Team 4639 is excited to join open alliance for this 2024 build season to share our ideas, designs, and code with the rest of the FRC community on a day to day basis this coming build season. We’ll share posts for our different subsystem prototypes, occasional programming and CAD tips, and other helpful information which helps others. So excited for this coming build season, and good luck to all!
FRC 4639 Mock kickoff 11/28/2023
One of the many annual events that our team does to prepare our new members for the build season is that we do a mock kick off, with a closely simulated environment of what the actual kickoff will look like. Last Tuesday we had a successful mock kickoff, simulating the game animation, field preview, game manual breakdown, and the concept portion.
Game Animation and Field Preview
For this year’s mock kickoff, we decided that going with the 2013 Ultimate Ascent Game would be the move, because our team predicted that next year’s game would be somewhat related to disc shaped objects. This is because the name, Crescendo, is music related, which may be related to music discs and vinyl records (or this is a large stretch and we were completely overthinking). Aside from our prediction, we also decided that doing the 2013 game would be optimal because choosing a unique game for mock kickoff would be ideal for a situation which simulates a unique game object never seen before.
The students started off with watching the game animation, followed by watching the series of videos which introduced the field and the game pieces for this year. They took notes during the video and also discussed with each other after the videos.
Game Manual Breakdown
After watching the videos, all the students spent 30 minutes, all in groups of 6 or 7, equally distributing the game manual amongst themselves and taking notes of their designated section in the manual.
After the students were done with taking notes on the manual, they went on and discussed the different portions of the game manual together in a group.
Concept and final discussion portion
After discussing the rules, point distributions, and the rest of the details of the game manual, they finally went to the last section of the Mock Kickoff, which was the concepts portion. This portion included coming up with what subsystems would be needed, basic concepts for the subsystems, and teaching the new members the process of coming up with ideas for prototyping.
Overall it was a successful mock kickoff, and I hope that our new members are now even more prepared for this coming build season.
FRC 4639 Kickoff 2024 Season Crescendo
This kickoff was a huge blast for our team, and we are excited to share many of the things that we have thought out about the game, strategy, and the flow of this season for our team.
Game Animation Reveal
To start off, our team watched the full stream on Twitch, and to our surprise, the game was somewhat similar to the game which we chose for our mock kickoff (2013 Ultimate Ascent) in the aspect that it was a disc game that required shooting. With this said, we were very glad that our new members wouldn’t be coming into this season completely cold but rather with some sort of ideas already in the back of their mind.
Game Manual Breakdown
Similar to our mock kickoff, we also had a game manual breakdown portion where we split up the roughly 70 people who showed up by department (CAD, electrical, mechanical, etc.). The purpose of this was so that the students would have people they’re familiar with and easy to talk with in their groups so that they can communicate their findings better than just randomizing groups. We spent roughly an hour alone reading the game manual and noting down all the new things for this season and everything needed to be noted from the perspective of about 6 different groups.
Game Manual Discussion
Once everyone was done taking notes on the manual and figured out all the small details that came with it, we came back together as a group and discussed our findings. We created a large flow chart that included many different aspects of the game such as robot build restrictions, scoring teleop and auton, and fouling teleop and auton. We then went one by one and listed everything down on a large white board to make sure that everybody knew what was going on in regards to this game’s rules so that nobody would make an unlawful design.
Human Game
One interesting thing our team does every year with our students is that we try to recreate the game that we’re playing for frc - as humans. What this means is that we will get 6 people to go onto the field in order to act as robots, and essentially they will play our the game just so that they will figure out maneuvering around the field hands on, and also so that our team has a little bit of fun on kickoff day.
Following the end of kickoff, our directors had a group call together for about 4 hours just discussing what is to come for the next week. In this discussion, we talked about basic possible strategies for the game, what subsystems we’ll be coming down to, and organizing all the members into different subsystem groups.
This kickoff was definitely a very fun one, and I can’t wait to see what everyone else is going to be doing this build season. I will be posting again tomorrow to go into detail what our plans are for the different subsystems we planned and why we chose them over other options, and strategies that we could use. Hopefully everyone else also had a great kickoff, and thanks for reading!
Today’s build season day was a rather productive one, as for we got a head start on our subsystem divisions, and we also brainstormed a ton on all the different things that we wanted to do. Here’s how it went.
In our call last night, we decided that we’re most likely going to need four distinct subsystems for this build season in order to achieve all the different parts of the game. The three main subsystems that we came up with which we saw would probably be pretty easy to keep small was the shooter, the intake, and the climber. The fourth subsystem would be an amp/trap mechanism which can pull off both without wasting space for an extra subsystem, but at today’s build meeting we also decided that if we have a hopper in the middle of our robot it would also be pretty useful.
For the intake, some of the things that we came up with which would be necessary is that we should have both a ground intake and a substation intake. As for the ground intake we were looking at designs from the 2013 game to take some little inspiration from that, but for the human player pickup i’ll touch on that a little more in the shooter section of this blog.
Although today the different subgroups mainly just wanted to test how the game piece interacts with different types of wheels and stuff, we still wanted to think of some possible designs. The first design we came up with was a flex wheel ground intake with poly cord belts running along the top with a lexan bottom.
This was the main design concept which the subgroup came up with for today, so once they figured out some basic entry level dimensions, they went ahead and tested how flex wheels interact with the Note in different situations.
As for what is come to next for the intake subteam, we will be working on advancing this current prototype to include a bottom and we will also add the polycord like previously mentioned. We will also test these things on the field depending on how far we get tomorrow.
For the shooter, there were a couple key points which we came up that we would need. For starters, we realized that we would need a system to make the angle adjustable so that we can shoot from not just up close. In addition to this, we realized that if our main ground intake breaks, we could easily turn the shooter into a secondary intake, so we also want to design the shooter in a way so it doubles as a human player station intake.
Today once again the shooter team was just testing how the game object would interact with the subsystem, but they got a little farther and were able to test their subsystem on the field. They tested with several different angles and were also able to test range. We went with a wheels on each side design so that we would be able to adjust how fast or slow one side spins in order to test if that changes anything, but we saw that full speed on both sides had the best results.
The dimensions and specs of this current prototype are 4inch diameter 2 inch thick colsons, 9 inch and 13 inch center to center distance, and the wheels are mounted on the board with a half inch spacer.
