Team 9659, the Vanier Vikings would like to introduce ourselves to Chief Delphi. This build thread will be covering our build for the off-season event Overtime Sunday, October 20th. As we just finished recruitment we will be designing and building a new robot for this event.
September 19th
We had a successful introduction meeting to the team where all the leads spoke about each subteam and what was expected, roughly 80 people showed up for it. The reception seemed to be great and we had a lot of questions regarding what the team does.
September 20th
Our admin has confirmed that we will be attending the offseason event, we plan to teach new recruits safety training over the next 2 weeks while we wait for the parts of our next robot to arrive. While it will be a tight schedule to have this robot done within a month we think it’s doable. Here is the CAD model we have developed for this robot which we have named Conswervo.
We chose to stick with the kit bot shooter as it’s what we have on hand and a complicated shooter would take too long for new recruits to assemble. Our Swerve is expected to arrive sometime next week, the code for it has already been finished and it works in the sim, that’s probably 50% of the way there. We’ve decided on going L4 swerve to make up for our lack of a long-range shot alongside lacking amp capabilities. Our center of gravity is also fairly low making us quite confident in our ability to move decently fast.
I really admire this simple, yet ambitious, off-season re-design. Reusing large components of your original design, and combining it with a lot of COTS solutions is very smart decision. No matter what the outcome, this is going to put you in a great spot for the 2025 season!
Major W. Glad to see your team going into the off season redesigning, as it means having new members to take part of “build season” before the official season begins. High hopes for such team.
September 21
While evaluating team resources we came to the conclusion that we didn’t want to order timing belts as VEX had run out of the sizes we needed. We considered using TPU timing belts but ultimately decided against that. Our main season robot (Consurgo) used chains for the intake run, so we used that instead. Consurgo faced issues regarding tensioning due to plates bending, so we decided to use 1/4" 5052 aluminum for the intake this time. The intake plates were also changed to be the exact same for both the left and right sides, as such it would make manufacturing and assembling it much easier.
A concern we do have regarding this robot is that our sponsor’s lead time on forming metal may be quite long, we shall see on Monday whether this is a concern or not. If lead times are too long we are considering making angled brackets ourselves or using Nut Strips to secure things together.
Furthermore, we have begun making drawings of our parts in anticipation of sending them to our sponsor for fabrication.
We have also begun working on our repository for this robot, while we intend on the new recruits to code it the leads will likely have a version of the code they write themselves in case things don’t go according to plan.
September 26
The past week we had a team meeting where we decided out of the 20 people that we’re allowed to send to the event, it would be our 2 drivers (one of which is our mechanical lead) and our programming lead. The rest would all be new recruits as we want to maximize the amount of new recruits attending the event. After reviewing team resources and what was available to purchase, we have decided that 3.5" screws were unfeasible, we have none on hand, and we would need to order Phillips or flat-head ones which we greatly despise. As such the belly pan assembly has been slightly modified to allow for 0.625" bolts to hold the assembly together (holes were increased so the socket could fit through and be tightened).
This allows us to use shorter bolts, and in theory increase the strength, allowing us to use greater clamping force. Some other modifications were made so that the robot itself could actually be assembled.
We had our first meetings for each subteam, the new recruits seemed eager to learn and the turnout was massive for some of the subteams. The most notable one was the programming subteam which had 30+ members attend.
Our sponsor Sable Metals has reached back and we expect our parts for the mechanisms such as the intake and the launcher to arrive around October 14th, giving us 1 week to assemble everything and get it working. This robot isn’t very complicated but it’s still cutting it close. We hope that it’s enough time to get it working.
Swerve drive is a major component, it arrives October 1st, a week later than expected. This creates a few issues giving us roughly 1.5 weeks to get the code working. The drive code alongside the autonomous code has been written, whether it works in 1.5 weeks is up to luck. As such we have decided to cut the scope of what we wanted to program, removing all driver assistance such as note tracking from our list of todos. At the very least we hope for a working autonomous as we believe that’s the most important aspect of the robot to get working. Alongside this club fair for our school is next week, we don’t believe it’s reasonable to get Swerve working by then so the team is reassembling the drive train of our tank bot for the club fair. We hope to have assembled swerve modules to display during the club fair.
October 1st,
Today we had swerve arrive and we began assembly. Unfortunately, we broke 3 out of our 5 magnets while assembling it due to a misunderstanding of how it was assembled. As such only 2 modules have been assembled.
While cutting tubing, we misread the measurement for the offset as they thought it was a 0.5" offset whereas a Thrifty swerve module has a 0.25" offset. This means we will need to purchase new tubing, it likely won’t be punched so our team members will have quite a fun time drilling it, after all, hard work builds character. We likely won’t have the new pieces to continue our swerve modules nor the tubing for it until Thursday or Friday, throwing quite the wrench in our plans. Hopefully, the next few days will go better.
October 4th,
After discussing with the manufacturer, our swerve module center columns that held the magnets were a few thou too small. As such we incorrectly assumed how it was supposed to be assembled, resulting in 2/5 being unusable. We expect replacements to arrive on Monday and to begin using on Tuesday. This has pushed everything further back making the schedule even tighter. For now, we have 3 swerve modules built and have begun assembling the drive train together. Using a hand rivet gun has proven to be quite difficult, but we believe hard work builds character.
We plan to make some gromets to run the cabling through the center of the tubing to make everything cleaner. Sable Metals our metal fabrication sponsor finished manufacturing our parts today and the team began deburring and finalizing the bearing hole sizes. These came earlier than expected so we hope to have the robot done by either Tuesday or Wednesday.
