Hello FRC Teams! Welcome to Team T3 7312’s build season thread for 2024! We are extremely excited to be sharing our progress during this build season. We will be posting shortly with meeting recaps throughout the rest of the build season.
This year, we will be competing at:
Week 1: Katy District Event
Week 5: Space City District Event
Links:
Instagram
Onshape (Mechanisms)
Onshape (Full robot assembly)
GitHub
Update 1:
This first week, we have been kicking off our design. Starting at kickoff we took a look through the game manual and prioritized the scoring objectives, with the following priorities:
With these goals in mind, we narrowed down to two main design concepts, with the following in common
Common parts:
GreyT telescoping tube climber
Under the bumper intake
Mk4i Swerve
Concept 1:
Pivoting shooter to tilt down and score amp, while being able to pick up from the human player station directly, in the case that our ground intake breaks
Concept 2:
Fixed angle shooter with rotary bar.
In our testing we found it very consistent to shoot at an upward angle and stay in the amp, as long as there was a peice of box tube placed ~halfway up the opening. Doing this means we would have to be shorter and give up the possibility of human player intake.
Selecting a design:
Once we narrowed it down to the two designs, we analyzed the pros and cons of each. We have selected the second design because we found it to be simpler and believe we can get it done faster, due to our week one competition. It also has similar elements to other things we have done successfully in the past, as opposed to the wrist mechanism that the first design would have required.
Update 2:
This week we worked on our CAD, it is not quite fully complete, but mostly there. That can be found at this link (different link than posted earlier)
We ended up changing our intake from under the bumper to an over the bumper rotary style intake
Mechanisms:
Intake
Falcon (maybe kraken) driven sets of 2” thrifty squish wheel pivoting with a Neo geared to 40:1
Shooter:
Our shooter is a two sided shooter with ION grip wheels. It is driven by two separate Neos geared to 1.5:1. We are compressing the NOTE down to 7” wide.
Climbers:
GreyT telescoping, 17.5:1 hook design is currently still being worked on
I will be back with more updates once we get started building, but any questions or comments on our design are welcome!
This looks like a really solid robot! Do you plan to add any protection for the pulleys on the outside of your collector? To that extent, have you considered adding dead axle shafts for your collector to improve rigidity?
The space between the climber assembly and the stowed intake is really tight, so we are unable to add any protection around those pulleys, as for the dead axles, we currently have 3 peices of hex shaft near the end of the intake that will be tapped into, to add rigidity and help guide the NOTE
Solid reasoning. if you can’t add protection for those pulleys on the outside, i suggest moving the pulley to be inside your collector side plates. That would protect them and give you more room for your collector
Looks like a really good robot with lots of potential. Can’t wait to see it built and shooting notes.
I can’t wait to see more of this bot. Looks like you guys improved everything wrong with our Cranberry Alarm robot!
Would you happen to have any video showing this? Thanks.
Looking forward to playing with you all in Katy and hopefully in April.
I don’t have a video of us testing it, but the idea is similar to what cranberry alarm tests in this video. They use a peice of spline shaft instead of box tube. We toon that idea and tested it using a peice of box tube clamped horizontally across with the 2” side toward the opening. We found that the consistency of that is much greater than demonstrated in the cranberry alarm video.
Thanks for your quick reply, Matthew. See you all soon.
Hi! We’re pursuing a similar concept. Do y’all have any sort of CAD/renders/dimensions on your rotary bar? We haven’t started testing yet, but plan to use a piece of 3/4" round tube on some polycarb arms driven by a 775/VP.
We do not have any CAD or dimensions on the amp bar yet, we’ve written it off as something to add between our first and second competitions
Update 3:
This week we finalized our CAD, finished field elements, and started production of our robot parts.
CAD:
We had a minor panic this week, as we realized that our intake actually went out to 12.5” and we had to redo the entire intake CAD. During that process we also decided to flip the pulleys and gears of the intake to the inside to protect them at the suggestion of another user here.
Once we had the speaker together, we took the chance to test our shooter prototype at the angle we designed into the speaker. We soon discovered that the angle could not make it in at the distance we designed for. This sparked another mild panic, leading us to redo the entire cad of our robot, better organized this time (found under robot V2 in our CAD)
Part production:
First, I would like to take a second and thank Spectrum for their old powder coat oven, our parts have been coming out great.
Most of our robot parts have been produced, and we are done with both our main, as well as our spare intake. Our climbers are mostly assembled, we are waiting for some parts to be able to finish them.
Once our intake was assembled, we did a little testing to ensure that it intakes properly
Update 4:
This week was a very productive week! We now have our robot mechanically complete (only using about 750 rivets), with electrical just started. The only major problem we encountered was the heating element failing in our powder coat oven, but we just spray painted our brackets instead. We are still waiting to attatch swerve, but that should be done by Wednesday after our krakens arrive Monday.
This our first competition was the FiT district Katy event. Due to the simplicity and consistency of our bot, we came out of prelims as the number one seed. After teams 118 and 624 rejected our alliance offers we selected teams 1477, Texas Torque, and 5923, the WildC.A.T.S. After being pushed into the losers bracket by the 4th seed alliance, we were eventually eliminated in match 12 by the 3rd seeded alliance.
On top of our incredible robot performance, we won the district Impact award, qualifying us for the Texas DCMP. With our robot performance, as well as our award, we came away with 55 district points, the same amount of points we earned across both of our qualifying events last year.
On arrival we discovered that our climbers would no longer extend properly, a bolt had backed out inside of one of the tubes and stopped it from moving.
Fix:Taking apart the climbers and loctiting all of the bolts in place, we had forgotted to do it the first time
Failure: Inside one climber the rope snapped
Fix: Taking off the tube and fishing a new rope through
Failure: Throughout the event, we had very inconsistent shots
Fix: Design a new shooter and replace it before space city
Our next competition was the Space city event, we ranked slightly lower this event, partially due to a few consistency issues, coming in at the 6th seed, ended up as the 4th alliance captain. We picked teams, 3035, Droid Rage and 8879, Redbird Robotics, after getting knocked to the losers bracket by the first alliance, we got eliminated by the 3rd alliance and placed 4th as an alliance. On top of this, we won the judges award.
Failure: On impact, our intake belts would pop off
Fix: Large 3d printed flange around the pulley to not allow the belt to pop off, as well as a new belt
Fortunately that was our only real failure that happened at space cityFailure: Probably our worst failure we had all season, when picking up the robot after a match the stage chain caught a googly eye mount and snapped it off.
Fix: Lots of superglue
DCMP alliance photo: 
Thanks to our success, we have qualified for the championship for the first time since 2018, in the Johnson division.
(With that being said, if your team needs anything for champs, shoot me a PM and I’ll see if we can help you out)