What needs to get done next for this prototype is that we need to test the shooter with a smooth roof cover, test the shooter with more compression, and also test the shooter with a much smaller center to center distance vertically. We will also add a guard towards the front which kind of acts like a funnel for the human player station pick up.
Regarding the climber, not much was done specifically to prototype, but a couple base ideas were laid out. First off, we will be most likely using a single climber with 2 stages, similar to a climber in a box from AndyMark or a WCP telescope. Some basic dimensions were also marked down on how big the different stages should be. Most likely climber will be the first of our subsystems to finish, since it’s a rather simple one, but we are taking this approach for a climber much similar to the 2022 and 2020 games.
The reason we haven’t decided on a set name on this team yet is because this is something that we want to make sure can be double purpose with one subsystem, but we also want to make sure that we allow for creativity when making this, as long as it’s something which can get the job done is what matters for us. For today, we decided that we would go with something like the arm from 5414 from last year, in order to be able to push the trap in and have the ability to outtake into the amp.
As for the actual prototyping aspect of this, we went with just figuring out the intake portion of it today. We saw that if we wanted to keep it small, we would would have to possibly drop the note into the intake rather than sticking the intake up against the wall and sucking it in straight from there. We tested several times and we rarely were able to successfully suck it in by just dropping it into the intake, it only worked at high speeds.
The dimensions for this cone style intake from last year are 3.5 inches center to center distance of the shafts, and 2 inch wheel diameters.
For tomorrow, what this team needs to test is that we are going to test another prototype design for the intake which can pick up something from an internal hopper (more on that below), and also make a more consistent set of wheels and rollers on the intake with less gap. For further down the road, we also need to begin prototyping a system which can actually move it from the intake position to the scoring position for the amp.
This subsystem was sort of a possible idea which isn’t guaranteed that we will go through with it, but essentially we were thinking of making something which would lead the Note into the shooter from the ground intake, but if needed, an arm could also grab the note from the hopper so that the amp scoring doesn’t need to always grab the note from a human player substation. An idea comparable to this would be 118 grabbing their game pieces from inside the robot last year. We haven’t advanced this idea much further yet, but tomorrow we will be testing how effectively the game piece can move on polycord without a lexan cover on top of it keeping it in place.
The biggest design challenge and goal that we have this year is to build our robot completely under two feet, so that we can pass under the stage during the game. We figured that having a small robot that could pass under the stage is important for mitigating traffic on our alliance, and could be huge for also avoiding defense robots and scoring easily. Although it is a large goal, if we do achieve it, it would definitely make our cycle times shorter and will give us more freedom around the field.
We have a lot of ideas in mind that we’re hoping to test soon, and we are excited to see what everyone else has to offer!
Today’s build day was very productive as well, but we mainly went down the route of trying a whole bunch of ideas to see what is and isn’t feasible for the different subsystems, and we also had some discussions to figure out what drive train dimensions would be ideal. Here’s a summary of what happened.
Today, the intake team continued their prototype from yesterday, and also started a new one today for the purpose of just seeing different options of what could work and what can’t work. The prototype from yesterday got a base added, but we also tested it with smaller wheels and we wanted to see if it would make any difference. Since it made virtually no difference in performance, we decided it would probably be better to use smaller wheels because of the less weight.
Additionally, the base added to the intake proved to us that we will need a second set of wheels up top or polycords guiding it all the way to the hopper.
One of the problems that we did end up running into with this design is that when the intake is at an angle, the Note isn’t able to be intaked that well because of it getting stuck on the base plate of the intake. In order to fix this, we will most likely need to add a second set of wheels where it’s getting stuck rotating the opposite direction.
The other design of the intake which they came up with was something similar to the Ri3D design, except with wheels and polycord instead of a roller and belts. For tomorrow, we will need to test the old intake design with some wheels where it’s getting stuck and also see how to continue feeding it up the system.
Today in the shooter team, we mostly designed a lot of different iterations of some ideas which we saw online, and some other designs which we thought were possibilities, and because of this we were able to see really well what worked and what didn’t work for us.
To start off, we created a high compression shooter today which compresses the note vertically rather than horizontally to see if that would improve the range significantly, but we saw that it made our performance worse rather than better. Another thing we tested was decreasing the distance vertically of yesterday’s prototype, but we saw that pretty much changed nothing, so we figured that the best configuration is to just have one set of spinning wheels for the high speed and just have a set of wheels in the back to act as a kicker.
First iteration of vertically compressed shooter: 1 inch of compression
Second iteration of vertically compressed shooter: 1.5 inches of compression
In both cases we saw that it really didn’t go all that far in comparison to the prototype from yesterday.
Because of our tests today, we were able to figure out that wheels on each side is most likely the most reliable option for us because it doesn’t cause any jams and it also shoots relatively far considering low drill speed. For tomorrow we will continue testing with yesterday’s prototype, and we will decrease horizontal compression, but we will also add the roof as mentioned previously in yesterday’s blog.
For climber we are mostly waiting on the field at the RSC to get set up, but for now we have decided that we are going to use an andymark climber in the box. In addition to this, we are going to test two things for climber, the first being how much weight it can carry, and the second being whether we need 1 arm or two arms, or if either works. From a robot space perspective one arm would be much better for us because then we can fit everything else we need. Tomorrow we are going to modify the climber in the box on Inventor so that it’s much shorter than it actually extends to.
For the amp/trap team, we continued working on the intake design for the possible arm which we are going to make. We came up with a roller intake design which worked pretty well and was able to keep the game piece rather stationary. One thing that we noted was that the roller needs to have lots of friction or else it won’t pull it in otherwise, we tried with a metal versa pipe and it ended up not working, so we added a ton of tape on it. We then tried with small wheels and it worked much better.
Wheels (sorry for slowmo):
Roller:
For what’s next to come, we need to try a 3 inch center to center distance with the rollers and we also want to try pool noodles on them to act as a foam roller so it gets extra friction. Additionally we are going to come up with an arm design for the amp / trap so that it can do both.
For hopper today we didn’t really do much yet because we were discussing whether it was even necessary, but just to be safe we just ended up starting the prototype anyways, we cut the wood and got the parts ready now we just gotta assemble it and actually test if the note can go on it without a lexan cover on top. Tomorrow we will assemble the hopper prototype and test the note on top of of freely.
