FRC Team 2980 2024 Open Source Thread

FIRST FRC Open Alliance
1

This is more of an open book thread than anything else. I use this to share my thoughts, my team’s process, and yes, our designs, concepts, and ideas. It also contains my emotions and the goings on on the team.

Is it too early in the season to be exhausted?

Last year my team made it to District Champs. It was the first time that we as a team qualified based on the performance of our robot, which was surprising given our lagging performance at our first district event. After our FIrst district event we realized that we had built the wrong robot. Our robot was tall and top heavy. We had a giant arm that swung through the robot, We had a cone intake that didn’t work, We struggled to load from the human player station and our arm’s shoulder setup kept breaking.

So, between district events we tore the entire robot apart and started over.

We cut the uprights from something like 32 inches down to 14.
We redesigned the shoulder joint.
We completely redesigned/stole from 2910 our intake

Basically we built a completely new robot.

The problem was, that took almost everything out of the team. We put in the work, and it payed off at our second event, but it came at a huge cost. By the time we got to district champs everyone on the team was exhausted and it showed.

The robot would come back from a match with known issues and our pit crew seemed to struggle to get motivated enough to fix anything. Our drive team struggled to perform and often ended up blaming problems on our pit crew.

Our lead scouts ended the day crying because so many people on the team just didn’t show up for their scouting slots…

In anycase, we really struggled and I think the kids were miserable.

Last year was the first year that we ran 2 FTC teams. We did decently well in FTC, not perfect, but we did well in our first two district events and while we weren’t putting up the huge numbers some other teams were capable of, both of our teams were consistent and were able to contribute.

That said, running two FTC teams, mentoring 8 FLL teams, and essentially building two FRC robots meant we were running out of steam come district champs. I really don’t think we would have been able to do anything had we actually qualified for worlds.

So…This year. Instead of 2 FTC teams we ran 3. We also sent a robot to Girls Gen. We again hosted 8 FLL teams, and we hosted 2 FTC events.

FRC hasn’t even started and I have that “tired behind my eyeballs” feeling. I find myself struggling to deal with minor team member conflicts without losing my cool and saying the absolutely wrong thing.

I don’t know…I know I will get through this year, but I’m not looking forward to it.
I hope the kids are.

I want them to have a great year. I have a few seniors who have been with us since FLL and I want them to get to experience the type of success this team used to experience…I want them to have something to look back on, and I hope they look back on it fondly.

I could also just curl up into a ball and go to sleep for the next 4 months.

Did I mention the kids are talking about hosting an FRC training weekend next year?

So…

Here is to another year.

Nuff for now,

Edoga

26 Likes
2

It is 525 in the morning and I’m already talking to myself. I need to go do my morning yoga practice and center myself for the day.

So…the question. How do I empower the greatest possible number of kids without disempowering the kids on the team that are taking responsibility for things and trying to push the team in a new direction?

The good of the many before the good of the one? What does the good of the many look like?

Edoga

6 Likes
3

So…a huge part of the problem.

It is perfectly natural when something unexpected, undesired, or threatening happens, to assume the absolute worst intentions.

Years ago I had a little girl in my class, (I taught middle school at the time) and her name was Demoneisha. It was probably one of those unfortunate combinations of names where someone in her family was named Daymon and someone else was named Eisha or something and they just put the two names together.

In anycase, for the longest time, it didn’t matter what that kid did, I always assumed it was something bad.

She smiled at me and said hello, and I saw it as a sneer and false greeting.

She did a good job on an assignment, and I assumed she had cheated or was trying to lull me into a false sense of security.

Pretty much, I caught myself always assuming the worst.

Then I stopped one day and really looked at her. I really looked at her work, and the things she was doing, and I realized she was the absolute sweetest kid ever.

I ended up really loving that kid and feeling terrible about the way that I thought about her based on something as simple as her name.

So…

We have a kid on the team who is really really really (that is three reallys mind you) into FIRST. Seriously awesome kid. Hard working, smart, incredibly knowledgeable…

And they are desperately trying to plug up holes that they are seeing in our program.

One example is that we have had a number of things fall through the cracks due to miss communications, or people simply forgetting to do things. This kid quietly tries to take care of things…

The response has been that people feel threatened.

So and so is trying to “take my job”

So and so is “squeezing me out”

So and so “Tried to tell me how to do my job!”

Really for this kid there was no win.

So…I spent most of the meeting talking with people. Asking them how they would feel if they solved a major ongoing problem for the team and then had the team repeatedly attack them for it.

I asked them what they would do if they, for example, noticed that the team was about to miss out on FIRST Choice?

Would they just let us miss it because it wasn’t there job?

Years ago when we were a new team, (the soccer year) We build a terrible robot.

For some reason you had to tighten the wheels to exactly the right torque setting (I don’t think we know about nylock nuts at that point, or the wheels would fall off of the robot during a match.

So we got this one kid and his whole job was to torque the nuts with a torque wrench before each match.

So during a match sure enough two of our wheels fall off and our robot tore the carpet on the field.

We bring the robot back to the pit followed by several robot inspectors (who swapped out all of the nuts for nylocks mind you) and a kid on the team looked at me and said, “Well…I saw that so and so forgot to tighten the nuts, but I didn’t say anything because you guys told me that it was his job.”

