FRC 9496 Lynk | 2024 Build Thread | Open Alliance

[Jimmyy]

Hello Open Alliance!

Welcome to Team 9496 Lynk’s 2024 OA thread! We are a community based rookie team (first year as a team, and first year as an Open Alliance team ).

About Us

Lynk is a newly formed high school FIRST Robotic Competition (FRC) team, operating under the umbrella of the Inspire Carolina, Inc non-profit organization. We believe that FRC is a powerful program that can challenge and grow the high school students in our region, and have a positive impact on our community. We’re a community team based out of Rutherford County North Carolina, serving the whole region and we’re welcoming to all students who are in 9-12 grade (14-18 years old).

2024 Events?

Currently we are going to be in attendance of:

Open Alliance Thread

This off-season, we hope to push at least 1 update every 2-3 weeks. During the season, we hope to push an update at least once a week minimum if not more. We are excited to join the OA community, and interact with everyone

Table of Contents for Posts

2023 Off-Season

2024 Crescendo Season

Team Lynks (get it because links)

[jedgar6]

I’ve always been curious about community team work. Where do you do meet and work? Are you based out of a specific school?

[Jimmyy]

Update Time!!

Off-Season Update # 1 10/23/2023

First (actual) Team Meeting

On 10/23/2023, we hosted our first actual team meeting (besides the interest meeting prior); the purpose of this meeting was to meet our future teammates, discover available roles within the team, and see a competitive FRC robot in action.

An actual robot? but how?!

An FRC robot that has competed before? Where did we get that? Well, a huge thanks to fellow North Carolina Open Alliance Team, 3506 YETI Robotics frc3506, from Charlotte, NC! They were kind enough to lend us their 2023 competition robot, “Himalaya” to showcase to the students different parts and pieces that go into a robot and how everyone has their role within an FRC team.

As our mentors went through the different sub-teams, such as build, electrical, programming, design, business, awards, media, fundraising, etc. The students were ecstatic to learn more.

Students gathered around while seeing how the elevator works on 3506’s robot Himalaya

3506’s Cube Outake being showcased

More photos of the intake and elevator being explained to students

Swerve drive being showcased (and the beautiful belly-pan of their robot)

We ran through in detail what kickoff is like, what the build season is like, the different competition positions, like drive team, pit crew, awards team, and scouting is like.

Overall, the students are excited for this pre-season, and the incoming 2024 Crescendo season.

[Daniel1464]

You know where 3506 got that bellypan?

[rjbell4]

@jedgar6

Where do you do meet and work? Are you based out of a specific school?

@jedgar6 One of the reasons that we haven’t replied yet is that we don’t know the answer to these questions! We currently have been meeting at a local church associated with one of our mentors. We are continuing to pursue possible locations for hosting the build and competition seasons, including local schools. However, we are not based out of any one school. In fact, our primary reason for existing is to supplement a local school-based team, as there are a lot of other students in our area that don’t qualify for that school-based team, and we want to ensure that the FIRST opportunity it available to everyone in our area. When we settle on a specific location for the 2024 season, I’m sure we’ll mention it here!

[EHutson]

Hi! I am on 3506 and designed the bellypan. We have a local sponsor that does laser cutting for our team. They were who fabricated the bellypan. Let me know if you have any more questions!

[Jimmyy]

Training Time!

Welcome back to the 9496 Lynk OA Thread! This update will be about training our team members for this off-season, and this coming 2024 Crescendo season.

Lynk Library of Knowledge (LLK)

What is the LLK?

The past few weeks, a few of our students and mentors have been putting together a collection of resources from many different teams on a site hosted on GitHub Pages, which will be maintained for years to come.

What is contained inside of the LLK?

This site contains different resources about different sub-teams such as Build, Design, Electrical, Programming, Strategy, Scouting, and more. There are even things that are not sub-team specific, such as a section on “What is FRC?” that contains stuff on topics like the history of FRC, what are the different sub-teams, etc.

How is the LLK sorted?

These resources range from the absolute basics to advanced topics, and so the LLK is separated into three tiers: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. These tiers were decided on so that when the LLK expanded with a lot of different resources, navigating through it wouldn’t become confusing and overwhelming to see a gigantic list of resources with no topic in mind.

Why is the LLK?

