Week 1 has come and gone. NERD Spark has mimicked much of the rest of the OA teams’ progress. i.e. built shooter and intake prototypes, talked about overall strategy. There is very little that we can add to the conversation so I’m not going to post our boring prototypes videos.
I am struck by the luck of having come from FTC so recently, and having a similar game element in 2020. It was a much smaller orange foam ring but intaking and shooting required similar mechanisms. The team has reviewed the design in CAD and most likely will be using it for inspiration on our 2024 FRC robot.
For those who do not know the game, here is a video of our match. Keep in mind, this was the pandemic year and competition was virtually held at NERD HQ otherwise known as my basement.
For those interested here is CAD of that year’s robot.
CAD:
The shooter is powered by a single motor. A gear and pulley system connects the bottom and top wheels. The shooter wheels grabs one side of the ring giving it enough forward movement but also imparting just enough spin to keep the ring stable.
The design is similar to a lot of the really fast shooters shown already in OA. But most of these shooters have wheels all the way across the Note and thus does not spin the Note. I have yet to see anyone take out half the wheels to see how it affects spin and forward velocity. Our prototype for that is most likely a week away.
Design Strategy:
The team has finalized chassis size to a 24" wide by 28" long robot. Using our reconfigurable OnShape CAD model, we generated the DXF’s and sent files to our sponsor’s laser last Wednesday. Parts arrived on this Monday. We sanded and painted everything black. We specifically use this:
"Rust-Oleum 7220830 Textured Spray Paint, 12 oz, Black
which can be found locally at home depot. The spray paint covers well and dries to the touch in about 10 minutes.
We’ll be wiring all week and the LabVIEW team will hopefully have the chassis shaken out by the weekend.
24X28 size was chosen based on this design strategy
It is a combined intake shooter which should only take about 60 % of the real estate of the chassis. That will allow us to intake from the ground and shoot into the Speaker. To handle the Amp and possibly the Trap, we’ll implement a super lightweight 2 DOF arm with an additional wrist joint/gripper. Gripper will grab the Note directly from the shooter opening. If we have time, we’ll implement a shooter to arm pass off that actually has the shooter shooting the note 1 foot across the robot into the gripper of the arm which will then dunk it into the Amp or Trap. Not saying this is the smartest thing to do, but it would be pretty cool to pull off.
Turd Swerve
Lastly, We wanted to share our Swerve Training and Development platform. The idea is to develop a super cheap fully 3D printed Swerve Pod but use FRC legal motors and electronics so that the software could be transferred fairly seamlessly to an actual FRC robot. One use case is to allow pre-swerve teams the ability to try out swerve without buying expensive swerve pods. The RIO, NEO’s etc, could all be re-used for eventual competition robots if they choose not to do swerve so the added cost would be under $100 of general bearings and parts. Another use case would be to allow SWERVE-enabled teams to use this platform to teach younger members of the programming team. It might be too expensive to provide every member of the programming team with an FRC sized test bot, but this platform would be cost effective enough to have a few among the programming group to test sensors, auton, and other algorithms.
The design was meant to be ultra cheap so definitely not meant for any competition use. It’s not quite up to the name NERD Swerve, so we decided to call it TURD Swerve instead.
Here is a video of it running around:
OnShape CAD:
Github:
As always we welcome any questions or comments.
That’s all we have for now. Happy week 2.