Sooo…That was a huge part of my day.

Thing is, this is a two parter.

We are a year round team. We run FLL and FTC in the fall, and FRC in the spring. All of our teams do community service and special projects the rest of the year.

A number of our kids do other things.

Some do band, others sports.

Many of our more experienced members don’t participate in FTC at all.

The problem…

At the end of last year/the beginning of this year, we noted that our team’s traditionally marginalized representation was lagging. That is something we were pretty good about before the pandemic, but the huge drop in numbers and subsequent recruitment efforts haven’t worked very well to make it so our team demographics and school demographics line up.

So…We made some pretty big investments over the past few months.

We got the team to Girl’s Gen. We made a trip to Girl Geek Con, We brought back our Girl’s Day event, and we had one of our 3 FTC teams be for traditionally marginalized individuals.
We still aren’t perfect, but we gave some kids the experience they needed in order for them to feel comfortable moving into leadership roles on our FRC team. We are making progress, and working pretty hard at it.

The thing is,

A number of kids are coming back now that we are getting ready for kickoff, and thinking that they still need to fight and throw elbows in order to get represented on the team.

Partially it comes down to the original part of this post.

People are looking around and automatically assuming the worst.

Again, it isn’t perfect in any way. We still have work to do, but we are making progress and actually have goals.

So…

I spent a lot of time today talking with people. Helping them through their problems and feelings. Helping them to see where other people on the team are coming from, and hopefully to see that everyone is trying their best to make things better.

Hopefully it sticks and hopefully the rest of the season won’t be this hard.

Ok…enough for now.

Edoga

14 Likes
4

This is the honest and wholesome content I lurk here for, thank you for sharing your team experience with all of us

4 Likes
5

Edoga 01/09/24

First three confessions:

Outside of writing my name and the title on the cover, my engineering notebook is completely blank.

I am worried that some members of my team are completely ignoring the process that our team uses to come up with our robot design and trying to manipulate things in order to get their personal desired outcome.

I have only written less than 1/3rd of the test that we are going to use in order to determine what roles people have on the team at competitions. (it doesn’t exactly work that way, but it sort of does.)

Every morning before leaving the house I have to remind myself that I am OK, and that I will be OK. I’ll be honest, I am super stressed. This is a relatively precarious time for our team. Yesterday I overheard some of the kids talking about what the robot “needed” to be like, and when I cautioned them about the process one of them suggested that if the community came up with a design that wasn’t the way he wanted it to be then he “wasn’t doing it.”

I find this incredibly troubling.

A handful of years ago we almost stopped having a team.

The community decided that the team needed to build a robot capable of doing a task, but did not specify the exact way in which the team should do it. Two kids, two different ideas on how to solve the problem.

The team split, some following one of the kids, the rest following the other.

The two groups started having meetings outside of our meeting times.

We ended up having to stop everything and have a team meeting. At the team meeting all of the resentment that had built up between all of the kids came out. People accused each other of horrible things. Parents got involved. Parents began accusing kids of horrible things. It was a terrible time.

In the end it turned out that the whole conflict had nothing to do with the robot at all. It was about people trying to exert power over others. When the team finally decided to go with the simpler of the two solutions, three of the instigators pretty much abandoned the person who they had originally purported to be fighting to support while one of the kids from the other team who had been accused of all sorts of horrible things stepped up to help build the idea that he had been arguing against.

I know I can’t keep fighting old battles, and just because I see some similar feeling events, doesn’t mean that I am going to see similar outcomes. I know the kids are all just trying their best to get what they think is the going to be the best possible outcome, and a huge part of the issue is that in their minds, everyone else’s ideas and the entire process are completely flawed. I’m sure they have wonderfully rational arguments too. I’m sure they have done their research. And maybe they are absolutely right.

But…

What if they are wrong?

What if once everything is done we realize that we built the wrong robot? IE a shooter during steamworks, or a climber during aerial Assist…(yup…that was us.)

In both cases it was really smart kids manipulating the system. Luckily Steamworks we had enough of a gear placer to still be successful.
]
The next day

Yesterday after our meeting a couple of kids came up to me and asked if they could have 1 representative from each group in the room when the parents are deciding.

Two things that stuck with me…

We have spent the last 2 days coming up with different mechanisms for completing various tasks that are part of the competition. For example, a team was tasked with figuring out all the different ways we could pick up notes. One of the kids said, “I don’t know what the point of the last 2 days was.” When I suggested that they had not taken the last two days seriously and treated it like a waste of time.
One of the kids said that his parents didn’t want to come to our design competition because “last year it turned into a bunch of people just yelling at each other.” Which it sort of did. Last year things sort of got out of hand. There were two camps, One camp around a robot with an arm, and the other camp around fixed linear slides. The two camps dug their heels in and would not budge. One of the questions that I ask the community is, “If we went with this design instead of the one you chose, could you deal with that?”Some of the people flat out said, “No.”

We have tried letting team representatives stay in the room for the decision process in the past and it REALLY didn’t work out. There was an imbalance between the kids in the room and that heavily swayed the community’s decision in a way that ended up costing the team.

I know the kids who came up to me have the best interest of the team at heart, but I also feel like I am hugging a dragon. There is the potential for serious harm to come to the team if we screw this up.