With the coming season approaching very rapidly, giving us little time to create original training content, we realized that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. With so many resources that already exist out in the wild, there is little to no point to make (for example) an intro to Java slideshow when there are 30 of them out there. We hope to also help other teams out there with this, as one of the Open Alliance values is “Open Alliance teams join to help everyone - not just other Open Alliance teams.” We hope that this helps all teams out there in the FRC community.

Can I contribute to the LLK?

Yes, you can. As stated before, there are a lot of resources out there in the wild, and it would be amazing for the LLK to grow more than it already has for years to come.

How can I contribute?

You can submit a “Content Request” by going and submitting one in our GitHub issues found here. There is an issue template there that tells you all the information you need to provide for a “Content Request.”

Lynk Library of Knowledge (LLK): Lynks

[Connor-8177]

You guys have been consistently putting out amazing content in every post, and it’s still just the offseason. Will definitely be one of the teams I follow during build season.

[shuki]

Tools, Glorious Tools!

In preparation for the upcoming season, we have been creating a list of the tools we will need to get going.

The goal with this is to create a list of all the tools we should need in a shop/pit for the season within a reasonable budget. When picking these tools one of the goals was to find quality tools that we can choose as a long-term standard, so in the future when we are able to spend more money on tools we aren’t saying let’s get better tools but rather let’s get more of these.

This list is built around our particular circumstances so it may not be directly applicable to all teams. We intend to mainly build with a tube and gusset design approach and that has led to some of the choices on the tools list.

There are also tools that we’d like to get at some point but we recognize they’re not necessary to run a season.

One of the main reasons we’ve taken the time to create this list is that sometimes sponsors are eager to contribute but may not be willing or able to directly give cash. So having a list of items like this at hand can be a valuable resource where they can donate a specific item.

I hope these lists help some teams who are looking for what tools to consider and we would love to get some feedback on what we may have missed or where we could do better.

[Connor-8177]

For what it’s worth, the omio x8-2200L comes with a vfd and will cut faster compared to the shapeoko. A bit smaller, but it’s by far the most recommended entry cnc within the frc community.

[SheptheSheep]

Love the lists. One thing I noticed on the shop essentials was that y’all had one of those handle chain breakers linked, I have personally had very bad experiences with bending plates on those, the ones I’ve found to be the most reliable are the vex or dark soul/ARC chain tools (I’m sure the new wcp tools are really good too).

Hand Tools

[lewislongbottom]

I highly recommend prioritizing an electric rivet gun. We have the Miwaukee to match our power tools. Not cheap by any means, and only makes sence to get once you have all the basics, but it makes the world of a difference. We found having complet sets of tools is not always needed. A handfull of commonly used sizes for different fasteners is all you need. For example, drill bits. You dont need every size in the book, you need lots of good quality 3/16 and 1/4. One complete set is good to have on hand, but for comp, its not worth bringing big tool boxes full things you done need. Having socket sets containing 80% of tools you dont need is a waste of space and money.

[shuki]

We have the Dewalt electric rivet gun on our wish list, I have used the Milwaukee one in the past and agree that it is well worth the money for the ease of use.

We are trying to standardize our tool sizes so we only have what we need and this is in the works. I would love to hear what drill bit sizes your team has standardized on, we are thinking that we will only need bits for (1/8, 3/16) rivet through holes, and (8, 10, 1/4-20) bolt through holes. Anything else should be used infrequently enough to be serviced by a single drill bit set.

[lewislongbottom]

VorTX uses 3/16 for most. We have quite a lot of 1/4 hardware so thats a common size but we are trying to change those to # 10 where the design is seeing larger loads and frequent maintainence, so we would end up using 13/64 which is a convenient tap drill for 1/4 and clears for # 10. We dont use smaller rivets than 3/16 and largest we go to is 1/4. Kinda off topic but I highly recommended an annular cutter for bearing holes and dedicate a drill press to the cutter. We used a step or a hole saw in the past and didnt have great results.

[Jimmyy]

Lynk Library of Knowledge: 2024 Pre-Season Release

Welcome back to one another 2023 Off-season OA posts of 9496 Lynk!

In a previous post, we announced a project called the Lynk Library of Knowledge, or LLK for short. The LLK is a website with a collection of resources for FRC sourced from all over the robotics community. This included Build, Design, Programming, Electrical, Strategy, Business, Technical Binders, Whitepapers, and many more.

