Hey Chief Delphi 
Team 1884 Griffins here! We are excited to hopefully be a part of Open Alliance for the 2023 Season!
We know there is still a substantial amount of time before Kickoff. Still, we wanted to get started documenting and sharing our reflections on the 2022 Season and our ongoing pre-season developments in preparation for build season.
Over the past 4 years, we have had a pretty rough time due to numerous setbacks, including a lack of experience among the program staff and recovering from the pandemic. Fortunately, we think we are well on our way to recovering from these setbacks due to changes in staff and reinvestment in the program in the correct places. Our mentality going into this year stems from the idea of starting afresh while noting our previous shortcomings to improve ourselves. We hope these posts leading into build season will provide insight for other teams that are looking for a reset or are new to the incredible yet challenging competition that is FRC.
Blog Expectations
From now till December, we will be sharing regular updates about our team training, our learning from pre-season R&D, and any other developments we think are worth sharing with the community.
Some Team History
Griffins 1884 was initially formed in 2004 after students from a smaller sumo bot club decided to set their sights on larger projects. Over the years, we’ve grown to a size of around 100 sign-ups. We’re based in London, United Kingdom and have competed from China to all over the US.
2022 Season Reflections
Drive Train
Like many other teams, we decided to try to take advantage of the COTS Swerve Modules that are increasingly common in the FRC sphere. The work SDS and WCP have done has pushed the boundaries of FRC in exciting ways.
In last year’s pre-season, we had a lot of trouble getting the modules working as we attempted to write our own swerve drive algorithm. This was a mistake. A common idiom stresses the need not to “reinvent the wheel”. Unfortunately, we ignored that and decided to attempt to write our algorithm for the SDS Modules. In hindsight, it would have been better to go with the code SDS so graciously provides (or [Team 364’s algorithm](which is easier to debug) and try to further ourselves in other areas like vision. Our advice to rookie and rebuilding teams: “Don’t reinvent the wheel!!!”. There are so many projects you can spend your time on advancing that isn’t already out there. Take advantage of what’s already been shared with the community as a base to further yourselves!
Shooter
One of our season-defining moments was at the close of the prototyping phase of our build season. We narrowed down our shooter mechanism to two final designs: a catapult and a flywheel. After much heated debate, we settled on the catapult design. This decision was an error on our part for numerous reasons. One key anti-flywheel point that was repeatedly brought up was a fear of friction impacting the consistency of cargo being fired and that we wouldn’t be able to do the physics/math to combat that. This was wrong as we had no empirical data to base this on, and during the season, we discovered there were many calculators to assist teams with these calculations.
A secondary problem our team faced was a lack of effort put into the flywheel prototype. This stemmed from a poor setup during the prototyping phase of the season. Our original design groups did not have enough structure to help them create good prototypes. This year to improve upon last year we are trying to implement a rapid prototyping system. We found these clamping blocks that can be used to assemble structures quickly. Furthermore, we are moving away from cardboard to higher precision software/materials like CAD, 3D Printing, and Laser Cutting. Hopefully, this new approach will lead to more sophisticated designs from the get-go.
Outreach
One of the key positives that came out of the last few seasons was the growth of our Outreach Program. We founded an FLL program at a local school with numerous teams and mentored a local FTC Team that ended up winning an award at a regional last year. We’ve also hosted an FLL Regional for over a decade. We are proud of the role we’ve played in the growth of FIRST UK over the past few seasons as FTC has become more widespread and FLL continues to hold strong. Our students have interned with FIRST UK helping organize FTC Competitions and supporting the program elsewhere. Furthermore, we are happy to hear that there will be 2 rookie FRC teams from the UK this year. FRC in the UK has had a tough time starting with most teams folding. AFAIK we [1884] are the only FRC UK Based Team that has stood the test of time. Hopefully, through working with and assisting these two new teams we can set a foundation to help establish FRC more strongly in the UK. Giving back to the community is something that’s fundamental to us, so we hope to continue supporting our existing partnerships and further growth to spread the message of FIRST.
Competition
Easily one of the best aspects of our team last year was our scouting abilities. Even though all our scouting was conducted remotely from London. We scouted every single team and match at our region with detailed points and strategy analysis. Although we didn’t need a picklist, our scouting allowed us to go into games with immense amounts of strategy information. For example, we knew 4481 could only shoot from the hub going into the game. We developed a game strategy around that and ensured that they could not get to where they needed to shoot from. In one game, we halved the average amount of points scored by the ranked second team at our regional.
Our scouting capabilities mainly hinged around a few elements. Firstly, our scouting app (Link to the new iteration). Our scouting app consists of an app that the scouts would load onto their phones and a server that someone would run. The scouts would scout their game on their phones and then scan the game using a QR code into a spreadsheet. We used this data to calculate predicted scores and other metrics for a given match. In addition, our more experienced scouts wrote down subjective data such as where a team is shooting from and how to stop them from scoring points. This data was compiled into bite-sized chunks for our coaches to read before the games began.
Thank you for taking the time to read some of our reflections on last season. We’d love to hear your thoughts on our takeaways and any questions you may have for us about the team, robot, outreach program, scouting system, or anything that crosses your mind. We look forward to sharing more with the community as Build Season approaches!
Wishing everyone the best!
~ 1884 Griffins