Can I stress how much I hate this part of the process?

Here is the slide show I’m going to go through with the team today.

I think where we might end up is having the team come up with the 3 distinct designs and then telling the community that they need to just select one. No changes.

The only allowable thing would be for the community to add “Reach goals” or, “second comp goals”.

That way we would be greatly limiting the community’s input, which might be a sad thing. It also means that we would have winners and losers in the different design competitions.

In the past when things have worked out that way, we have had losers work to either directly sabotage the chosen design, or continuously fight to switch the design to something much more closely related to their, losing one.

Oh…and my wife just came in, (she teaches in the same building.) I need to remember to schedule a dentist appointment. The soonest they have available is May.

I’m thinking by the time that happens all of this will be over and done with.

Ok…Wish me luck.

Enough for now,

Edoga

8 Likes
6

First, I want to say how much I enjoy reading this thread every year. Your caring for your students really shows.

I wanted to say that it is ok for adult mentors or coaches to have the final say on what goes on the robot. Most students do not have the experience to understand what can be done in a reasonable time. I usually say that a robot on paper has never scored a point in FRC history.

If a student disagrees with a design decision, I allow them to CAD & prototype his design to show the rest of us the merit of the design change. 9 times out of 10 they do not want to put in the extra work to do so and they drop it.

As a fellow teacher, I appreciate what you do for your students.

Good luck this season and take care of yourself.

JMH

8 Likes
7

Totally agree…to a point.

One thing that I ask myself on a regular basis when having conflicts with students is,

" What do I lose if I win, and what do they lose if they lose."

The last thing I ever want to be is the reason why a kid stops doing this, or a reason why a kid leaves the team. I can influence them, but only if I can keep them around.

I think we are in a better place today than we were yesterday, which is good, we still have two angry cats that rightly or wrongly can destroy the team trying to prove which is “smarter”. So…I will have to carefully navigate the minefield of their egos and emotions.

Thanks for the well wishes and reminder.

Edoga

5 Likes
8

01/14/25

First things first.

The team had our annual design competition on Friday. We walked away with a design. Basically an under the bumper intake feeding up to an aimable shooter. The robot should have a light weight arm that folds out of the launcher to help guide notes into the amp.

Pretty much a mix of parts from robot in 3 days robots.

The actual CADD will be released sooner rather than later if all goes well.

EIther way I am not unhappy with the way things are working out, and I am hoping for a less stressful, things constantly breaking/not working season.

Fingers crossed.

One of our FTC teams is moving on to state champs. First time in the history of our FTC program. They were the 3rd place alliance captains and ended up losing in the finals, but one of the teams that won the Inspire award was on the first place alliance. So…they get to move on.

I don’t like to watch matches. I get really stressed out because I want them to succeed, and I also recognize that I can’t control what they do and the choices they make.

So…I didn’t see how they did, and don’t really know what went on.

But…They came in second and from what I hear they actually did pretty well.

So…now we need to figure out how to keep our FTC team from falling apart, while also managing our FRC team…

It also means I can’t move all of the FTC stuff to storage just yet as I planned, and won’t have room for the FRC field elements that are getting built tomorrow.

Conflicts

It is really exhausting having someone constantly look for ways to challenge you. I try to make the best decisions I can for the team, in the moment. I try to listen to the team, and I try to resolve conflicts in ways that make sense.

So…today someone suggested that I was a “push over” because I allowed the team to only form 3 design teams instead of 5.

Historically we have had 3. And, having 5 just didn’t make sense on a number of different levels.

  1. The team didn’t do their homework on the first 2 days. I really wanted them to come up with every possible way to do each thing they wanted to do. Instead they just watched robot in 3 days videos and came up with the complete robots they wanted to build.
  2. It doesn’t make sense to have that many design teams because there weren’t enough different design ideas for subsystems so it would have ended up being 5 design teams proposing pretty much the same robot.
  3. Given the limited number of types of game pieces (1) and the status of our team (good enough that we should be able to do almost all the things relatively well. Not good enough to focus on one thing and dictate to other teams what we are doing.)
  4. I am not sure I could get the community to sit through 5 presentations. It is hard enough to have them sit through 3.

So…In my opinion, I made a different decision based on new information. Again, I am trying to make the best decisions for the team in the moment. But find myself being accused of “giving in” to the kids.

The hard part for me is the false dilemma this presents. At some point that is going to put me in the position of disagreeing with a kid, despite the kid being absolutely right, just in order to demonstrate that I am not in fact a push-over. Now I have to worry about the potential of doing that, and that consideration will have to effect my decision making moving forward.

Today the kids took the rules test

On our team we use the test to pick the three kids who decide what roles everyone gets at competition. We did/are doing the test early this year because we are planning on having our drive base up and running relatively quickly (possibly by the end of the week), and we want to give our drive team as much time to work with the robot as possible.

Thing is…the test is sort of stupid.

It tests for the wrong things.

Which is the nature of the test.

That said, it is the process and some process is better than no process?

Ok…I’ll post the test later on this week once everyone has had a chance to take it. You’ll see what I mean about it being stupid.

Enough for now.