For our drive train, we came to the optimal size of 27.5"x27.5" because it’s enough to fit most of the subsystems with a little bit of freedom room still leftover if we want to add things before or after a comp. Additionally, tomorrow we will be using our backup swerve drive to test how bumper height affects how the swerve goes over the note. We will try with both bumpers low to the ground and higher up to see what works best for us. That’s about all that we got done today, and hopefully soon we’ll be able to come up with something for trap.
Today’s build season had a lot of epiphanies come to our heads and it also marked the end of the simple prototyping phase for our intake and shooter teams. Here’s a summary of what went on today.
For the shooter team today, we were finally able to finalize what wheels worked best for us. Given three different options (colson wheels, fairlane wheels, and flex wheels), flex wheels definitely worked the best by far. My guess for this is that colsons and fairlanes are too hard for something as soft as the note, because those wheels usually worked best with harder balls like the 2022 year.
Additionally, we realized our mistake from yesterday and our other prototypes as to why they weren’t going that far, and it was because yesterday in our vertical wheel alignment design we had way too much compression and way too little speed, so in order to fix this, we will be cadding and cncing a wood plate designed for vertically aligning the wheels for flex wheels, aiming for about .5 inches of compression, but we will add two motor mounts so that the wheels can spin at like 10x the speed or something, it will most likely be much better that way.
Here are some videos of our testing with the flex wheels spinning with almost drained battery drills:
The last thing we tested with the shooter team was that we wanted to see how feasible it would be to attempt shooting the note into the amp with the shooter, but based off what we saw, we only got it to work about 10% of the time, so very unlikely that this is a possibility.
For tomorrow, we will be cncing two different types of the same prototypes that we did but we will make sure they’re motor compatible, so that we can actually test how well they do with real motors rather than drills.
Today the intake team was once again very productive, they were able to come down to a final design already, and they worked on refining their past prototype which they already had, but today they were coming up with several ways to mount the intake and several ways to intake more efficiently.
As for efficiency, the refined design from the old one now includes a wheel on both the top and the bottom, and the entire thing is lined with polycord rather than having just the top side or only the bottom side be polycord. The intake team worked on designing it, then they began to assemble the shafts for it to insert into the two wood blocks.
For mounting, the intake team decided that it would be much easier this year to retract the intake using gears and motors rather than pistons like we did two years ago. This is because since the intake is going to be more flat to the ground this year it’s easier to mount a gear pivot rather than a piston pivot system.
The CAD team for the intake team has also started 3D modeling their design for the intake, so far they’ve gotten through the wheels and polycord idea, but they haven’t finished the polycord assembly and the pivoting system to the actual robot. This CAD should most likely get done tomorrow, another thing to note is that the shape of the sides aren’t finalized yet we will have to see what will work based on the size of the note and such but for now this is what we’ve gone with.
For tomorrow the intake team will continue to prototype their design out of thick plywood and finish the polycord on both sides idea, and once they’re done with that tomorrow then they will begin using cnced plates for the intake sides on Thursday or Friday.
For the amp and trap team, they had refined their intake even more and now the intake portion of the amp and trap works really well, however they now need to come up with an idea to get the game piece out of the robot and into the arm ready to score.
Today for the intake for the amp/trap the center to center distance between the two rollers was increased to 3 inches and it showed to produce better results than yesterday. The scoring for the amp seems to be very simple with this intake now that the amp on our field has been built, but we now need a scoring mechanism for it.
We also built a 3005 style intake from last year for the note just to test if it would make any difference but we haven’t gotten around to testing it yet, so we will most likely test that tomorrow.
For tomorrow this team will begin intensively thinking about the design which they want for their scoring mechanism and they will possible being milling bars to create it, however first they are planning on adding a ramp to the end of the intake to ensure it goes in the amp every time.
Today on climber we thought of possibly adding some sort of flex wheels in between the two hooks so that the metal does slip on the metal chain as much as it normally would, but we wouldn’t exactly know until we actually build it and test it on one of our mini kit bots.
^^^ This is a rough idea of what we were thinking could prevent slipping, but we won’t really know until we physically test it with a real climber. For now all climber can really do it climb using our old robot from two years ago on a chain to see if that works fine with two climbers, or they can go ahead and start manufacturing the smaller version and put it on one of our old kit bots that we have.
For hopper there wasn’t really much done today because me and the president are the only ones working on it and we were both busy guiding everyone else today, but we really just need to assemble it and test it but based off what we’ve seen in our own other departments it will most likely work, but we still want to test it before any judgement calls.
The last thing we did was make a rough electrical diagram of the drive train before cadding it so that the electrical team and the CAD team would know where all the wiring needs to route to so that the wiring is planned beforehand rather than rushed after the robot is already completely made. Tomorrow we will most likely begin (and finish) the drive train CAD and have it start getting manufactured by the end of this week.
FRC 4639 Build Season Day 5, 50 days left until Katy
Today’s build day was a slower day for testing where we started to make specific designs for the subsystems. We started programming and making CAD.
Shooter
For the shooter team today, we implemented our lessons from yesterday in new prototypes. We are waiting on the black compliant wheels, so for now used the ones we had.
We stuck with our wood prototype for the side orientation but CNC’d lexan plates for a top and bottom wheel shooter. In our limited testing, the side orientation proved to be better but we will confirm these results tomorrow. We also will mount motors and test the real range of the shooter to finalize our base design.
Intake
Most of the day was spent building the prototype. We decided to add wheels on the bottom along with polycords between the wheels to maintain even control over the note. Due to some issues with polycord tension, we were not able to finish this prototype. We also made a lot of progress with cadding an actual design that can hopefully be CNC’d by the end of the week.
Amp/Trap Team
The Amp/Trap Team updated the rollers to a sideways orientation for better accuracy and eliminate the need for a ramp/guide. We had a long discussion about the placement/length/design of the “arm” that will hold the intake and came to some rough decisions like an approximately 24 inch high pivot point and simple two bar support. The team tested the intake/outtake at many angles and are confident the intake is confident and to quote them “successful”. We have sketched out an arm design and will start prototyping and manufacturing to test it.
