp bot could bring notes closer so that the shooting bots can work better on their own.

Design Plans
We are currently planning on breaking into 5 Prototype groups to start our production and to produce concepts
Intake 1 Floor
Intake 2 Source
Scoring 1 Amp/Trap
Scoring 2 Speaker
Climbing/Lift.

This last group will mainly focus on the climbing segment, but it also may entail testing our prototypes of our Sprocket fed arm, a telescopic tube that could theorically easily lift us up and down from the chain. Meaning that in a perfect match we could lift ourselves to score in a trap then leave it join and climb with another team to harmonize.

Thats all for now when we have further cad models and working designs ill post em up!

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We have some of our first prototypes up and running!

Currently we have one intake, and one shooting platforms we are currently testing on as we further develop CADed models of our prototypes.

We also have our MK4I Swerve Drive working!

So far really good progress and we have had time to learn.

Intake
We have worked around a ground intake that can tell us the current feel of the note is. We are currently looking for further iterations to move the note futher upwards. With a possible interior design.

Shooting
We have made an adjustable shooter concept to test the compression of the shooter, currently around 8in inbetween the wheels we are using.

When we have more finished and higher quality CAD models ill post them in the week, so far this is what I got to share and im excited to get more out there!

Howdy there folks!
Coming here with the next prototype update and we are moving along at an excellent pact this year!

So far we have currently have 4 major prototypes

Intake
In Frame Intake style

Our in frame wheeled intake is working very well. It needs some more support but with a 1.5in compression throughout the design it has worked effectively to give up a so far unseen advantage with having an intake not out of our robot. We do see a current problem with the size of it though, its rather wide and to fit in our current mk4i frame 27x32 we may need to lengthen the longer side to fit this style of intake.

Transfer
Our Intake/Transfer/Shooter system has been a platform we have tested to understand more how we can move our note to a shooter. We are looking at further iterations to allow the note change from the top down compression of 1.5 in to the side to side compression of 9.5 ins

Shooters

Shooters are both going well, one with a twin arrays of 4in colsons with a compression of 9.5in

Side to Side Shooter
With our side wheels we noticed that the compression was solid! We did notice one problem though, we had our gear ratio too high with a 6:1 currently we had too much torque for how many game elements we needed to fire. We did see how the element worked with half that ratio on our previously listed transfer shooter, that with had two max planetary with 3:1s. I do believe we might go for an even lower ratio to maximize our RPM however.

Top to Bottom Shooter
Our top and bottom Shooter has been working so far pretty strong as well.
With a 3:1 gear ratio we have the RPM to hit some nicer shots, however we are noticing that with our current setup of compliant wheels we may not have a hard enough shooting to keep our note straight throughout the air.

Climbing

We currently have not put a large enough focus into climbing but so far we have tested a concept with our Sprocket arm. When we test one with a weight of 125lbs we noticed we were shearing teeth off of our 25 sprocket we used.
We are currently talking through some fixes with that like maybe double sprockets or redesigning our arm.

Thats all I have for now!

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Clip montage out!

Also some exciting strategic news as we consider some new integration concepts. Currently we are considering the 4522 approcach to multitask climbing, shooting, amp, source, and the trap.


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Big News!
We have a better iteration to our robot this year!

We have majorly decided to work with an elevator concept, very akin to 4522s. We have in frame ground intake that can feed to pivoting shooter arm that is on a Thriftybot Elevator. With these and some soon to happen testing we believe we can start with the first stages of scoring in the speaker then moving onto the amp, stage, then hopefully the trap!




Also Some prototype videos of our futher worked on Shooter and transition system

This is going to be a hard design to pull off and we have a good amount of work to do but I believe we have something promising! Ill keep this place updated when I have better models and I might drop the intake CAD once I review it with my mentors.

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As Week 4 crawls around we have a protobot frame built up, This frame is without an elevator but this can help us with the first main iteration of our robot until we get our new parts for our dev and comp bots coming soon.


With our Intake-Index-Shooter components finalized we can finally work towards our elevator required for the stage, amp, and source! We have a goal of getting that model done by tuesday to get frame parts sent to be cut out so that we can finalize our robot.

Leaves us with a todo list of such

  • Elevator Lift Gearbox
  • Elevator Frame
  • Climbing Hooks
  • Wiring Chain
  • Electrical Panel & battery placement


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Howdy there teams! @yumindorf and I are now going to be posting for the 4329 Build Blog! Since @Kraigo is going, we are moving onto to different blog posters!
We have finally started producing our Comp Bot

  • Frame
    The base frame is assembled, and we are currently putting up the rest of the elevator frame. This current frame perimeter 32.75*27

  • Intake
    The final iteration has been made and it is now on the robot, and we have a solid inframe style with 1.5in compression

  • Elevator
    The elevator has been dry fit, and we are working on it tonight.

  • Shooter
    The Dual Flywheel Shooter is in its final iteration and being assembled tonight. We are using 4 4x2in Colson’s

  • Software
    The Software team has some code for the completed robot. They have spent the week working on the Rio, Sparkies, LEDs, April Tags, and a line break sensor.

  • Strategy
    The Strategy crew spent their week reviewing the FRC Q&A. they have also successfully completed the scouting app we plan to use a competition.