Edoga

6 Likes
9

01/17/24

I am going through a bit of a metric reorganization. So…a cool trick to do as a composer is to have some part of the music that lends itself strongly to being perceived as the downbeat being in one place, only to introduce a new voice that completely changes our understanding of where the down beat is. This happens a lot with techno…

Enough about that though it just left me in a strange mood since yesterday…But…I dealt with everything today and things are back on track.

That said, we had a snow day today and the CADD team was hard at work on the CADD model. They are using CashCAD to work cooperatively, and every time I check there are dozens of changes to the CADD model.

Hopefully we will have a cut list tomorrow and can get everything fabricated pretty quickly.

The really cool part is that I haven’t had to CADD anything. (Not exactly true. I CADDed a bracket for a bumper mount because the ones in the model may break rule R101…

I will post the CADD as soon as It is done. There are a ton of broken constraints in the drawing. I may go through tomorrow and reassemble it, but I am not sure I want to do that. I am also pretty convinced if I just wait long enough they will fix everything so I should just leave them alone.

Our media department is gearing up for all of the stuff we are going to put on them.

A coloring book, some buttons, a t-shirt design…Also they are going to be decorating our pit to showcase art. I’m pretty excited.

I just emailed them. Years ago, recycle rush year I think, we painted our entire pit white and hung artwork all over it. We put sculptures on the shelves.

Besides the fact that we had to rebuild our entire drivetrain at our first competition that year, things went great!

Actually, the art stuff was pretty cool.

I know…today is a short one.

Enough for now though.

Edoga

8 Likes
10

Edoga 01/20/24

First off,

I made the bumpers translucent in this one so you can see the “under the bumper” intake…

Here is a link to the complete CADD, or the version of it that is available right now:

Here is a link to our Rules Test:

There is also a PDF version:

Today on Facebook a Robot friend posted that she felt like she was getting burnt out by doing year round robotics, and how much better she felt to be getting back to only doing FRC. She talked about how now, she is looking forward to these few months of doing what she loves.

Maybe that is my problem? I guess the harder part is that doing this year round is sort of my job. Well…My job depends on me doing this year round? Something like that.

Years ago I said that I was an FRC mentor first, and a teacher second. My main priority, the real meat and potatoes of my job was being an FRC mentor. That is very much still the case, though I am having a harder and harder time making it all work.

Not really…I don’t think, but there are things around the edges that are bothering me, and perhaps more than they did in the past, or should even now. But…Here we are?

Its the little things that build up on you. I had a rough couple of days with a person on the team. Sort of ripping off of a scab, and a whole lot of things that didn’t make sense before came into focus. Painful, but necessary. Then there are the normal day to day things. Every time my wife says something along the lines of, “Well it’s robot season so it’s not like I get to see my husband outside of work anymore.” Or just the way so many people on the team just seem to resist everything that I try to get them to do…I feel like there was a time when the team trusted me.

I’m not saying that everything I say should be law or anything, It’s more that I feel like more and more we as a team just aren’t willing to try anything new or daring.

So…I suppose I need to just stop pushing for a while and accept that it is what it is. And that right there is where I think the problem is coming from.

We have to really LOVE this in order to do it as much and as hard as we do. We have to look forward to it, and find ourselves thinking about it even when we aren’t. Instead I’m finding myself headbutting a wall of “no”s and complaints.

Meh…enough whining

A part of me thinks that we will have a good robot this year. Another part of me worries that everyone will have a good robot this year. I wonder what we are missing. A team already posted a 6 note auto? When I saw the Citrus Circuits 5 note auto a week ago I figured things were getting out of hand, but 6!?

This! What the heck! It is what…week 3? Week 3 and a team is already posting a 6 note auto. My team is pushing for 3, so the preloaded note and possibly 2 more, but 6? At this point we have prototyped our intake and a very very very (is 3 verys enough to get my point across?) basic shooter.

The everybot is also pretty decent. While it can’t floor load as far as I can see. But even that could score one in auto. Though from watching the video I can see how climbing on the chain is something we are going to have to practice. The way the robot is swinging around…I wonder if getting ground clearance to wear the bumpers won’t catch on the ground when the robot swings back and forth might end up being a problem for some teams…Probably not as much of a problem as I might think, but who knows.

When I was in college I was on the diving team. I wasn’t very good, but that isn’t the point. The point is, that the differences between any and all of the divers and their skill level meant that there was very little actual competition. The person you were competing against was either amazingly better than you, or you were better than them but enough that you weren’t really worried about things during competition. For me it was mostly the latter btw. But the point is that unless something went really wrong, you weren’t actually competing with other people.

I am starting to wonder if this year is going to be the opposite. Where newer teams and low level teams will be able to scrape together something that can score at least one note during auto and then be able to help out with scoring in the amp, and teams like mine who should be more middle of the pack not being able to put up much more than that.

Being able to floor load will be a bonus, but that is something that most mid level teams will be able to do.

So maybe it will come down to execution and driver practice.

Today we powdercoated a bunch of robot parts.

A part of me worries that it is a waste of time, and had we not, then we could have the drive base up and running right now instead of hopefully by the end of the day tomorrow.

The shooter wasn’t done in CADD at the end of the day today, but given how furiously the CADD team has been working I wouldn’t be surprised if it was done by the time I post this.

So yeah…It will all come down to execution.