In the past few months the LLK has grown exponentially, with many commits being made, and changing shape many times. It has been reorganized, re-themed, sorted, etc. many times to find the best way to organize the site. The site’s structure as of this release, will be the final structure for the 2024 Season. We won’t change it as teams will become familiar with the site, and if it did change, that would be very inconvenient for teams to find what they’re looking for.

Every “section” (ex. Design) is split into 3: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. After that, it splits down further into Reading and videos, then topic by topic. For example, design’s Intermediate section is split into Design Training, Mechanisms, Engineering Drawings, Simple Robot Design, Design Process, etc.

With that in mind, teams can still contribute to the LLK, in our previous OA post, we setup several custom GitHub Issue templates for “Content Requests.”

There are multple issue templates for specific things (such as: CAD, Code Bases, and some more coming soon), but if you have a resource that does not fit those, refer to the “LLK Content Request” GitHub Issue Template.

If you have anything to add, like CAD models, Code Bases, Software, Technical Binders, literally anything, feel free to submit it, this site is to help everyone, the more content, the better.

If you have any suggestions for the LLK as well, those are also welcome, we want user feedback, this is for the community to use, this project will be maintained for years to come, so we hope that this site is as accessible as it can possibly be.

Have a great season!

Lynks:

[shuki]

Preseason Design Project

In preparation for the coming season, we are getting students up to speed with design and Onshape. To do this we have started working towards building a robot cart from a design that is based on 4481’s robot cart. The goal of this project was to teach basic Onshape navigation, capturing dimensions, creating engineering drawings, Effectively communicating with manufacturing partners/team, and preparing parts for manufacturing

The reason we chose to work on this particular project, is because it serves as both a practical tool that will be needed for the season and it also serves to show new students how to finalize a project. The hope with working on this is to start the feedback loop of design to finished product far sooner than would have been normally possible in most beginner projects. Also, this should show what a somewhat final design could look like, which may help students understand project scope and what they are working towards in their own designs.

Here are the Onshape design files we created.

[Niels_Heijden]

Awesome! Looks good!

[Jimmyy]

Week 1!

Welcome back to Team 9496 Lynk’s 2024 OA thread, for our first post of the 2024 season!

Kickoff Day

What not how

On the early days of a kickoff, we are trying to gain an understanding of what the game will be. At this point, we don’t care how a robot will do something, but rather what it will choose to do in a match, and why. So our main focus in the early days was trying to break down the match scoring and strategy, so we could make sure that we have a solid understanding of the game and why we may want to do one task over another.

A big part of these early discussions is unanswered questions. Throughout the early days, we kept a list of questions we had that students were working on answering, or preparing for Q&A if they couldn’t find an answer. And at the end of the day the answers that we found were presented to the team.

We want to give a huge thank you to Fountain Electric and Services for being a Founding Investor in our team and presenting their donation at kickoff. This set a great tone to backdrop our kickoff, and we appreciated the kind and inspiring words from Terry Fountain.

Also, we got pizza, as all things should be on kickoff!

Monday, January 8th

By this time we had gained a solid understanding of what could happen in a match, so we started working on a list of every legal function a robot could do. The goal with this is to help capture odd features and create the list that we will later pull from to create the “Our Robot Will” list. This is a great opportunity to have a discussion about odd or possibly illegal strategies, and can be a great time for brainstorming.

Thursday, January 11th

By this point, we have been discussing strategy and what robots might do for several days. We also created a list of potential robot archetypes that we expect to see all in an effort to better understand the coming season, but we haven’t even started on what we will do. So this is the day we finally got to this. We worked on this in the form of a “Our Robot Will” list; this is a list of functions that we will try to achieve with our robot – it doesn’t answer how but rather what. We also tried to make these goals measurable, so we will actually know when we have achieved them. This list will be a work in progress for the next few days, but at some point it will become our guide through the build season that we will rely on when we are designing our robot.

We got our tool cart today so we can finally organize our tools and start setting those standards.

And last but not least for this day we built an AMP, so we will have it at hand once we start prototyping.

Friday, January 12th

Today’s main goal was to polish the “Our Robot Will” list and get this in a form that we were willing to hold to for the season. Once we finished this, we finally were able to start talking about the “How” of our robot.

