FRC 6985 ENKA TECH. 2023 Build Blog

[EnkaTech6985]

FRC #6985 ENKA TECH. 2023 Build Blog
Hello everyone! We are the team #6985 EnkaTech from Kocaeli/Turkey. Our team was established in 2017 and we have been working actively since then.

We would like to tell you about our pre-season work for the 2023 CHARGED UP season, which we have been eagerly waiting for. With the end of regional competitions and the addition of new team members, we began our first works in June. We understand the value of having a long-lasting team; therefore our experienced members gave SolidWorks education to our new mechanical members to share their knowledge and experiences. We assisted them with everything they needed and taught them how to build robots. Through this, we have made sure they are totally prepared for the design and manufacture of the robots after the Kick-Off.

Here you can see our SolidWorks education!

[EnkaTech6985]

Kick-Off
We were very excited for the Kick-Off day. We had applied for the Techtolia-HUNTERS Kick-Off event, which was the closest Kick-Off event to our team. On January 7th, we went to the Kick-Off event with some members of our team. After the trainings and fun activities, we watched the live broadcast where the new season theme was announced together as a whole team.

We can say that this year’s game met our expectations. We identified some situations that could be a problem during the game. For example: the robot hanging on the charging station or picking up the fallen cones from the ground, etc. We started to think of alternative solutions for such problems.

The day after the Kick-Off event we started analyzing the Game Manual. After analyzing the manual, we started to determine our strategy.

A few days after the Kick-Off, we started to produce prototype drawings for our new robot on SolidWorks.

[EnkaTech6985]

Manufacturing
The new season is coming with big innovations for us. With the support of our sponsors, we decided to renew our chassis. We ordered the MK4i swerve module from SDS. Shortly before the arrival of the swerve module, the mechanical team of our team started to process the profiles and support parts of our new chassis on the machines in our school. As ENKA TECH we care about the robustness of all the robots we build and because of that our mechanical team worked very carefully while manufacturing the parts.

[EnkaTech6985]

Robot Design

After two weeks, our mechanical team finished the robot designs. Basically, we divided our robot into elevator, chassis and three different parts this year.

Gripper Update
With Gripper, we aimed to create a design that made it simple to pick up and set down both the cone and the cube.

-We thought that having 18 wheels in the front would give us an advantage, particularly in the cube. In order to make the design of the wheels compatible with both engines—Redline (4:1) and Falcon we made alterations while picking up the cube. With the aid of a piston in cone compression, we were able to easily open and close the gripper.

-In case the cones escape from within, we reasoned that we could cover the back with sponge material.

-In the starting position, we designed the entire gripper system to be held inside by the sprocket so that the gripper does not protrude from the robot.

-We designed a system that uses the gripper technology and uses the same gripper to drop cones and throw cubes.

-We created a robot that, when placed in the playground, we believe will effortlessly drop cones and cubes anywhere but the final stage cone.

Elevator
In our robot, we choose to use both vertical and horizontal elevator systems. These two elevator systems were created taking inspiration from the elevator systems of our previous robots.

-In our elevators, a chain gear was used. With the chain gear, we transferred power using a Redline (80:1) motor.

-We used a sheet of metal to connect the chain to the box profile, ensuring that the profile would rise when the sprocket was moved.

-We made sure the game piece could get to the top when designing our elevators.

-We made sure that the legal length of the robot was not exceeded when designing our elevators.

-Our elevators have been bearinged in three directions.

[JamesCH95]

I’ve circled two spots that look risky to me:

Both joints need to resolve significant torque with relatively small moment arms and that has me quite worried about their strength and durability. Have you performed any calculations, analysis, or testing to determine that this structure is going to hold up?

[mrnoble]

What are your overall drive base dimensions? It looks to be about 30x30, which may be problematic this year for several reasons. First, with you design (elevator-on-elevator, rear mounted) you are adding material and (more importantly) length to you moment arm, which will increase the possibility of tipping over or breaking something that is sticking out. Second, the limited space on the Charging Station and the floor in general will make a large robot hard to work with on alliances.

[barisgungor1]

Hello mrnoble, this is Mechanical Captain Baris from 6985. When we draw, we actually use millimeter measures, so we created a drive base that was 735*735mm, or roughly 29 inches by 29 inches. As you noted, there might be issues given the size of the region, but we have designed our drive base to accommodate both a vertical and a horizontal elevator system. This year, we anticipate that towering robots may pose significant tipping concerns, therefore we are considering making the robot’s elevator as strong as feasible. We sought to depict the robot in broad strokes in our design, but we also considered adding the support components as we tested the robot in the field. Later, we will make these design modifications and provide them here. For the Charge Station, we thought that we would talk to our alliances in the competition area and share the space in the station, and we thought that it would not be a violation of the rules to keep part of the bumper outside the station, thus reducing the space we would occupy in the station. Stay tuned.