Climber
The Climber team discussed the length and placement needed for the climber arms. We settled on a 3 stage climber positioned close to the center of the robot. The main considerations are that we want the climber to be as low as possible at rest and also pull the robot up significantly to make scoring the trap easier. For now, we have decided on 12-14 inches per stage to easily climb but also be way under 2ft when redacted. While our climber stages arrive, we have decided to use our 2022 robot(Hermes) to test climbing on the chain as that mechanism is very similar.
Drive Train
We decided to start CAD asap for drive train and get the drive train up and running. We still need to meet to design some packaging issues and how our unusually high number of subsystems will efficiently fit on our limited drivetrain. The dimensions will be 27.5x27.5 with the swerve drives mounted on the top, giving it a toal height of about 5 inches to the top of the tubing.
Programming
We started the base code for the robot. While it is mainly for testing as of now, we officially have a repo set up and ready to be used 
.
Today’s build season was very machining heavy, but also lots of other stuff regarding the other subsystems got done and we’re moving along pretty smoothly so far, so here’s how it went.
For the shooter team today, although we weren’t able to implement the motors yet due to a firmware issue on the motors, we were able to expand the older prototype more to include a roof, a funnel for picking up from the HP station, and changed the position of the wheels a bit.
We saw that with the new iteration of the prototype the game pieces kept their line of motion much better than before, and that it was easier to feed it as well.
Hopefully we will be able to get our motors working soon so that we can properly test them, however for now we will just have to use drills.
For tomorrow we will hopefully have our motors working this time, and if not we will continue to test human player station pickup this time on the shooter.
For the intake, there was a bit of a chokehold in the assembly process again because of the lack of polycord present, however we are starting to get the prototype fully working. Right now we were able to test the suction ability of the intake to a degree and it seems to be intaking things at a fast speed, but we have to see once we make our lexan prototype of it so that we can mount it on a kitbot to see how well it works in action.
Additionally, we are going to test the use of gears as a pivot mechanism for the intake, but since we don’t have much experience with that we will need to do some prior research of recommended gear ratios and such.
For tomorrow, we will finish the polycords and the lexan plates so that we can test both the pivot system and how it works when it’s mounted on a drive train.
For this team, today not much physical work was done, but we did get to do some brainstorming for future plans. In order to test our prototype arm out of wood and not use up materials like aluminum, we wanted to just first braintstorm the dimensions needed for it as a team, so we decided on just testing the feasibility of a design like an arm, which may prove this subsystem to be the most challenging to design.
Although not a complete design, tomorrow we wish to continue it and be able to actually test something like an arm.
For climber today we came up with a couple new hook designs which we saw on open alliance, and the most promising one was a normal hook with a little spine in the middle.
A design like this could possibly link itself inside the chain rather than just sliding on the chain, so this may help with being able to put the climber not dead in the center of the robot. Aside from this we weren’t able to really do much with climber since the WCP telescoping climber got delayed, so most likely we will just manufacture the parts ourselves for a regular telescoping climber and just purchase the bars we need to make our lives easier.
For tomorrow we will be testing our 2022 robot on some mock up chains to see how hooks like that even work while trying to lift up a heavy robot.
After discussing and going through electrical system placements for drive train, we were able to finalize our drive train size and immediately get started. We finalized 27.5x27.5 inches, and started manufacturing the drive train today. As for today we cnc’d the lexan base plate for the drive train, and we have milled all 4 bars. The only thing left to do is to just assemble our new swerve modules which came in recently and mount them and connect them to the drive train. After that electrical will begin wiring the new drive train so that programming can start their april tag programming relatively early.
That’s all for today, hopefully everything continues to go this smoothly for us the rest of the build season as well, thanks for reading!
I love your iterative climber hooks! Our team has found pretty good success by iterating on this design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EciOE7YiN48
I may have missed it in my skimming, but do you plan to just do basic telescope arms or something different?
Yes, we plan on using telescoping arms for our climber. We’ll likely be using the AndyMark climber in a box or the WCP GreyT Telescope. Thanks for the hook idea, I think that it would definitely be something worth testing.
FRC 4639 Build Season Day 7, 48 days left until Katy
We mainly worked on cadding and machining prototypes, making significant progress with exact measurements and dimensions. We’ll be having a design review meeting tomorrow to go over everything and talk about the interaction between subsystems.
Shooter
The shooter team worked on exhausting all speeds and angles and orientations and targets in today’s testing. We got the side wheel shooter to consistently shoot into the amp and recorder angles for both amp and speaker. For amp: 6.25 inches and 80 degrees; For speaker: 65 degrees.
After many struggles with hardware errors and motor mounting faults, we assembled the lexan prototype for top and bottom wheel shooter. Below are videos of initial testing. We hooked up two neo motors with no gearboxes, one on each shaft. We were able to consistently chuck the note across the field!! We found that -.57% for top and .5% for bottom was optimal so the disk wouldn’t spin and would go straight at a high speed.
Intake
The best was mostly spent building then testing the wood prototype with tensioned polycords. We got the intake to pick the notes consistently even from odd angles with varying heights and angles(top shaft ~3.5 in from ground, bottom ~3.0in).The only problem was when the note only hit the bottom shaft, causing it to be inconsistent. We also debated on the possibility of using star wheels on the bottom shaft. We also managed to score the amp with the intake at one point(redundancy🤩). Compression was 2.5 inches and 1.7 inches with polycords.
Amp/Trap Team
The amp/trap team mainly worked on cadding the new prototype. We figured out the correct orientation for intake and measurements for mounting structure. We will cnc and test tomorrow. We also scored amp with this subsystem(we’re getting kinda good at that??
).
Climber
Climber team built a test frame to use with old robot climber. We also cnced specialized hooks to lock into the chain. We will, however, likely iterate on them to improve effectiveness. We also took stock of the aluminum tubing we currently have since we’re going for a 3 stage telescoping climber as of now. /s We unfortunately were not able to score the amp with this subsystem(disappointment). /s
Hopper
Polycords seemed to work fine on the note even without a top cover, though a dead zone did seem to happen at the edges. We may try to use flat polyurethane belts instead. I forgot to take a video oops.
