FRC 6643 Open Alliance Build Thread 2024

[DataChaos]

About us

Welcome to the 2024 updates thread for team 6643 - Walden Robotics! We are based out of Walden III High School in Racine, WI. Created in 2016, we are the first FRC team in the Racine area. Currently, our team consists of 14 students and 2 mentors, and as always, we will be competing at the Wisconsin Regional in Milwaukee. We also have an FLL team, 44401, who competed this past weekend and won second place for their project.

We are extremely excited to participate in OA for the first time! We would greatly appreciate your feedback.

Objectives

• Host more outreach activities in the Racine community in the next few months
• Continue to advance knowledge of team structure and robot design
• Keeping members and mentors engaged throughout the year
• More organized electronics boards and detachable mechanisms for robot
• Adhere to a schedule
• Swerve drive driver practice and autonomous routines
• Reliable robot
• Participate in a week 0 event

What have we been doing?

Our team lost a lot of knowledge and connections after the pandemic and is gradually improving. This also meant we were in a tough financial situation at the end of last season. During most of the off-season, we have been fundraising to prepare ourselves for current and future expenses. With assistance from 6421 WarriorBots, 1714 MORE Robotics, @Renee_Becker-Blau, and other resources, we were able to get the support needed to compete this season, and we are working on improving much of our equipment, materials, and technology.

We were then able to purchase important equipment and materials, albeit not as early as we had hoped. This past Thursday, we just received several shipments from Rev containing swerve modules among many items! We also received parts for a Rev extrusion lift from a previous year and are working on repairing it.

We built up a quick and dirty chassis in two days and it is working well. We will be polishing this in the coming weeks. Additionally, due to the lack of traction, we have been looking to obtain carpet for driving.

Moreover, thanks to PPG Industries, we received several Dell Latitude laptops. This means we no longer have to rely on a single school laptop.

Important links

Instagram

GitHub (coming soon)

We will be providing our code as well as sharing updates every week or so. We hope joining Open Alliance will help us gain more expertise as well as share our ambitions and progress along the way. We’re looking forward to an amazing season!

[NYtoWI]

I’m glad we were able to help you folks out over the summer. I’m excited to see what you all do this year.

[Trinity]

If you guys have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us!

[DataChaos]

Hi everyone! Apologies, an update for us is long overdue. Let’s go over what we’ve done in the last two weeks.
The week of kickoff was fairly hectic, with only three days of school due to the weather. A few alumni came over to join us for kickoff!

We set some objectives for this season, and we decided that the speaker would be our top priority and that the robot should fit under the stage. Like many others, we closely followed Ri3D and began intake prototyping.

Many thanks to Jay (a parent) for helping us manufacture field elements!

Jay also helped with a new work table, shown in the above photo.

We received a huge sheet of polycarbonate last week, something we have been lacking for a long time.

This week, the robot chassis will be redone at a smaller size to fit within the legal frame perimeter and fitted with a more permanent belly pan. We will also trim down two AndyMark Climber in a Box units in order to conform to height requirements.

Unfortunately, work this week has been slow. We usually are able to CNC parts at Gateway, who is kind enough to let us use their fabrication center, but the manufacturing center at Gateway was closed. Even worse, the end of the semester is this week and we are unable to come in on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday.

[DataChaos]

Hello everyone! Here’s our end of week recap.

The required parts were CNC cut. Here is our intake-shooter using the Unqualified Quokkas design.

The chassis base is complete, except for the side rails.

We haven’t bought a hydraulic crimper yet, so unfortunately we had to continue painstakingly using clamps to finish up some battery crimps. As you may have noticed, our new batteries for this year have been upgraded to 4 AWG wire and SB120 connectors.

Next week, we will install the side rails which will support the arm. Hardware to mount the bumpers will arrive as well as gears and pulleys for the intake-shooter system.

On Tuesday, the leadership team will be attending the FIRST WI advocacy day, where we will be speaking with our representatives regarding FRC. We will also be going to the FRC Test Run in Madison the following weekend.

[DataChaos]

We made so much progress since last week!

The robot was driving erratically at the beginning of the week and we found that a Spark MAX threw a Gate Driver Fault error and we had to swap it out. We received more aluminium extrusion and necessary parts and were able to install side rails and the arm base.

Work on the intake-shooter system continued on Tuesday while the leadership team was out at the FIRST WI advocacy day. We met with Rep. Greta Neubauer and Sen. Bob Wirch, both of whom we are grateful for their support; it was very successful. Fortunately, we finally got our hands on six more NOTES in the perfect time, which we received on Thursday.

On Wednesday, we ordered a new 3D printer along with various varieties of PLA filament thanks to our Argosy grant provided through HCB. It is a Bambu Labs X1C. The blue bumpers were also completed.

On Thursday, we had to obtain some emergency hardware as we had run out the previous day. We also bought a new chain breaker only to find our existing chain breaker after looking for it for several weeks. We did some much needed organization of our workspace. The arm and intake-shooter structure were finally mounted onto the robot.

[DataChaos]

We had the unique opportunity yesterday to go to the Isthmus Engineering center for the test run event, generously hosted by them and 1306 BadgerBots. We usually are not able to access our robotics room on Saturday due to the school building being closed but were able to work on the robot thanks to this. While we aimed to be able to get more programming done, it was not as smooth as we desired. However, we would not be at this stage if we had not put on this deadline.

The last few steps we got done on Friday and Saturday included the fixing of a bearing, chains on the arm sprockets, arm wiring, and bumper mounting. We decided to use some thicker L brackets. We also ironed on our vinyl bumper numbers.

