Who Are We?
WE ARE a student-run collegiate engineering club that will construct a competitive prototype for the annual FRC challenge in 3 days (72 hours) to showcase learnings and ideas to traditional high school teams. Penn State is located in State College, PA and we will work alongside local team “Center Punch” (4027) to collaboratively build a practice field and aid in other ways when possible. We aim to publish and document all of our successes and failures in the design process via social media, livesteams and showcase videos. Overall, we hope that teams will be able to benefit from our experiences and findings!
2024 Season Goals
The biggest goal for us this first year is to understand our position as an Ri3D team and how we can contribute to FIRST’s core values of discovery, innovation, impact, inclusion, teamwork & fun while producing content that is practically useful for high school FRC teams. This CD post has given us insight and has helped shape our goals as a team. (Worth a read!)
We are creating this build thread on Chief Delphi specifically because we’ve noticed these pages get the greatest direct engagement from the FRC community. We hope to organize this page similarly to Grasshoppers (95), Spectrum (3847), & Rembrandts (4481) among others!
As a first-year Ri3D team, we’re looking to build and document prototypes that are useful to a wide range of teams. We will avoid “executing the obvious design” and focus more on testing prototypes that we feel will be most useful to a majority of FRC teams.
Partnerships (Build Spaces)
Penn State University (Learning Factory)
As students at Penn State, we are privileged to have access to the newly constructed Engineering Design and Innovation building (the Learning Factory), which features a large open makerspace with 24-hour access that will be our home base for our 72-hour build event.
OriginLabs
Since kickoff is during the weekend before classes start, the machine and wood shops on Penn State’s campus are closed. After reaching out to local shops in the community, OriginLabs agreed to partner with us, so we will be able to use their wood and metal shops to do our fabrication for the robot this year! (video about this space to come)
Organizational Structure
Team Structure
- Executive Committee (President, VP, Treasurer)
- Team (Co-)Leads (business, electrical, fabrication, field-construction, mechanical, media, programming)
- Team members (focus on to 1-2 sub-teams typically) - Total Team Size: 29 students
Build Event Structure (72 hours)
- The pdf attached Schedule.pdf (356.1 KB) outlines our timelines and deliverables for the main group, field construction group and the media group. All of the media deliverables (daily reports, Q&A, and final reveal) will be posted on this build thread as well as on our website.
- Formal documentation (will updated at the end of each day 1/6 - 1/8). You can stay in the loop by following our activity on all our platforms!
- CAD - OnShape (Link to be announced)
- Reports - Detailed documentation reports will be posted on our website
- Programming - Code will be posted on GitHub (Link to be announced)
- Livestreams - Twitch
- Videos (Daily Reports, Q&A, Reveal) - Youtube
- Other updates - Instagram
Our Current Setup
It drives around!
Chassis
- Drop-center kit of parts tank chassis, powered by 4 falcons
- Plastic belly pan with control system electronics mounted
- T-slot frame for quick assembly (pictures to come)
Electronics
- CTR control system
- NEOs, NEO 550s, & SparkMAXs
- Limit switches & Beam breaks
Other Components
- 1” t-slot extrusion and brackets
- REV MAXTube extrusion and brackets
- REV MaxPlanetary gearboxes
- 1/2” hex shaft components