I would toast to that or something but…

I haven’t really been sharing songs of the day anymore. I listened to a bit of Marilyn Manson oddly enough…Sort of looking for a throwback.

Hopefully I’ll get my groove back tomorrow.

Ok…Enough for now.

Edoga

10 Likes
11

01/22/24 Edoga

Yesterday was a better day. The team made some decent progress and everyone seemed reasonably happy.

We may need to lift our intake. It is currently sitting about 1/8th of an inch above the ground. I worry that “self clearance” might lead to more reliability issues than we want to deal with. I’m thinking the pulley diameter wasn’t fully accounted for in CADD.

One thing that did bother me on Saturday was a few kids on the team being a bit mean. We as a team haven’t used the powder coating machine since Aerial Assist back in 2014, and only one kid on the team used it once for a class. So, the first belly pan had way too much powder on it when it went into the oven and ended up looking like a melted chocolate bar. People on the team complained until the kid who did the powder coating spent a few hours grinding all of the coating off so that it could be recoated. The really stupid part was that there was a mistake in the CADD anyway so the whole thing had to be remade. Second time it came out better, but I am still unhappy with the way the kid was treated. (Don’t worry. I talked with a couple of the kids about it already, and repeatedly told the kid who did all the work that he should make the complainers fix what they saw as being the problem.

But…All in all yesterday was a good day.

The drive base is 99 percent assembled and given how cleanly it is laid out the kids should be able to get it wired up and moving around pretty quickly. They still have to localize the spark maxs for the swerve modules. They also made a mistake and installed a bracket in the wrong place. Things are going to be incredibly tight btw.

One of the kids has a fondness for not putting holes in Cadd models. So…there are a few parts with the holes left out. Oddly the same kid complained that parts were being made without all of the holes they were supposed to have, or holes in the wrong place…As if there is no connection. Silly kids.

It is the next day. Made it home last night, wound down on the couch, and crashed into bed just before 10. Getting out of bed at 4:15 was hard, but necessary. I have to get up early in order to get through my morning routine or I end up being miserable for the rest of the day. I’m having some “getting old” issues (Arthritis and intestinal issues) that make it so that if I don’t get up and work out in the morning I am miserable for the rest of the day. Getting old sucks.

At least I managed to get all of my assignments posted and classroom materials created for today. During FTC I try to stay about a week out, posting all of my assignments for the week on Sunday…Meeting from 10 - 6 on Sundays makes that kind of hard.

Honestly if you asked me to list everything I got done yesterday I couldn’t tell you. I know I got 16,000 steps in, but I couldn’t tell you where I went. I think I ran the plasma cutter for 2 parts the kids gave me and I taught a couple kids how to use the power coater and oven…

Our programmers made themselves a little cave to work in. We throw food back there every once in a while to keep them alive and happy. Hopefully good things come out of this and they don’t program the robot to take over the world.

Our local resident aluminum welder came by. The nice part is he takes payment in yams. This was a 5 yam job. Good thing we don’t have to put that on a BOM.

This is the robot as of last night. The intake is temporarily mounted on the wrong side…Good thing it is just temporary. Actually, we had to take it off to have it welded anyway.

The next day:

Ok…so one problem that we are having…We have a couple of girls who don’t get much time working on the robot. The past couple of days they have been planning our Girl’s Day event…The rest of the team has continued on working on the robot…So…the ones planning our event which is supposed to be promoting women in stem are then the same ones who don’t get to work in stem because they are busy planning the promotion.

That isn’t to say that all of the girls on the team are doing planning and awards, but…The ones working on planning and awards are mostly girls. Gonna try to crack this egg today. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Ok. Enough for now.

Edoga

11 Likes
12

Edoga 01/29/24

Falling behind and struggling to not fall apart.

Are we behind schedule? Honestly I am not sure. I think we are behind other teams. I’m not sure we are behind our own schedule. I do think we are behind where we wanted to be.

That said, The drive train showed signs of life today. The team was working on getting the swerve modules to behave. In the least, things were moving.

The “final” version of the launcher was being assembled.

The Climber tubes have been cut. Nothing has been assembled, but the tubes got cut to the desired length.

The intake side plates got re-cut, and hopefully they were modified, lifting the bottom roller so that it isn’t less than an 8th of an inch off of the ground.

And, we started putting numbers on the blue bumpers!

So…things are going great!

That said, we had the difficult task of assigning roles at competition blow up on us as a team. Our process for this is perhaps “Sub optimal”, but it usually works out in a way that is mildly successful. So, we have our rules/robot/team history test. The three kids who score the highest get to, 1, Choose their own jobs, and 2, Go through the preferred jobs list and help choose jobs for everyone else on the team. The problem…Our team got much bigger, all of a sudden, so there aren’t going to be enough jobs for everyone.

Historically, the three kids who are top scorers have chosen to lead different aspects of our competition team, and then chosen the people they wanted to work with. There has usually been some giving and taking, some “Horse trading” as it were, but this method lead to the largest number of people feeling relatively good about where they ended up.

Part of the problem this year is that two of the three kids involved chose to be on drive team, so the drive team got locked down pretty quickly. This created the difficulty of having 3 kids choose the lead roles for pit crew and scouting. I thought they were going to consider test scores, a jobs survey, and other information in making their choices, and for the most part they did that, but some of the choices got quite a bit of pushback from certain members of the team, which lead to some raw nerves and hurt feelings.

