Hello all! We are the Ocebots, team 9033. We are super excited to join the Open Alliance this year and look forward to sharing our experience through our second season competing. We are based out of Yorktown High School in Arlington, VA and consist of about 25 students.
Links:
Github - https://github.com/Ocebots
Yes love seeing you guys here! Very enjoyable team to compete with and very dedicated students 
Not much else happened other than swerve!
Nice to see this wonderful CHS team be part of the open alliance!
It’s been a little while, but here is our last offseason update, for the build season, we will use a different thread. That will be linked here once that thread goes live.
We are planning to run MaxSwerve with aluminum wheels. Currently, however, we are testing with plastic wheels while we figure out exactly how we want to cut and manage the treads that we purchased from McMaster Carr.
We were able to build the entire drivetrain in about 6 hours on a Saturday. In terms of a belly pan, we were kind of unsure how to do it, and we didn’t quite have screws long enough to mount a piece of plywood. We ended up just putting a piece of plywood on the top of the chassis, and velcroing it down. This is jank, and we do not recommend other teams replicate this. To mount the battery, we used ratchet straps. Once again, we do not recommend this, it is unsafe. Additionally, the battery is lying down, which isn’t recommended for its longevity. We used spare red tacky grease for the gears of the modules. Members applied this with their hands, which once again, is not recommended. In the future, a proper grease spreader, or maybe a syringe would be a much better choice. All members who handled the grease washed their hands, and we followed the safety data sheet for the tacky grease.
We used the Spark Max mounting brackets to keep our Spark Maxes in place. We don’t like them. Even with properly sized zip ties, we found that they were a pain, especially when one of our Sparks wasn’t working. While doing that, we found out the hard way that the absolute encoder adapters are fragile. When putting the bot on the table, we accidentally broke it. We were working on coding at the time and didn’t realize our mistake until troubleshooting many other things. REV documentation states to have the 550s connected to the top spark, and you should do that. For our CAN bus, we don’t have small lever nuts or crimping tools for their wires, so we used spare PWM cables. We bent the connector for the connection side of our RSL, so although we were able to mount it, we couldn’t connect it to the RoboRIO.
We started coding with the REV example code and everything has been going pretty well so far. We thought we had reached a point where the bot was ready for testing, and we tried it out. You can see this video (attached below this paragraph) on how that turned out. We’re not exactly sure what happened here, and we think it might be a symptom of poor calibration. When calibrating, take it slow, this results in much more accurate numbers. Also, make sure you burn the flash of the sparks. We forgot to do this a few times and had to go back and re-calibrate them. Most of our effort has been focused on teaching right now, so we’ll make sure to update you all once we figure out what the problem is.
For our teaching, we focused on two major departments, Coding, and Mechanics. Mechanics focused on getting everyone set up for CAD, including OnShape and Fusion360. Additionally, they went over some of the commonly used vendors and libraries in Onshape. They went in-depth and designed a Rapid React styled bot using Krayon CAD. They plan to continue some basic CAD training and mini CAD projects during the coming meetings. If we have time, the Mechanics team might be able to build a tank chassis for testing. Finally, the mech team did a complete overview of basic FRC systems/parts. Coding focused largely on getting coders familiar with terms that will be used frequently and got everyone set up with git. They helped everyone install WPILib VS Code and taught them how to get started with a project. They then worked together on coding our Romi. Next meeting they plan to hold an autonomous competition with the Romi to see who can make the best autonomous routine.
Overall, we’re really happy with how everything went! We attached pictures of our teaching below, and we can’t wait to start giving you all weekly updates once the build season begins!
