First public facing training material published. Inspired by the news that Molex ( @Knothing ) is working on getting their tools into the hands of FRC teams. The goal was to keep the training content concise, in focus, easy to pause/follow. Youtube FRC CAN Wire Molex Crimping with Generic Crimper
Super cool video! I’ve never been so relaxed watching CAN wires get made
Second of many training videos coming soon Crimping 10AWG With Anderson Powerpole 45A Connectors
In order to give the team a chance to practice in the off-season, a few months ago we held a mock kickoff and studied the 2017 game. In the spirit of keeping things simple, we modeled Chicken Nugget (our robot) after the teams who successfully played the game with gear runners.
While we ran out of time to get any drive practice & gear placement with CN, 1339’s driver Melissa was nice enough to take it out for a literal spin.
After an exciting and long kickoff of game manual review and archetype discussions, our programmers wanted to test out the intake with the new game piece. Lo and behold…
Everyone’s looking forward to working on prototypes on Monday 
Hi guys,
We just discussed about intake like this but in game manual R401 the bumper rule was changed so we were far away from this idea is it legal? Could we missed something in manual?
Does not appear to be allowed. However this design could be easily modified to sit in the bumpers instead of going through them.
Apologies. I should have clarified, this robot was only being used temporarily for the intake. We will be prototyping and building an entirely new robot that meets the new bumper rules.
Yesterday, the team met in some very cold weather. It’s exciting to see students showing up when it’s snowing and sub-zero temperatures because you know how excited they are to do robotics. Unfortunately, we didn’t take the robots outside to play in the snow. (snow game anyone?)
One of our primary focuses has been testing and iterating on any ideas that we have. We want to limit the risk of damaging our game piece when prototyping and keep that top of mind when testing something new. We were fortunate to get some extras, but we still don’t want to risk being wasteful.
One of our tests involved machining a piece of polycarbonate with holes that got closer to each other in half inch increments. Using drills, we tested various wheels making sure not to force the note through.
Next up, we’ll be testing the angle of our shooter. One of the students did some napkin math and verified we could aim for both the amp and for the speaker with around the same angles. There was much discussion around whether we should have a fixed angle, a semi-fixed angle that can be adjusted between matches, or a completely dynamic angle. We’re leaning towards the last one but we still want to make sure to get a range of angles we can use. Introducing our very scientific angle tester!
Upgrading from our drills to use NEO motors we had on hand, our programming students quickly whipped up some code to control these motors. Unfortunately we had some trouble with the RoboRio 2 not allowing us to send it code, so that will also be resolved tomorrow.
We also wanted to test these polyurethane belts as well for maneuvering the note around. The idea being that the belts might be a little more gentle on the piece as well as having more surface area contact with it. Some quick CAD and CNC work and a prototype was born!
These were the main highlights of this week, but we also focused on teaching wiring and crimping, worked on our kit of parts bot to train students on building robots from the mechanical perspective, and thinking through various designs such as under vs over bumper for intake.
Teaching students to test assumptions and watching them validate them quickly and iteratively was definitely the name of the game this week. Even as the CAD students design the robot, we’re still going to be testing and prototyping things to try and make incremental improvements on the robot. Better to find any issues now than after hours of design and manufacturing!
Also, a huge thank you to team 1339 for squeezing into the Butler 4 building, allowing us to utilize Butler 3 while our usual meeting space in the loft is closed during this school holiday weekend.
To our empty loft, we’ll see you on Tuesday!
We frequently emphasize the importance of time management and avoiding burnout within our team. With the majority of our ~23 students being 9th graders, it’s understandable that balancing the demands of a new school and participating in extracurricular activities like robotics four days a week can be challenging. To assist with these challenges and maintaining awareness of deadlines, these are some of the aids we’re trying out:
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Kanban boards (via Trello.com) for each subteam to see the status of a task/card, and be able to drag the task/card into whatever list describes the new state. e.g., To Do, In Progress, Done.
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Gantt chart as a visual tool (via Monday.com thanks to FIRST). The team’s goal is to have a robot that drives, intakes notes, & can score at least one method (speaker vs amp) with the notes by the time our friends in Colorado Springs host their annual week zero scrimmage. As Mentors, we’ll be updating timelines & milestones so we can post a screenshot of this a couple times a week. Opting for screenshots to reduce systems for students to keep track of. While this could technically replace Trello, even the FRC hookup is limited to 10 users.
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Discord Webhooks (via Linux coreutils, shellscipts, & cronjobs) as a reminder of the remaining days, meetings, & meeting hours.
We’ve started using ChronicleBot to sync our team google calendar to discord. It’s been working great as a reminder for meetings, and it allows multiple people to modify without Linux knowledge.
Great minds think alike. We also use Chroniclebot
Thanks so much - you’ve done a fantastic job on this video! What a great resource.
Week 3 is a wrap! Our CAD team pulled off some amazing contributions to get their robot design just about complete before the end of their allotted time.
We set a goal for CAD to leverage a master sketch-based multi-document design so that each document could be worked on independently. 3847 Spectrum’s OnShape Robot Organization youtube guide was immensely helpful and highly recommended. We struggled to land the shared origin concept but will revisit that in the off-season for next year’s incoming students.
After a couple fresh starts, the master sketch came into focus. Our UTB (under the bumper) design was meant to minimize the degrees of freedom on our robot which greatly simplifies the CAD, Mechanical, & Programming requirements for the team.
Working our way from the ground up…
The drive train belly pan was cut very short to allow a more subtle angle for the upcoming intake/indexer:
Our intake/indexer:
The adjustable shooter:
Finally, our ribcage will house most of our electrical components. We’re headed this direction in an attempt to use the battery to offset the weight of everything on the robot towards the rear.
Let’s take it for a spin
Fabrication begins Monday!
We edited a super cut of the Crescendo field tour videos to help our upcoming drive team better rehearse the game mechanics. Hoping it also helps the families understand more of the up close elements while they watch from the stands.
We just ordered our pre-burned silkscreen so we can make our own shirts and show support for our amazing sponsors
NASA
Argosy Foundation
Colorado FIRST
Comcast
Hallmoore Engineering