I think things are almost figured out at this point. Hopefully…

Ok. Enough for now. I will try to add pictures tomorrow.

Edoga

8 Likes
13

Edoga 01/31/24

Things have gotten better over the past few days. The team is starting to settle down and people are starting to get along better. There is still some well poisoning going on, but it has been greatly minimized and seems to be waning. This entire week has been strange in that we had a strange schedule because people have to register for their classes for next year this week. Today was the first day that I actually got to get ahead with posting assignments for my classes which means I can take time to actually write about what has been going on on the team for a change. Now one problem with this is that in my head it is already Friday evening. “I know…weird right?” See…I’ve already posted assignments for the week and made the daily agenda and all that good stuff, so in my head, the week has already happened. Oh well…

We are both behind schedule and on schedule at the moment. It is funny, we were close to being ahead of schedule a few weeks ago and things were looking really good. Now things are just looking regular? If we were done with assembly by Sunday and into programming and test driving early next week, then I would say that we are on schedule. The intake might finish being re-welded tomorrow. But we are losing out on Saturday because of FTC. The reality is the team keeps sort of running into walls and people keep not working on things in a way that adds up to getting things done.

There isn’t as much doing and undoing as there sometimes can be, and things don’t seem to be as wrong as I think most of the time, but it seems like everything something gets close to being done, everyone stops working on it and goes off to do something else, or something gets broken…

I know…Better now than three weeks from now, but I really want my drivers driving as soon as possible.

I know it is stupid because a part of me is looking at teams posting 5 and 6 note autos already and wondering what those teams are going to do for the rest of the time. We were joking with our lead pit scout about this. “How many notes can a team claim to be able to score in auto before you know they are full of it?”

Meh…Every time I think I know what I am going to see I learn exactly how wrong I was.

So…There is a weird sort of bias. Because we are aware of Chief Delphi, and have been around for a while, we know that there are a number of really good teams out there, and we want to grow up to be like them some day. So the thing is, are we really going to be or do well enough to get there this year? Looking at our robot I hope we have a good chance, but then I look around and think everyone is going to be really competitive this year. Everyone is going to be able to score in Auto. Everyone is going to be able to climb…Everyone is going to be able to score in the speaker and a large number of teams will be able to score in the amp. Heck…maybe it will be the other way around.

So…Maybe the reason why I am feeling relatively confident about this year is because everyone will be able to feel confident about this year…

And…Unless something goes really right over the next few, we will be behind schedule on monday.

The Next Day

This was our agenda 1 year ago today. At that time we had no electronics, and we weren’t done with CADD. We were hoping to be physically assembled in a week, and that was before last year’s major last minute disaster which required a complete redesign or our robot arm.

Compared to that we are in robot heaven this year!

That said, I think it is the current level of comfort that is really making me nervous.

For some reason the team uses roles of tape for propping up the robot…

This shows the porkchop mounted on the frame just behind the moderately modified climber in a box. I took this picture before it got welded. The teacher who helps out with welding is actually a retired special education teacher who was an iron worker in a previous life. At some point in his history he taught welding. Only thing is he hasn’t tig welded since the last time we asked him to, I spent some time going back through previous robots and I can’t remember the last one that had any welded parts on it. So…It has been a bit hard for him to scrape all of the cobwebs out of the welding part of his brain.

This caused some of the kids on the team to be a little bit rude…The really nice part is, that a couple of our kids have been more kind and are actually laying reliable beads on aluminum with decent penetration and everything. Not going to be able to use their welds on an actual robot any time soon and the tungsten’s keep getting fouled cause they dip them in the puddle, but some day, maybe next year some of them will be able to do the welding for us on their own.

That said, you can also see the result of a persistent problem that persisted despite being a known issue.

So…The hole spacing on the side of the robot is wrong. It was off by a half an inch. Instead of remaking the entire frame, we were supposed to make the porkchop a half inch shorter and add new holes where the porkchop was supposed to mount…

Well…Neither of those things happened despite us needing to remake the porkchop before the welder came back in.

This is the first iteration of the intake. The welds didn’t have good penetration and broke pretty easily. Oddly I don’t think we actually need the front beam outside of using it to hold the bumper, but really it may end up working the other way around.

This shows the “front” of the robot We really need to clean up the wiring, but I think they have a decent foundation for that. So…I have hope. A small part of me is worried that the radio is too low in the frame and might not get the best reception where it is, but we will see and time will tell.

Here you can see the bumper mounts and more of the wiring spaghetti monster.

This shows how the notes will be taken from the intake into the launcher…

Have I mentioned how much I really hope this works out?

I really hope this works out.

Ok…Enough for now.

Edoga

6 Likes
14

Robot heaven is right!! This is looking gorgeous.

Any FRC team with this much robot done week 4 has a lot to be proud of, and will likely do really well at comp given the extra testing time.

1 Like
15

From your lips to god’s ears! I am really hopeful that this will all work out. Thanks for the words of encouragement.

Edoga

1 Like
16

Edoga 020224

I mock mounted the launcher…The motors aren’t on there…and I’m not sure I got a good pick of the linkage that tilts the launcher. The non-powder coated part is temporary while we wait for the smaller hubs to show up.