Drive Train
With the frame and bellypan machined yesterday, we mainly worked on the swerve modules today. Due to a delay in shipping, we decided to use the pulleys from last year’s swerve as a temporary replacement. We should be able to assemble and maybe test tomorrow.
Overall
Our team is slowly moving from rough prototypes to exact CAD models giving us more consistent and tangible results. We will discuss each subsystem at length in our design review meeting tomorrow and also get a rough idea of the packaging of the robot.
Hello everyone! In the spirit of the Open Alliance, our team has decided that, going forward, we will be updating this blog with our outreach- and awards-related progress in addition to our build season progress (albeit at a slower rate than our build blogs). We believe it could be of some use to both ourselves and teams with less awards experience to share our progress in composing our submissions and making our pit binders. For this first post, we’ll be going over our team’s circumstances and our work during the off-season in addition to our awards progress thus far. We hope you appreciate this additional insight into our team during this build season!
Our school district has a designated building, the Robert Shaw Center for STEAM, meant for all of its high schools’ teams to both build their robots and practice on a full-sized field (our fellow teams include 624, 2882, 5427, 6488, 8370, and 8576). Each team has access to their own bay with a larger workspace at the front and a small machine shop at the back; additionally, a communal machine shop with larger machines (including a mill) is located at the back of the building. The RSC is also the host venue for the majority of our team’s in-person camps as well as STEAM Nights organized by the district. The RSC not only gives us the ability to design competitive robots but to conduct larger-scale outreach events and collaborate with other teams.
Our team also has a number of corporate sponsors, the majority of which we have gained from parental connections and one of which we even gained from one of our elementary school demonstrations. A new sponsor - Honeywell - that we acquired this year has set ourselves up with a higher budget than usual going into this season; this was very beneficial as we will be participating in our first travel tournament (FiT Dallas) in about 2.5 years.
Over the past off-season, spanning from last May to the end of the year, our team has hosted camps, connected with sponsors (both old and new), held our annual off-season tournament, mentored FLL teams, and recruited and trained new members.
Since 2019, our team has hosted a variety of camps both over longer school breaks and on various weekends throughout the school year. In 2020, we were forced to move all of our camps online, and, since then, our team hosts a mix of online camps, in-person camps held at the RSC, and in-person camps held in outside venues in cases where the RSC is closed. The location largely depends on the topic being taught; for example, our Web Development camp was held online while our STEM camp was held in person at the RSC. This allows us to get the best of both worlds: our online camps give us the ability to reach kids outside of our local area, and our in-person camps give the kids a hands-on STEM experience. These camps were mainly aimed towards older elementary- and middle school-aged students and, as such, included activities ranging from constructing towers out of recyclable materials and designing balloon cars to learning the basics of Java programming and building websites.
Apart from our paid camps, our team organizes an annual Girl Scouts Robotics Badge Workshop. In our workshop for 2023, Girl Scouts in grades 4-8 learned the Engineering Design Process and utilized it to design their very own robots to solve daily household problems. We are also in the process of organizing a Think Like an Engineer Journey Workshop in February; with these events, we hope to continue to develop our relationship with the local council, the Girl Scouts of San Jacinto.
Our process for gaining new sponsors this year involved first listing out potential STEM-related companies (e.g. Air Products, ConocoPhillips, Markforged), then finding their contact information before sending them a copy of our Sponsor Letter and Sponsor Perks List. Our letter includes information on our typical expenses and our team’s achievements, and the perks include everything from making buttons with their logo to putting their logo on our robot. Our goal with each new sponsor, particularly those gained through parental connections, is to maintain our team’s relationship with them for many years, even after the student whose parent works for them graduates. In order to do this, our team sends out a monthly E-News email going over our accomplishments from the previous month and continues to provide the same perks as when the alum was still on the team. In the near future, we are also thinking of creating weekly vlogs to be uploaded to our YouTube channel to not only be more thorough as an OA team but also to provide higher-quality updates for sponsors.
Since October 2021, our team has held an annual, Halloween-themed off-season tournament, called the Pumpkin Rumble, at the RSC. This event is meant to provide all of us RSC teams with a chance to prepare for the upcoming build season by giving drive teams an opportunity to practice and new members a chance to learn how an FRC event works. Our most recent one also included a costume contest, Mummy Wrap game, Candy-Counting contest, and Human Matches. In the future, we are looking to possibly expand this event to be an official off-season event, but that will require more funding than we currently have available and a facility with a larger capacity. In the meantime, this event is always the highlight of the off-season and is an event all of us teams look forward to every year.
Our team has been mentoring local FLL teams since 2021 when we started 2 teams at our feeder middle school. About a year later, we started a 3rd team, and these teams have continued to compete for the past few seasons. Most recently, our team started FLL at another middle school in our district, and we have been volunteering at their biweekly meetings. Our team’s vision is to eventually reach a point where kids in our district can follow a path from FLL to FTC and eventually to FRC, all the way from elementary to high school. For now, we are focusing on establishing FLL teams in all of our nearby middle schools.
Many of our new members are freshmen who learn about our team through our school’s Fish Camp; many other members are told by their friends about the team and join with them. We then hold an official interest meeting in late August (our school year starts mid-August and Fish Camp is about a week before) where we discuss our team’s departments, our schedule throughout the year, and the registration process. Our registration then closes at the beginning of September, and, shortly after, we hold our General Meeting where we go into more detail about the training process and schedule, the hour requirements, and our plans for Build Season. This is also around the time where we have our Parent Meeting to explain the options that parent volunteers have to contribute to the team.
For the next 2-3 months, our build directors train our new members by teaching them about the various components, tools, and machines in FRC and how to use them. We require that all of our members become fully trained in at least one of our five departments (Mechanical, Electrical, CAD, Machining, or Programming). Our training process involves first studying material on our team’s Google Classroom before coming into the RSC to apply that material with hands-on training. We also hold drive team tryouts during this time and require that our members reach a certain hour requirement for volunteering at outreach events in order to be able to attend competitions. This is also around the time when we hold our Mock Kickoff (see the beginning of this thread for more info on that).
At this Wednesday’s weekly outreach meeting, our outreach directors settled on our deadlines for finishing our Executive Summaries as well as our Technical, Outreach, and Financial Statement binders. As FiT Katy has its load-in on February 29th, we decided that we will be sending our binders for printing on the previous Sunday (Feb. 25th), meaning we are aiming to have them finished on the 24th.