Our Robot Will

• Score 3 notes during auto
• Score from wing to speaker
• Climb
• Pick up Notes from the ground
• Be able to leave the starting zone in Auto
• Have multiple auto routines (flexibility working with other teams)
• 70% accuracy in wing
• 90% accuracy in starting zone
• Drive under the stage
• Low center of gravity (no tipping)
• Touch it, own it (immediate acquisition of Notes)
• 8 TeleOp cycles
• Robust
• 3 degrees or less DOF
• Quickly shoot (minimal time to align, etc.)
  

Stretch Goals

• Score in amp
• Harmony
• 10 TeleOp cycles
• Every match
  

We can finally talk about "how"

Brainstorming

At this point we know what we want our robot to do; we “just” need to look at how. Similar to how we came to the list of what our robot will do, we start by listing every way we think a robot could do these task. At this point there is no such thing as a bad idea; we want all the ideas, even if they don’t make sense, as those non-sensical ideas can sometimes lead to great ideas.

Also, our business side worked on nailing down the investor levels and what benefits those may entail.

Saturday, January 13th

We had an online class to work on chassis design, and created this assembly of a swerve drive chassis with cross rails and a belly pan. The model was made in such a way that it is very easy to adjust the size of the chassis, so once we choose the dimensions, it will only take a few seconds to type it in, and we can start cutting the tubes to length.

What is a robots favorite type of music?

Heavy Metal

See y’all next update!

[Jimmyy]

Week 2!

Welcome back to Team 9496 Lynk’s 2024 OA thread, for our second post of the Crescendo season!

Monday, January 15th

In previous discussions, we had decided that we wanted to be able to pick up notes from the ground, and now we had to decide how we would do that. The main debate was between over-the-bumper vs under-the-bumper, and we had to list out the pro/con of each system. After that, we decided to pursue over-the-bumper, as it would allow for a better touch it own it approach due to it being wider than we expected UTB.

We also 3D-printed a field to use when developing strategies.

Tuesday, January 16th

We received sheet metal parts for the robot cart from WestRock (thank you, WestRock!), so we could start building that cart.

We got our MK4i swerve modules today, which allows us to assemble the chassis. At this point, we decided to go ahead with a 27"x27" chassis.

Wednesday, January 17th

We had an online meeting to discuss the 2D design of the current robot concept. The goal was to lay out how the overall system will work with real dimensions, and show us how it fits together.

Thursday, January 18th

We worked on building the robot cart.

We had a discussion about the design we had been proto-CADing the previous day. This concept was an over-the-bumper intake with horizontal wheels on the shooter, and at this time this is what we were looking at to complete all of our goals on the “Our Robot Will” list. Here is the concept we were discussing:

After this, we discussed a new to-us concept for an intake inspired by 95’s design; we started calling this the “Between the Bumper” intake. After this conversation, we felt this was a different enough new design that it required us to go back to the whiteboard and compare its pros and cons to OTB and traditional UTB.

Friday, January 19th

Since we decided to revisit our decision on an OTB intake in the last meeting, this meeting’s main goal was to discuss the pros/cons of the BTB intake as compared to the list we had made for the other concepts. This is the list that we came up with. Because of this evaluation, we decided to pivot our design and move towards a BTB intake. Once we saw the pro/con list, it was a somewhat easy decision to make.

Intake Style Comparisons

Over-the-Bumper	Under-the-Bumper	Behind-the-Bumper
Pros:	Pros:	Pros:
Touch it, own it	Protected	Touch it, own it
Faster cycles (reach)	Good for playing chicken	Protected
Multi-function	Defense	Good for playing chicken
Lots of examples		Defense
Can see when in		Reach (better than UTB)
Easy to iterate		0 DOF
		Able to iterate
		Normal CG
		Limited Jamming
		Some OTB knowledge applies
Cons:	Cons:	Cons:
Damage	More operator skill needed	Not multi-functional
+1 DOF	Jamming Prone	Few examples
Bad at playing chicken	High CG	Reach worse than OTB

Saturday, January 20th

We held an online meeting to work on how we would build a BTB intake, and how it would integrate into a full robot. Our goal was to make complete enough CAD to create a prototype of the intake, and also see how everything fits together.

See y’all next update!

[ehochstein]

Nice 3D printed field, I love the addition of the lego stormtroopers!