¾ view?\

The lowest roller of the intake was lifted by 1/8th inch. Hopefully that is enough.

The climber in a box still isn’t mounted.

The launcher tilted back which I think is for aiming into the amp. Might need to work on this angle though…


If you look carefully in the background you can see part of the climber in a box mechanism.

So…I guess it is all starting to come together. Now hopefully the darn things works.

Edoga

3 Likes
17

Edoga 02/06/24

I have been carrying a lot of stress when it comes to the team. My wife has noticed. She keeps suggesting that I take a day off…(I would if me taking a day off didn’t mean that the rest of the team couldn’t meet.) The thing is, the kids are starting to notice also? Or well, sort of notice. Some of the kids are starting to carry stress also. It is starting to show, and I need to remember that and work to suppress my anxiety.

The hard part is, I know my anxiety is unfounded. We are in a relatively good spot at the moment and things are really just going along as normal. The robot is moving around and all of the subsystems should work once we get everything together.

The robot is under the weight limit even with the hugely thick layer of powder covering everything (including parts that probably should not be coated) Either that or I have gotten a lot stronger! (I haven’t, though we should plan on getting the robot to the vet in the next week.

It would suck to have to lose a subsystem. (I don’t see that even remotely being a thing…of course now that I have thought about it…)

So…Onwards and upwards.

Things to be proud of?

  • We can score in the amp and the speaker.
  • We have a running and driving drive base
  • We have tested everything about our intake except for actually intaking
  • We can aim our launcher though we don’t have the sensor package/cameras hooked up yet.
  • We are 90% done assembling one of the two climber in a box modules and I think we have a solution for actually mounting them on the robot, though the longer this waits the harder everything gets. (People keep mounting stuff where the climbers need to go.)

Things that are frustrating me…

  • There is a lot of animosity between the awards team and the robot team. (not to say these SHOULD be two distinct groups of people but they are and have been two distinct groups of people for years now.) See…the robot kids resent the awards kids for not knowing what is going on with or helping out with the robot, and the awards kids resent the robot kids for not helping out with awards. The really hard part is, both sides have repeatedly made requests for ways to help the other only to be rebuffed for their efforts and then complained about. Not really sure how to fix this one. I have tried having dedicated awards time where the entire team has to work on awards as a way to force the robot kids to help out and free up the awards kids so that they can help with the robot during other times, but really there aren’t enough jobs to go around as is and everyone is desperately clutching on to whatever robot related job they can get. Recently I had a kid on the team walk over to a girl who was working on a part, take it out of her hand, and walk away with it to work on it himself. Had a meeting with his mother over that one. Same kid was working on the climber. I asked him to get other kids on the team to help. His response was, “They are perfectly welcome to come over here and help me if they want.” Basically,I am not going to involve anyone else in this if I can help it, this is my job!

We have 2 Saturdays left before competition. We have a community outreach event on the 24th so that day will be tied up working on that. 2 weekends left…

Holy crud.

Now you can see why I am carrying so much stress.

Aaaaaaaannnnnnnd…

Some of the kids decided to violate homework hour so I canceled the meeting and we all went home. I’m cracking down on kids who have grades D or lower in any classes and I got home before it was dark outside and used the time to clean my dog’s run and take them for a walk.

Made and ate dinner before 9 pm and now I’m going to bed well before 10.

Hopefully tomorrow will feel better.

Ok…enough for now.

Edoga

13 Likes
18

Edoga 02/09/24

Thoughts on this year’s robot…

We have an achilles heel. I would say we have several, but really there is one blaring one and several smaller ones.

Before I get too into this, what are all of your thoughts on the andymark “climber in a box”? A part of me thinks all of our current problems with the system stem from user error, but I’m not 100% sure.

Ok, so one of them was clearly assembled wrong at first and jammed in the down position. The wrong screws were used for holding the bearing in place and they stuck through rubbing on the square tube inside. No one knew where he right screws were but a trip to the hardware store and $10 or so later we were back in business. Metric button cap screws are no joke when you buy 1 or two or 8 at a time…

A trip to the hardware store also means buying chocolate for our non-technical awards mentor. I try to do that on the regular to keep them happy and willing to come back.

Once we replaced the offending screws it worked like a champ,or well…should work like a champ? Haven’t actually run it yet.

The second one…This time the kids working on it had the first one to use as an example. They could look at the first one and use it as a guide, and they had access to the brain that struggled through.

It also jammed, but this time we knew we were using the correct screws to hold the bearings in place. Today we didn’t have a meeting and I went through and tried every possible combination of everything I could come up with trying to eliminate any binding points. I am settling on the idea that the bearings are just too thick. They are super close, but just a bit too thick. If I only installed the bearing on one side then everything works just fine. As soon as you try to install the second one you are in bind city.

(By bearing I am referring to the plastic bearings or guides that nest between the two tubes that slide past each other, not the roller bearings that are mounted on the bearing block.

Tomorrow I may try 3d printing a guide that is slightly thinner to see if that works.