In 2022, we earned Engineering Inspiration for the first time, and, last season, we earned Team Sustainability at both of our district competitions. In order to improve our chances of earning higher awards, we’re going to try and incorporate more statistics into our Outreach binder rather than just general descriptions about our events. In order to do this, one of our outreach directors went and compiled data from our past few camps and outreach events. Another one of our directors also did some research on past Impact winners in both FiT (118, 5414, 5427, etc.) and outside of our district (namely 321). We are hoping that studying their submissions and videos will help us to improve our own submissions.
Our Outreach and Financial Statement binders typically don’t need much work beyond updating them with new information and pictures, so we are planning on starting the work on them later into February to allow us to focus more on our Impact submissions, video, and speech.
Our Technical Binder, however, will obviously require some more time than our other binders as we will be creating a brand new one for our new robot. We are planning to create a template by the end of next week with a simple layout for all of the subsystems as well as the intro portion. The intro portion will consist of a list of our design priorities and will be followed by a list of our individual goals for each subsystem. When the robot’s design is finalized, we will then add in the CAD for each subsystem and details of the different components we used. As we often iterate on our robot from tournament to tournament, we typically have to reprint this binder with the updated CAD and descriptions.
That’s all for now, but we will try our best to update this log at least weekly if not more often. We’d appreciate any and all feedback, and we would be more than happy to answer your questions. As always, have a good day everyone, and good luck this season!
Today was the first Saturday / 10 hour day of our build season, so it was a long one but we got quite a bit of brainstorming and design review stuff done today so it was pretty worth it.
Since on Friday we mounted the motors and were able to see that we can now shoot effectively across the entire field, we figured we’d test how consistent a shooter like this would be. Over several trials from shooting relatively close up to the speaker (not directly next to it but still really close), we were able to consistently ish score into the speaker without much trouble. We had several trials, and the most consistent trial we had we got 9/10 into the speaker. The rest of the time we were mainly tuning what is the best speed for the top and bottom wheel so that the note gets shot out flying straight and not flipping through the air.
Another thing to note about shooter is that one of the things we noticed in our testing was that the angle which the note was being fed at relatively heavily affected how it performs in the air, so we need to find the optimal ramp angle relative to the angle of the wheels. We came up with a quick ramp just to feed it in consistently but we will have to see later on what angle works best.
For Monday we need to find that perfect angle for shooter, however we will also be cncing prototypes to make a shooter with adjustable angles. In order to save on moving parts on our robot however, we will also test to see if changing the speeds for the top and bottom wheel will change the angle it shoots at to see if having such a mechanism is even necessary for this year.
For intake we tested our current prototype we had and designed a pivot point for a cncable prototype to test what motors with how much force we’ll need to make the intake pivot up and down. For our current prototype we had we wanted to test how good it would be at intaking notes coming to it very fast, and the results were really promising. We slid notes into the intake at fast speeds and it was able to redirect and intake all of them with no issues at all.
We didn’t test much else for the intake, but this is pretty much the final design that we’re going to use for the intake. The only thing really left to do for this prototype is to just test the pivot point and lexan plates and then we’ll be done and we can start building it for the real robot. We will cnc the needed plates on Monday.
For this team we decided a big factor in our design in our review meeting today and that is that for this team we will only focus on trap, because with enough refinement we can relatively consistently get the note into the amp using our shooter mechanism. Looking at the OA blogs from a couple other teams, we saw that is also what a couple other teams are going to end up doing, so we will do more testing for shooting into the amp on monday.
For today however, we were able to CNC the intake plates of the trap subsystem and were able to test how it would score. The intake will have a pivot point which will then be used to push the trap open to score it in.
This approach seems more promising than the original approach that we had of mixing the two, but to be completely honest my assumption is that if we have this subsystem on the robot already then it probably would be pretty easy to score into both amp and trap using the same thing but that is something that we’ll have to see in the future when we do build it.
For Monday we will be assembling the rest of the subsystem and the pivot point to see how it works out and how well we can get it to pivot.
For this subsystem the only thing that they were really able to do is that they were able to come up with a couple more hook designs for locking onto the chain. Here is the most promising one which they came up with.
This will hopefully help with not shaking and slipping too much when climbing, but we can’t really test much until the climber parts we need arrive from WCP. We decided on the WCP GreyT telescope.
We will try our best to cnc this on Monday but we got a lot on our cnc queue so we gotta see which one is more important to do first.
Today we finished assembling pretty much most of the drive train except for 2 of the swerve wheels which should hopefully get done within like the first 30 min of Monday’s build day. Like stated earlier we used REV tubing because of the simplicity in mounting, but there’s still a couple more things we wanna do before putting it on the field.
The first thing we have to do is put a small metal plate underneath the lexan so that the battery doesn’t cause the battery to droop. The next thing that we have to do is make all the bolts connecting the swerve to the drive train the same, so once we get those two items done, then we will start wiring the drive train. This year we’re also probably gonna make bumpers pretty early on to test with the way the intake interacts with our final bumper.
In our review meeting this week, we had a couple of ideas but it was mostly doing a progress check of where everyone is at so far. We are pretty on track for our schedule, but for the rest of this week our main goal is to finish prototyping by the end of Saturday, and to get at least 1 of our subsystems assembled by the end of this week. Most likely we will finish our intake subsystem first based on how quickly and efficiently they’re progressing, so we’re excited to see how everything goes this week.
Unfortunately the RSC (where we work) was closed yesterday and today due to the ice storm hitting the US, so for these two days we had a meeting discussing our plan for the rest of this week and I sat down and made some more CAD models for future testing of our subsystems. Here’s some of the key points of yesterday’s meeting that we concluded to.
In this game, especially after they nerfed the amp by limiting it to only 4 amplified notes at a time, we figured that it would be the most optimal strategy to maximize our shooter intake and climber capabilities so they’re as fast as possible, and leave amp for the shooter. As for trap, we are most likely (unless if a miracle happens) omitting the trap subsystem, because as seen in several other team’s testing, we saw that shooting into the trap is a possible option. Additionally, shooting into the amp has also worked for us several times, but only at specific angles and speeds. That’s why for the next iteration of the shooter prototype, we’re testing the adjustability of the shooter’s angle.