While testing and programming on Saturday, there were a few things we discovered. We initially thought that there was a programming issue because the robot turned when attempting to drive in a straight line. However, we discovered that one of the swerve modules sometimes stopped working due to a sensor issue. We tracked this down to a broken Absolute Encoder Adapter where the connector broke. Unfortunately, those are out of stock at the moment and we could not find a lead time, so we asked around and are waiting to see if anyone else has some. In the worst case scenario, we will have to solder a data port breakout board.

Another issue we ended up having was forgetting our SB50 to SB120 adapter cable. This resulted in not being able to use the older batteries, as well as not being able to charge our newer batteries. We would have took the time to switch a port on our battery charger to SB120, but the local hardware store only had SB50 connectors.

We ended up applying Loctite to some shooter components because unsurprisingly they fell apart quite easily after spinning at full speed. The intake currently uses a BAG motor. It was a bit slow and had trouble picking up a NOTE without external force. We will be ordering a Neo 550 for the intake motor as well as gearing it faster.

We also came across some tensioning issues on the arm chain. Last year, our attempted solution to this problem was an adjustable mount so that it could be moved if loose, but we found that it would still easily slide back into the loose position. We will also be changing the arm gearing lower so that the brake mode will function better.

[DataChaos]

Thanks to 930, the robot drives properly again after they gave us two of their absolute encoder adapters. We are now working on swerve drive programming and figuring out PathPlanner.

We received the X1C 3D printer! A few days later, we also got many boxes of filament.

We printed 8mm to hex adapters. The shooter motors now have no reduction.

In addition, we also prototyped the climber hook.

We also received a new battery charger with SB120 connectors which we are planning to make a new wooden battery cart with. We’re currently working on redesigning the arm supports. Previously, the hex shaft mount was not properly aligned to one of our brackets, resulting in an improperly positioned hex shaft. We also are working on mounting our Limelight. Our secretary, Michelle, is retiring next week, so we hosted a brief thank you event.

Some other minor things we accomplished include bumper brackets for the red bumpers. We will receive a NEO 550 next week as well as more compliant wheels for the intake.

[DataChaos]

The new support structure for the arm is now finished. The arm moves again but still has chain tensioning issues. On an unrelated note, the arm has been further geared down. You may notice that we 3D printed bearing blocks for the arm.

We also 3D printed a mount for the Neo 550 which is geared with UltraPlanetary cartridges for a total of 12:1 on the intake, and it already is working much more reliably and quickly.

We’re planning to 3D print a hex shaft mount for the Limelight, which will be mounted on the arm hex shaft (which remains stationary). This will also help protect it. We’re looking to use this for pose detection for the robot.

We attempted to place several orders this week, but only one succeeded since our credit card kept getting declined. This means that our compliant wheels as well as additional motors will now be arriving next week. This is an issue out of our control, meaning that work on the climber may be delayed.

We’re in the process of setting up a CANdle to handle an LED system on our robot, and our sponsor panel is also in the works. The rest of the work is almost just programming. We set a deadline for 4 March to have the robot fully done in order to be able to get some driving practice in.

[DataChaos]

As we rapidly approach our deadline (and our competition!), we have been hard at work. We finally received our much needed compliant wheels today. We also are pleased to have received two Kraken motors which we’ll be using on the climber, as well as new bearing blocks, which will be replacing the 3D printed bearing blocks that are starting to crack. The Limelight is now set up to read the new AprilTags we placed on the speaker. We reached out to our sponsors with our brand new monthly newsletter as well as requested logos, which we will be placing on our sponsor panel.
TEAM 6643 Newsletter.pdf (1.3 MB)

We didn’t get to order CAMs, so we 3D printed some and the arm is now (finally) tensioned correctly. We also 3D printed some covers for the swerve modules and greased them. We found one of the swerve modules was having trouble rotating without help, and it seemed like the high resistance carried through all the way to the Neo 550. We will try another one and see what happens.

With our due date on 4 March, we greatly appreciate 930 again for allowing us to practice on their field the following day. Check back later for some pictures and updates next week!

[DataChaos]

Thanks very much to 930 again for having us on Tuesday and Sunday! We ended up attempting a three note auto and getting in some drive practice. The swerve drive issue did not end up being the motor. We swapped out a Spark Max on Tuesday, and that fixed the issue. We’re currently working on getting autonomous to work. We only have 3 meetings remaining until we have to pack up for the competition.

We also weighed our robot and it comes out to 73.7 lb. This allows us to run fast cycles to and from the source. At maximum, we were able to score around 6 notes in one teleop period. We still need to finish tuning our Limelight for pose corrections as well as calibrate some shooter positions. During our auto, we found that shooting from the edge of the wing was challenging as it required sub-degree precision on the arm. We did make it in a couple times, though.

We slowly ramped up the driving speed up to our top speed of 4.8 m/s. We practiced several matches with all three robots (8744 joined us as well) cycling. We found this to be a very successful day. We are now looking into some note rejection under the arm, as notes could get stuck there and effectively render us defense only. We’re also going to adjust the intake note detection sensitivity.

Oh, also, we accidentally smashed our intake several times. Interestingly, we only bent a churro (which was there for support). We’re still going to bring extra intake plates because it’s going to break at some point, but it’s good to know that the polycarbonate is holding up.

Videos will be posted as soon as we can regain access to our YouTube channel!

Amp cycle 2024