Welcome to Team 611, the Saxons, 2023 Offseason Build Thread. We are super excited to join the Open Alliance this year and look forward to sharing our experience this offseason! There will be updates once a week working on a Wednesday to Tuesday schedule with updates on every Wednesday. We are a student-led school-based team operating out of Langley High School in McLean, Virginia. As public documents get created, we will post them here. Special thanks to our sponsors Leidos and Lockheed Martin for supporting us. We look forward to having a great season and wish everyone the best of luck.
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611 | Week 7
Welcome to 611’s first offseason update! We started our offseason in late September with an open interest meeting which had a great turnout. In our first few meetings, we covered some of the basics of safety and how to use the tools we have, and then split up into subgroups where we From there we split up into different subgroups where we went over the season schedule and our offseason competition The main focus of our offseason meetings is training new and returning members by building a robot for the CHS Blair Bunnybots offseason event in December. As always, thank you to 449 for creating and managing this year’s event!
During our offseason we meet two days a week, with half the team coming to each. The current projects we’re working on is our pit setup, where we’re finishing lights for our tool cart and wiring our battery cart, building our Bunnybots game pieces, and then building our Bunnybots robot itself. This is a render of our current robot design.
Bot Overview
Our design is relatively simple, with our two main mechanisms being a drop-down roller intake and a fixed flywheel shooter. We used a swerve drivetrain last season, so we’re continuing with that for this offseason so that we’re prepared to build one during build season. We’re just over a month from our offseason competition. We’ve completed our drivetrain and superstructure, and are now working on building our intake and mounting our shooter components. Once we’re done with that, we’ll move to wiring our robot, programming, testing, and fixing the inevitable issues that come! Having the opportunity to design and build a robot in the pre-season has been a huge help to our team, and has given us a lot of valuable experience that we will take with us to build season.
Outreach
Part of what we also do in the offseason is member recruitment and fundraising. Our member recruitment has consisted of attending events like our school’s club day, distributing flyers to advertise our team, and our previously mentioned interest meeting. For fundraising, we held a bake sale event on the 28th and had a great time sharing robotics, meeting alumni and potential sponsors, and raising funds! Bake sales have been a great way for our team to reach out to our community and also spread awareness about FIRST to younger students, who loved to drive and demo our 2023 robot.
Resources
CAD: 611 Bunnybots 2023
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611| Week 14
Design Changes
Since our last post, we have made some slight design changes to our robot. Initially our robot was designed with perfect inflation and tolerances, but after some testing we realized this wasn’t feasible. We decided to move the flywheels back to increase compression to plan for uninflated game pieces. We also had our hood shooter previously shooting at a 60 degree angle but after some testing at Marshall High School (Thanks to 5549 for hosting), we realized we did not shoot high enough to reach the high goal. We have adjusted this angle to 45 after doing the physics calculation and integrating air resistance and backspin into our equations.
Electrical
We opted for a brain board for this competition because we did not want to risk damage from the yoga balls going in and out at a high velocity. Although we initially had the PDH mounted at the back of the bot, we redid the wiring for our robot and made the PDH more accessible and central in order to make all the wires fit simply and relatively symmetrically. We also got our pneumatics wired properly. One key element was making sure to put the electronics in the CAD in order to not have them collide with the structural parts of the robot.
Programming
One of the largest challenges we faced from a programming perspective was the pneumatics and our swerve drive. One key problem with the swerve drive was that we could only get it to either drive and strafe or rotate. We were able to solve this by redefining the swerve modules in different orders with different positions and by changing the x and y on the joystick input.Even though this made it a bit more difficult from a coding perspective for autonomous, it made driver control easier for the drivers.
Lessons Learned from Bunnybots
For Bunnybots this year we decided to keep our robot simple and avoid many of the problems we faced in previous years. This was a great experience for our team and a great training opportunity as we tried to keep most of the senior members from doing too much work, which gave our new recruits the experience of a competition season before the real one started. There were many lessons to be learned from this experience such as:
- Giving coders more time for autonomous and tele-op configuration
- Setting up auto alignment for scoring
- Fast ground intake is more efficient than having to go to the human player
- Low center of gravity is better
- Brain boards are hard to test due to not being visible from the top of the robot
- Bumper production should start as soon as the CAD is complete
- ALL Electronics should go in CAD
- Prototyping is extremely important
- Wiring needs to be triple checked
- Effective build calendar needs to be established
- Calculations should be done for all portions of the robot
Have a great 2024 and good luck for the season!
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It was great working with y’all, both before and as alliance partners! It was a great robot, which I’m sure is a good omen for crescendo. Looking forward to a great season!
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Hi guys, excited to see what you all come up with for 2024! Do you have a Github organization that you use / are you all publishing code this year?
Yes, we do have a pubilc github that we are publishing code to this year.
Here is the link for the Github
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