Team 340’s Offseason
2023 Season Recap
This offseason started off quicker then we are normally used to. To recap the season we competed at the Finger Lakes Regional (FLR) and the Tech Valley Regional (TVR).
At FLR we ranked 18th with a record of 8-7-1 and were picked by the 7th seed and were partnered with 1507 and 250. We worked our way through the lower bracket to become finalists.
At TVR we ranked 7th with a record of 9-4-0 and captained the 5th seed where we fell short of qualifying for championship.
The Offseason
Since we found an abundance of offseason time this year we opted to implement some improvements in some areas across our team. These areas include, our scouting app, programming (See next reply) and the design and fabrication of an offseason robot.
Scout 340
Scout 340 is our tablet-based match data collection system with *near* real-time web server-based analytics to assist in alliance selection planning. The system consists of our in-house custom-built mobile app running on inexpensive tablets and custom analytics software running on our team’s web server.
The system was developed to replace paper-based scouting for faster, easier, more accurate match data collection. This is accomplished through “gamifying” data collection via an intuitive, and fun user interface, resulting in better data and more engaged team members (see picture below). This past season our team members successfully collected more accurate data, affording us the opportunity to start seeing team performance trends earlier in competition.
Moving into the 2024 season, we’re already busy working on upgrades and additions to the base system, including improved data collection and transfer, better hardware power management, and expand analytics data visualization.
A special shout-out goes to Team 1678 Citrus Circuits for the inspiration!
Offseason Robot
After the season concluded we came back as a team and decided that it would be a good opportunity to take the new students on the team and teach them how to prototype, design, build, wire and program a robot from start to finish. Our goal was to keep it simple, build it fast and fail even faster. This goal led us into the direction of building a cube only bot.
We spent some time looking at the best of the best cube bots, 1923 The MidKnight Inventors and 1493 The Falcons. We decided what we wanted to go towards and off we went.
The next couple of weeks were spent prototyping intakes using our new laser cutter and learning what worked and what didn’t. We also decided we wanted our drive train to be fast! The quicker we could traverse the field the better. We went with Swerve X tube mount modules because we have used them previously. One thing we found is that we hated that we had to press pinions onto the Neos. For this problem we decided to change the pinon to the rotation of the azimuths to a 10 tooth pinon from a 9 tooth, this made assembly much easier (See picture below). Our decision to go fast was made knowing the flexibility of the gear ratios that the Swerve X module could handle. We ended up gearing our modules to go 18ft/s.
On top of the new speed we also decided that we didn’t like treaded wheels. They take to long to meticulously tread the wheels consistently. To solve this issue we did some research and found that BuySwerveWheels.com was testing out hubs for Swerve X to be able to use Colson Wheels (See picture below).
We found these wheels worked extremely well and will hopefully keep using them in the seasons to come!
Time went on and before we knew it the robot took shape and we ended with this!
This robot went on to compete at Ra Cha Cha Ruckus! It didn’t perform the way we had hoped but it was definitely a learning experience and got a lot of our rookies exposed to a mini season and what can be expect for our upcoming season (especially since we are a week 1 regional).
Side Projects
Some other side projects we have started are upgrades to our robot cart, battery cart and pit cart, more updates to come in the next couple months.
We look forward to posting about our 2024 regular season! #TeamREV