For this next version of the shooter, I made it so that we can both test specific angles and so that we can test how much force we need for pivoting the system up and down. The wheels are powered by a single NEO and the pivot is powered with a NEO 550. For prototyping purposes, I didn’t include the feed system into the shooter but on the real thing it will also have a hopper kind of thing which leads into the wheels at the same angle every time. In order to make sure we have feed angle consistency we will just slap on a wood plate and call it a day for now just for simplicity.
This specific design has about 38 degrees of deflection in total, and starts at a shooting angle of 35 degrees and can go up to around73 degrees. Depending on our testing we can either increase or decrease the range for the final testing or we can just mount the entire system on an angle. For tomorrow (hopefully it’s not closed again) we will just cnc everything we need to get this done quickly so that we can compensate for the days which we lost due to weather.
For intake I also made a pivot system for the current intake design which we have, however it is not completely finished yet. We don’t have the measurements which we need to fully finish the design but for now I made a rough mockup of what it will be like. Getting those measurements shouldn’t be too difficult but I still need to see how many inches off the ground the top and bottom wheel are when fully pivoted down.
This should be CNC’d tomorrow most likely as well, but since the shooter is getting cnc’d first we most likely won’t finish assembly tomorrow.
For our Trap/Amp subsystem we’ve decided to not make a whole separate subsystem for it because we want to focus on maximizing shooting and intaking for points, and we wanted to shoot into the amp using the shooter which we have. For week 1 at least we won’t have anything special, but definitely for future comps we will integrate it, most likely by week 4. Our teams will still come up with designing things for the trap/amp but for now this project is our lowest priority.
For Climber we also have what we have in mind designed, we just need the RSC to be open so that we can cnc it and test how the different hook designs will interact.
For the robot layout, we decided that since we’re trying to optimize shooter, we are going to have intake facing forwards on the front of the robot, and the shooter facing the opposite direction on the back of the robot. It’s a small change but the reason we did it like this is so that when we’re cycling to the other side of the field for notes we don’t have to spend time rotating for the notes in the middle of the field. Most likely that would be a very minor hinderance because we have swerve, but we also did it because integrating intake and shooter like that is much simpler. On the sides of the robot we will have two climbers in such a way so that when we climb our shooter is facing towards the trap and not away.
Hopefully we will be able to be very productive these next 4 days and makeup the days lost today and yesterday!
The shooter design brings me back to my 2020 and 2022 shooter designs. The shroud is so much fun to design and build. I can imagine it working well with the speaker this year, good luck.
Yeah i tried basing it off almost pretty much what our shooter was two years ago, the main difference is that two years ago the pivot mechanism was on the back but this time since it’s shooting opposite from the intake i put it towards the front
Today was our first back to the RSC after the freeze. We did a decent amount of work today and I’m very happy with our progress.
We did some range testing with our current shooter setup and found that at full speed it could shoot across the entire field fairly consistently. We also did some testing with our shooting shooting into the Speaker. We found that we could get a majority of our shots into the speaker from 10 feet with roughly 50% power on both wheels as long as there was a consistent feed.
We decided to try out shooting into the amp today and we found that with a consistent feed, you would be able to tune the shooter to consistently score into the Amp. Our shooter set up in the video is at a roughly 55-degree angle and 15% power on both wheels with the shooter itself roughly 28 inches from the Amp.
Today we used the climber on our 2022 robot on a custom test stand to see how well the hooks would work on chains. Tomorrow we’re going to attach different hooks and test those out on the test stand.
Not much was done today for intake we just continued testing our current prototype. Tomorrow we will CNC our prototype intake and see if we need to make any adjustments.
Today we got a bit more cncing done, but mainly it was a huge assembly day for especially our shooter team and our intake team. We don’t have many pictures or videos of today because we didn’t do any field testing because the field was being built, but tomorrow we should be good to go to test on the real field now that every game element is on the field.
As mentioned in yesterday’s blog, today the shooter team was just going to assemble the entire subsystem since we got those plates cnc’d last night. For pretty much the entire day shooter team was hard at work assembling their prototype, and they got quite a bit of progress. All that’s left of their new prototype is to just finish assembling the mounting portion of it and finish assembling the pivot point, but other than that it should be ready to test afterwards. For the pivot point we are going to try using an insanely high reduction because our shooter is probably pretty heavy, so we’re gonna start at like 100:1 with a NEO 550 and see how that goes, and if we need more or less.
Intake was a little slow today, but we were able to cnc the final iteration of their prototype which includes a pivot point in the design. Additionally, we also tested how well the polycords can guide the Note through the system when it’s being compressed on its sides. We saw that it was intaking the notes perfectly fine even though the opening of the intake was smaller than the actual diameter of the Note itself.
We got started on mounting the prototype intake on one of the spare kitbots we have to see how well it will work when it’s actually on a robot, but other than that tomorrow the intake team just needs to finish assembling the pivot point of the intake and assembling the actual intake itself should be easy to assemble.
Today we didn’t really do much regarding this subsystem since most of our focus right now is on shooter intake and climber, but we still did get some work done in regards to assembling the prototype which we cnc’d a couple days back. The point of this prototype was just to test the pivot point and what motor we’d need for such a pivot point, but other than that there wasn’t really much else done. For tomorrow this team needs to finish their prototype and test with a motor to see how much reduction they’ll need.
For climber today also not much was done, most of the time was spent just programming the 2022 robot so that we could individually move each climber arm up and down to test climbing on different parts of the chain and not just the center. Since our tests were successful yesterday with climbing, once we finish testing this aspect (should get done tomorrow), we will be able to start assembling the climber for the final robot.
We got quite a bit of progress done for our swerve code today and we were able to fix the issues that we were coming up across. We should hopefully be able to test it on the field soon, but we gotta refine a couple more things since we’re using some new swerve modules and new firmware for the motors.
Overall today was pretty slow but we were also lacking a lot of man power so hopefully tmrw should be much better
Today we got quite a bit of various things done which should all be ready for testing today, and we also finalized two of our prototype designs for good. We are going to have our design review meeting this Saturday (today) to verify everything with the rest of the team to make sure everyone is on board with all the ideas.