[barisgungor1]

Hello James,this is Mechanical Captain Baris from #6985. As you are aware, in order to make the design files smaller, we don’t sketch certain sections, like bearings. Although it is not immediately apparent, we have created a method here that will ensure that the profiles do not run out while also allowing them to move pleasantly by positioning the bearings in two separate directions. As you can see, we had already employed this method in the earlier version of our 2022 climb; it was one that we had incorporated into our robots in previous years and there had been no issues. We anticipate no issues once again this year. We appreciate your interest.

[JamesCH95]

So, I’m going to do some rough math for the lateral linear slide. I can see that your rails use a ~25mm hole spacing, so I can make decent dimensional guesses. But my numbers are just guesses.

Here’s a crude free body diagram on the joint:

sum of torques = 0 (about B+)
m = arm mass

B- = m1m/125mm = 6kg9.8m/s^2*1000/125 = 470N (~105lbf in imperial units)

This tells us that the rear bearings of the lateral slide mechanism may be exposed to a total of 470N (235N each) which seems like it could be a failure or indentation risk. This could be more than doubled when kinetic forces from moving the arm assembly are taken into account.

It worries me. But if you’re confident it will work then by all means make it and test it!

[EnkaTech6985]

LAST CAD UPDATE

General Design Process

• We made our designs to use 20mm20mm, 50mm25mm, 1in2in box profiles which will mostly be 40mm20mm

• We have designed the connection components we used in our previous robot to be usable this year as well.

• We created our design on swerve chassis in case it becomes ready in time

• Since only the front part of our robot will carry the weight , we intended to balance it by putting the battery on back.

Gripper Update

• For ease of cube intake and throwing, the outermost wheels were replaced with 3 in. compliant wheels.

• In order to make the rearmost wheel in the cube intake dysfunctional, we adjusted the wheels such that they were at an angle to one another in the same direction.

• We changed the wheels from having two at the bottom and one at the top to having one at each.

• As the final engine choice, we selected Redline (4:1).

• Instead of the 60mm space that existed between the two sheet metal plates in the previous design, we reduced it to 50mm in an effort to lighten the design.

• To build internal connections inside the profiles to which the sprocket and pistons are connected, we designed tapped parts.

• Brass was used as the material for the connection holes so that the sheet and piston could easily rotate on the profile.

• To create the compression movement for the cone, we used 20*25 pistons.

• The two rearmost 4 in. compliant wheels were intended to be used for the compression movement.

Elevator Update

• We redesigned our elevator mechanism, which was vertical in our previous design because we put the cone by throwing it to the last stage, at an angle of 67 degrees.

• We connected both the vertical and horizontal elevator to Redline (80:1) with a sprocket.

• By connecting the mechanisms with the sprocket, we ensured that the mechanisms move up-down, forward-backward with the rotation of the motor.

• Instead of using the gearbox we created to rotate the gripper, we chose to use the PG188 motor. We were able to further lower the weight and the number of revolutions by doing this.

• For the gripper rotation movement, we designed our design to have 10 and 40 teeth from 06B-1 sprockets and in this way we slowed down the movement speed.

• For the profiles to slide easily on each other and for weight balance, we connected each profile with 636ZZ bearings, two from the bottom and two from the top.

ROBOT IN THE FIELD

• We saw that when put on the field, our robot can accomplish all the tasks we had in mind. We hope we can state that we have done them all successfully after the manufacturing stage too.

[EnkaTech6985]

Manufacturing Part

Our mechanical team came to our workshop during the semester break for the production of our robot. We started manufacturing the parts of our robot with the delivery of the materials we purchased to our workshop in order to realize the production of our robot. In our workshop, we used CNC, lathe and milling machines to build the majority of the gripper and elevator system. Due to the large earthquake in our country, school activities were suspended after the semester break, and as a result, we were unable to access our workshop. This terrible calamity that has befallen our country appalls us. We will assemble our robot once all of our components have been manufactured.

[EnkaTech6985]

Swerve Chasis Update

Our MK4I swerve module we bought from SDS has arrived at our school. Our mentors and students assembled our swerve modules. Unfortunately, we do not have enough falcon motors. Therefore, we are thinking of making our swerve module with Falcon-NEO motor. We plan to use the CIM motor gear on the frame of our previous robot as a swerve gear for our NEO motor. When we receive the NEO motors we ordered from REV Robotics, we plan to complete our swerve module with 4 Falcon and 4 NEO motors. We used 1x2 inch profiles for our swerve modules. We brought our frame to 29x29 inch. We are very excited to start the new season with a swerve frame.