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Build Update!

Wow life is BUSY but im here to update this thread finally with my next weekly update.


Competition Robot (name isnt decided yet) is almost done. We have our end of build season celebration tomorrow so we have a list of finalized objectives

  • Wiring is almost there but needs to be finalized
  • Thriftybot Elevator # 25 chain needs to be put on after we get our wiring done
  • New Limelight Mount
  • 3rd Iteration Climbing claws need to be tested to work with Limelight
  • Panels around sides of robot over frame
  • Anti Note Side panels below frame
  • Bumper with fabric and mounts

Shown above is our wiring situation, we found the best location for our electrical chain was next to our electrical panel, a coil situation that will be later held in by a polycarb panel mounted to two 1x1 corner pieces



Shown above is packaged view for intaking

Shown above is amp firing angle


With some CAD screenshots we planning out our climbing situation to swiftly work it out, with our elevator having a twin NEO 125:1 Gearbox we calculated enough weight to pull up our bot of course still need to test its linear speed but we have climbing hooks we are ready to test out of wood before we get the chance to manufacture them out of aluminum

Highlighted Above is our Limelight Mount (slightly close to the climbing hooks)

We should have a strong crew to finish our robot tomorrow and learn how our design will do! Lifes been pretty busy but ill try and get another update soon.

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Build Season is officially over! with the close of our build season entering into the tuning before competition season we are proud to show off our robot progress so far!

We decided on a name too “Sir Percival” with that we also finished our elevator testing and concluding our design is working so far. Now we are moving it into software’s hands to get it tuned and then to practice our testing and then climbing with our elevator.

Arm Rotation
Shown above is our 24:1 Arm Rotator, with twin thick 5mm Pitch belts we were easily able to rotate our shooter. We did notice however with the ratio the torque is so high it can make the belts skip, basically forcing the pulley and not actually guiding it through. We will see if we have future problems with this but so far with PID our shooter is rotating comfortably.

Intaking
Our under the bumper intake is working great! with our shooter angle we plan to have a Thriftybot Hall Effect sensor in-between our Shooter and Intake where the plates close in next to each other. If our shooter is too low the notes will miss but luckily with correct code we have a rather large space to assure we can intake notes from a strong shooting angle.

Shooting
Our Shooter has not change majorly from our development bot, except for a wheel size. We switched from 4x1/2 Colsons to 4x2 Colsons to help boost the inertia on our shooter wheels. We have yet to do a full range test but they are working excellently so far

Elevator
The long awaited test of our modified Thriftybot elevator is now complete. We confirmed our motors were assigned the correct direction for our 125:1 gearbox and we tested them out. Lifting is working we first tested at around 5% power so that’s why its seem decently slow. We also confirmed the gear ratio is strong enough to hold the elevator at its set position when it is disabled, which is a great sign for our future testing of climbing, considering we liked to hold up there for the post 5 seconds of the match. We do have to better align our elevator because with these testing we did not have it perfectly flat and aligned to the base bar, considering we had pool noodles to help it if anything went wrong.

Climbing
Now our next steps after tuning will be working on our climbing! With 3 iterations of wooden hooks to test placement and geometry we will finalize our design with more testing this week and then get some hooks manufactured out of 1/4in aluminum this week. Here’s some Fusion 360 Geometry to help convey our current strategy to climbing as well.





Full Assembly CAD Files

Thats all I have for now but when we get back I should get more footage of cycles, climbing, and further tuning!

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Build Update!

Our software team has had time to test and tune our robot this week as we plan to get a drive practice out at an actual field (thanks to 1706) today! Ill post some videos of drive practice tonight.

Outside of that we learned something new with our arm rotation. Our shooters rotation had a lot of mechanical slop, with wrong hex shafts (ones with rounded edges) and multiple stages we swapped it out for a #35 chain, running directly from our 12:1 max planetary into a 12-24 tooth sprockets. Also thanks to team 4256 for graciously giving away #35 chain tensioners we needed before we knew we needed them, thx ben

We also have our wooden climbing claws on our robot. We hoping to get those machined out of 1/4 aluminum to start test geometry and the force of it most likely next week.

Thats all I have for right now in the mean time dont forget to tune into FUN’s Premiere night, our robots current progress will be shown there!

Glad to see the chain is working out for y’all, can’t wait to see the reveal!

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Testing!

Okay so I may or may not have not gotten any footage of cycling while we were at 1706s full field, but we did do some cycles. I am going to have a dedicated person with a camera next time we go up there, most likely Wednesday.

Outside of that WE CLIMBED

Thanks to a (75:1 correct gear ratio) on our elevator and the assistance of @Beanbean1706 from 1706 getting us our climbing hooks cnced before we were even there, we were able to quickly get them on and test the climb on a stage. With the elevators extension height we are easily able to lift up along the sides of the stage chain as well.

Cycling went well with the change of chain on our shooter rotation we were easily able to intake then score into the amp and speaker. currently we need more time to program our shooter to hit from farther distances but our manual shots are working.

Our software team is fixing some bugs over the next two days but I believe we will be back at 1706s field on Wednesday, which means ill get footage then.

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