For shooter team they continued working on their prototype which had the pivot point, and they almost finished, the only thing left to do is to lathe one of the shafts so that it can fit through the lexan plate.
Additionally, we are going to mount the design on top of a 4 inch block of wood so it represents the height which we will actually be shooting at when we take into account the added drive train height.
Today the intake team finished assembling their lexan prototype which we cnc’d earlier this week, and today they are going to test the pivot point with a motor to see how much power / how much reduction we’ll need. We are going to test with a neo and just keep on increasing reduction until it’s good.
Today the trap also finished their final iteration of their prototype because they tested the pivot point on their prototype which they had cnc’d earlier this week. They were able to pivot it pretty successfully using just a drill, which means that when using a motor they should be able to do it with ease. The only problem there is is that the pivot bounces up and down a little when coming down from the fully vertical position, so we’ll have to see how to make that movement a little smoother.
Additionally we mounted the wheels diagonally today to see if that makes human player station interaction any better and we saw it improve by a lot, so we will be mounting the wheels diagonally. It also works very well with the trap when the wheels are mounted diagonally (it’s also compatible with the amp if needed).
We will begin designing the final robot design version of this and possibly assembling assembling it this week and next week if we’re able to.
For climber we tested to see how much would weight tilt the climber design if the hooks are mounted in the center of the robot. To test this we used our old robot from two years ago and put like 2 or 3 batteries in the front to create a huge counter weight and we saw that overall it didn’t tilt it all that much, only a little bit. It had some side to side movement but that was because we weren’t bringing the climbers down at the same time we were alternating them one side at a time (idk why we did that tbh).
We forgot to record us doing that yesterday but aside from that the climber prototyping is also complete, we have received the winch kit from WCP for the telescope, and we can begin assembling that also as soon as possible. For motor we are most likely going to use a NEO to power the climber because of the mounting pattern on the WCP winch kit.
We had a couple discussions to see where we should do battery placement, and we came down to the two options of either in the middle or towards the back near the shooter. The reason we chose those two spots was because the middle would definitely help with COG, however mounting it in the middle would be pretty difficult with the design that we have. Putting it on the back where the shooter is makes it much better for accessibility and wiring simplicity, but it could also mess up our COG for when we climb and try to score in the trap. We will discuss this today at our design review meeting to see which option is best so that our electrical team can begin wiring the drive train ASAP. They already got started with getting some CAN paths set up and making connecting some cables into the PDH, but we weren’t able to get much farther because we needed to know where the battery was going to be.
This is a problem we’ve been having for the past 3 years, but today we were finally able to fix the issue which has been slowing us down for so long. We have always had the issue of our bearing holes being just about half a millimeter or even less short, so we’ve always had to file bearing holes so they’re a little bigger. Thankfully one of the members from 5427 recommended that we change our Stock To Leave settings in the G-Code to -0.01 inches when making bearing holes, and it worked perfectly, our bearing now fit extremely flush into all of the holes which we make. This will save us lots of time in the future and makes sure that all our bearing holes are consistent and accurate.
Lots of good work happened yesterday, hopefully today will be even more successful and productive.
Today we had our big design review meeting and put a wrap on 3 of our prototypes, and we will begin building the real robot starting next week. Here’s what gone done today and what is to come for the rest of the week specifically
Shooter was the only subsystem to not finish prototyping because we had to spend a lot of time getting the lathe correct and we also wanted to test a side wheel prototype with motors, so we will wrap shooter prototyping most likely by Wednesday. Since shooter is the last subsystem we plan to mount on the robot it should be fine if we finish prototyping for this a little later than the others, as long as we get something which works very well that is our goal.
Since we used consistent 60A wheels on this one, it was shooting much faster with only 1 motor compared to 2 motors, and it was also much more consistent into the amp. The only reason it wasn’t shooting into the amp perfectly was because we hadn’t set up the pivot motor yet so the angle was shaking around quite a bit. Tomorrow we will test the pivot point with a motor and we will also test shooting into the amp again.
For intake we put a wrap on prototyping because we were able to successfully test the pivot point, the wheels, and the feed system. For this prototype the wheels were much closer to the ground than the other one, which definitely help with intaking. However one thing that we saw was that the intake plate was a little too big and the note was just bouncing off of that instead of going into the wheels, so we will just make sure that the wheels are the first thing the Note can touch instead of the intake plates themselves.
Other than the slight problem we had with bouncing off the sides, intake is going very very smoothly and I anticipate that intake gets finished first compared to all the other subsystems. Intake has been working very well and very diligently this build season and I am so far very happy with the results which they have gotten.
For the trap subsystem, we’ve decided to end prototyping but we’ve also decided to put a pause on trap designing so that we can wait until the end of this week to see how the robot CAD turns out so that we can see if it’s something we can fit, since it’s very iffy at the moment. Also since we decided this is our last priority for the design, we want to wait to see if there are any other alternatives that don’t necessarily take up as much space as this one.
For climber today we purchased a bunch of parts we needed for the WCP 3 stage telescope and we also got the dimensions we needed so that the climber would retract under two feet. When fully extended, the climber is able to go to 3.5 feet high and climb onto several other parts of the chain and not just the middle. We should also be able to finish climber mechanism by the end of this week and and easily mount it since it’s a relatively small subsystem.
For wiring we decided that we are going to put the battery at the back where the shooter is. Although we really wanted to put it in the center, we weren’t able to because of space limitations and because fitting the PDH and roborio would’ve been impossible with that configuration given that the battery needed space to slide into the middle. We got quite a bit of wiring done, and the rest of drive train wiring should be completed by tomorrow. That way we can test our swerve modules on this drive train and make sure that there’s nothing wrong with the new modules we purchased.
Today we were able to successfully get the new swerve code working with all the new firmware that came along with falcons for 2024, which means that we can start auton and april tag tuning much earlier than anticipated which is great news.
Overall today was a great day in terms of progress and we got lots done, we hope to be able to get just as much done tomorrow and get our wiring for the drive train done which will be huge.
As for build progress for this following week, we are planning on milling two crossbars to mount a lot of our stuff on and we are also planning on finishing the intake by the end of this week. We also worked on bumpers so that the intake can be situated on the bumpers right off the bat. Additionally we plan on milling climber bars and assembling that too by the end of this week, so hopefully all of that also gets done.