[EnkaTech6985]

Coloring

We made a deal with a sponsor that we would paint the components we made in our workshop. We painted the parts we produced black because we thought they would look nice. In addition, we believe that our black-painted robot will draw attention more than other competitors at the Bosphorus Regional. We began putting our robot together as soon as our components arrived.

Installation
We started to assemble our robot using the parts that we manufactured. We assembled our robot in 3 sections.

1- Vertical Elevator
We first put our angled parts (67°) and chassis profile together to construct our vertical elevator. We used the angled support components that we CNC cut for this arrangement. We used the slots on the top of our chassis profile to connect our 20:1 NEO motor. At the tip of the gearbox of our NEO motor, we mounted a 10T sprocket. In order to serve as a stopper and join our chain, we installed a profile on the top of our angled components. On top of this profile, we put two bearing slots, into which we inserted a 10T sprocket. In order to line our sprockets, we attached our profile with aluminum spacers. We connected our chain after getting in line our sprockets. Finally, to ensure the stability of our elevator, we braced the angled components with two support profiles.

2- Horizontal Elevator
We have installed 4 of our profiles in rectangular shape for our horizontal elevator.
We used rivet for the installation of these profiles. We have mounted 2 of our profiles forward on this rectangle. From under these two profiles, we mounted a profile perpendicular to these two profiles with spacers below in order to connect our engine.
We have made our 20:1 NEO motor connection on to this profile below.Then we placed a 10T sprocket at the end of the gearbox of our NEO motor. We made 2-way bedding on both of the profiles we mounted forward. And we connected and placed two of our profiles in this bed with a vertical profile.
We have also imbedded our profiles in the bed from 2 directions. We have installed bearings and shafts from the end of these bearings profiles. We supported our profiles with aluminum pins. We have installed a profile from the end of the two profiles connected to the rectangle so that it will be vertical to these two profiles. We have installed 2 bearing housings for this profile and we have placed our 10T sprocket in them. And we did the chain connection between our chains. To fix our chain, we mounted a profile perpendicular to the bedded profiles and mounted our chain to the profile. In order to move our gripper, we mounted a motor plate on one of our bedded profiles and connected a 60:1 NEO motor to this plate. We have placed a 10T sprocket at the end of the gearbox of our motor. Lastly, we installed a plate to connect the chain of our vertical elevator to the outside of the rectangular part that we installed at the beginning, and we mounted the chain of our vertical elevator to this plate.

3-Gripper
For our gripper, we used CNC to make polycarbonate materials, which we coupled with bearing, shaft, and pulley connections before joining them with aluminum pins. Then, we equipped our grippers with a total of 12 compliant wheels. We employed 4 inch, 3 inch, and 2.5 inch wheels in our gripper’s three rows, going from back to front, accordingly. To make our wheels rotate, we used a NEO motor. We used a brass shaft to attach the grippers’ inside to the profile. A 25x20 piston was placed on top of two small profiles that were positioned perpendicular to this profile, and these pistons were then attached to the gripper. After mounting the gripper, we installed two profiles perpendicular to the profile from its sides. We installed a 40T sprocket on top of this profile. We passed through our sprocket and the shaft at the end of our horizontal elevator. Finally, we used a chain to join the 10T gripper gear in our horizontal elevator to the 40T gripper gear.

[EnkaTech6985]

Electronic Part
We got to work on the chassis assembly as the electronics team. At initially we used 4 Falcon and 4 Neo in Swerve. We attempted to write our own code using the sample codes as a guide because it was our first time using swerve, but we were unable to drive it because we lacked a cancoder and enough PID expertise. After plenty of work, we were capable of buying four cancoders and four additional Falcons. We connected the cancoders and swapped out the Falcons for Neos as we bought. Naturally, we also conducted software research up until the cancoders and new Falcons came. By doing this, we quickly made the robot capable of being driven. After the robot became drivable, we assembled the body part of the robot. After assembling the robot to make it look very smooth and flawless, we worked on wiring for a long time. After pulling the cables from the body, it was also very difficult to make the connections because we pulled all the cables from a single place with cable channels. This caused us to confuse about the cables. We checked the cables one by one with a multimeter and made their connections. We also prepared the software of the body part of the robot in 2 days.

[Kbeldag]

Is this sprocet 3/8 ?