This is the guy I am talking about. I shaved .043 off to make it .125 thick…Figure I’ll print 2 and see if they still work as guides without increasing the friction too badly. The jam nuts might not fit after though of course, which would completely defeat the purpose, but we will see…

It is really nice that everyone posts CADD models of their parts though…

Currently I guess the kids can just go without the block on one side and get the robot 1 step closer to working…

So…back to the thick of it.

Our intake…It may work, it may not work…We haven’t really gotten to test it and it is like hitting a wall trying to push them to get it done enough to actually test things.

Also, the handoff between our intake and out launcher. That part is fixable, but is probably going to take a lot of work. The intake feeds notes into a couple of wheels that then feed the note into the launcher. The problem is the feeder wheels are too far away and there isn’t enough contact between them and the note unless the intake feeds it in at full send.

The intake may or may not have enough friction to actually pick up notes without them being squished up against the wall. The kids are afraid that increasing the grip of our intake might shred notes…I just want to find a solution and fast before we wake up unable to do anything other than launch a preloaded note at the beginning of a match and then play bumper cars for the rest of the time.

Circled in red = sometimes not grippy enough. Then again it is just smooth polycarb and the two rollers do make note zest when they are spinning. The concern is that if we make them more grippy they will just rip the notes to shreds.

Fingers crossed that works out because we don’t have another way to get notes. Our launcher can’t feed notes backwards from the source. In fact the notes drop into the robot making it so that we would be dead in the water.

And that is it isn’t it…I have a feeling this is going to be a very high scoring game. Looking at what is out there already, between the everybot and all the robot in 3 days bots, there are going to be a ton of robots that can score in the speaker relatively quickly and reliably from known positions, so pressed up against the subwoofer, and climb at the end of a match. Couple that with teams using the same subsystem to score in the amp say 80% of the time and robots designed specifically for scoring in the amp and you’re down to the alliances that can successfully complete the most cycles in a match.

Ok, so that seems pretty obvious…I sort of do like the idea of a team building a robot that just shoots notes onto the other side of the field for their alliance partners to pick up and score, but also realize that that would also shorten the cycle time for the opposing alliance if they could snap stuff up before the intended robot did…

But again, as with every year reliability is going to be key.

Now I know Chief delphi is a bit skewed. The teams/people accessing chief delphi have access to this information and wealth of knowledge. They know what a number of other people and teams are thinking and planning and can respond accordingly, but it is a hard gamble to think that you are “OK” where you are

I feel like a lot of the people on my team have hit a wall of sorts. Things get mostly done and then abandoned so very little is actually getting tested in any meaningful way. I understand that we still have 5 long days and 2 weeks to work on the robot, but I worry that the closer we get the less we seem to be getting done.

Maybe I”m reading too much into this, but I feel like getting the team to actually finish anything or deal with problems that we pretty well know are going to be problems is like pulling teeth…and I’m tired.

Honestly this year has been a bit more of a struggle for me than I would like to admit. I think burnout is too strong of a term, but…I have some health issues. I have always had health issues, so that is nothing new, but I’ve usually been able to either work through them or they have been bad enough to take me out all together. This year is a bit different.

So…in 2016 I was diagnosed with hodgkin’s lymphoma (a type or treatable cancer) for the second time. (seriously almost exactly 20 years after the first bout back in college) The cancer was labeled “persistent”, and I was told that I might experience long periods of relative health with periodic outbreaks that I would have to deal with. Somewhere on the order of 5 - 20 years of health between needing treatment. In 2020 I was diagnosed with non-hodgkin’s lymphoma. So…a new type, also thought to be persistent, but treatable if caught early.

So they wiped out my immune system at the beginning of the pandemic. Yay for me!

It hasn’t come back much at all. My wife and I joke every time I get a flu shot or covid vaccine I don’t experience any side effects. None…It doesn’t bother me at all. Oddly, mosquito bites don’t really bother me either. But…My doctors currently think I have some sort of autoimmune disorder. So the little bit of immune system that I do have is attacking my intestine and joints.

Some of my doctors think it is Crohn’s disease. Others think it may be rheumatoid arthritis. (the latter makes sense because my mom has it.) It could also be psoriatic arthritis and irritable bowel syndrome. Basically I have all the things, and it is making me much more tired and snippy than I would ever want to be.

It is making this year harder, not just for me, but for all of the people around me.

I get tired faster.

I don’t have the energy to push the team to do any of the big things anymore and it just makes me not want to do any of it.

A part of me knows, once they actually know what is wrong with me and start treating it then things will be more manageable…or not…but at least I’ll know and knowing is half the battle.

Maybe I just need more sleep.

Ok. I’ll try to include more pictures and videos tomorrow.

Enough for now.

Edoga

10 Likes
19

Ok…I need to calm down. last year we weren’t anywhere near where we are right now…

Calm down…

breath in…

breath out…

7 Likes
20

You’re doing a great job. We are in the dog days right now and it’s hard to see how things will come together in the end, but they will.

Some students live and breathe FIRST; most don’t. It’s really hard to get them to see things the way we do and it’s even harder to get them to act like they see it the way we do. My students took the better part of 90 minutes to install a dozen bolts at our last meeting. Not a big deal for them; huge opportunities lost for me. Just take deep breaths and do what you can when you can. That’s all anyone can expect from us. We aren’t superhuman as much as we might want to be.

2 Likes