MSOE Robotics is excited to announce our first ever FRC Robot in 3 Days!
We will be posting updates here as as we make progress and develop resources.
Hopefully our team can be a useful resource to the FRC community and help everyone get off to a great start in 2022!
Thanks to everyone who helped us make this team a reality this year:
AndyMark- for choosing to sponosor our team this year
MSOE Campus Life- for their financial support
MSOE STEM Center- for allowing us to use their facilities this year
I would recommend avoiding non-standard acronyms with no explanation. Maybe I am in the minority but I had to look it up and MSOE is (I think?): Milwaukee School of Engineering.
Building a robot in 3 days is a cool feat no doubt. But if you’re doing this to actually help the FRC community and not just relive your high school days in depth and high quality videos and reviews of prototypes and lessons learned is way better and more helpful than having a “finished” robot in 3 days.
Good luck cool to see Wisconsin get in the game here.
One of our goals is certainly to develop a functional and competitive robot for whatever the 2022 FRC game may be in three short days, however, this is overshadowed by our goal to provide resources to the greater FRC community by doing so.
By doing so, our intent is raise the floor of FRC and to create a robot that is viable for teams to create that may not have as many resources as a well-established team or a university (the robot is planned to be made with nearly entirely hand power tools, a basic machine shop and standard FDM 3D printing) or the resources to do as intensive prototyping–hopefully we can help you jump ahead into a much more refined design right away and allow you to take these designs even farther!
While many of us have FRC experience and are still excited to build and compete with robots as we do through the numerous competitive robotics programs we have within MSOE Robotics , an even larger portion of our student organization is centered around promoting and inspiring robotics in the greater community. A significant portion of our team is involved with the MSOE FIRST Ambassador Program which is centered on supporting FIRST programs in the local Milwaukee area and are active mentors for FIRST teams and are volunteers at FIRST events and we are looking forward to being able to use Ri3D as an opportunity to not only continue supporting our local FRC teams, but also help the greater FIRST community. As such, our primary focus is on producing documentation and resources (I’m sure we’ll have a blast regardless).
We understand that the sooner we can get these resources into the community, the more helpful they can be as teams work to make decisions and hence the traditional three-day goal. We do also recognize the limitations of 72 hours are quite intense, and as such are working to prepare as much as we can, such as building the KOP drivetrain/basic control system in advance so that we can spend our full efforts on developing game-specific prototypes rather than just trying to build a robot in three days to show we can.
Also, since this is the first time we are participating in an FRC Ri3D, there may be some hurdles we have to overcome to make the release of this documentation as smooth as possible, so we ask for your patience as we work to get as much as we possibly can to you as quickly as we can. With that being said, please reach out to us on this thread or with the links to our various platforms in the initial post as we would love to answer any of your questions. We are in the process of setting up Q and A sessions for us to share what we are doing directly and immediately, allowing us to directly cater our work to what the community thinks is most beneficial.
After these three days, we do not plan on dropping off the face of the earth and would be happy to continue to provide more specific information or answer any other questions about the robot. The robot itself will reside in the MSOE STEM Center for local FRC teams to learn from and utilize as a resource—including a rookie FRC team housed within the center (FRC 8847).
I like having Ri3D teams, as long as they release update videos and in-depth videos during/after the process. A “real” reveal video showing actual performance would be great too, instead of just highlighting the best aspects of the designs. I often use Ri3D as a substitute for our own prototypes, which is good to have in the first few days of build season.
They’re only good if they go in depth and talk about what they learned, why they chose the materials they used, how they might improve upon it etc.
Just seeing people make prototypes and then a hype video doesn’t help much. I’m not trying to stop Ri3D I’m just throwing out what I think would make them better to the public and actually helpful and worth everyone’s time.
I think Ri3D started out with good intentions and then blew up with lots of college kids starting their own in hopes of reliving their glory days as a FRC student under the cloak of “I’m helping underserved teams get a faster insight in what to do” . That’s not helpful and I think those have hurt way more teams than people think.
You’re welcome to your opinion. I am fine with the bar being a lot lower than what you’ve described, and consequently I use ri3d every year in its current form with great results.
I think there’s significant value in uncut, representative footage of prototypes, combined with detailed descriptions of the prototypes as they are-- video footage speaks far, far louder than any kind of talking head analysis. One of the things I learned doing Snow Problem was that we were much more likely to be wrong to varying degrees than we were to be right-- so part of being valuable was making sure as much as we could get out there of what we did was out there for people to look at themselves. At a bare minimum, stuff like gear ratios, compression amounts/key dimensions, et cetera are important for being “useful” beyond just having a pretty picture/video.
I don’t personally hold it against a team for doing a sizzle reel type video-- getting hyped is important!-- but taking care to not mislead viewers is something I definitely learned to be a bit more cognizant about over the years.
Good luck MSOE Ri3D, I look forward to seeing what you come up with!
MSOE’s Ri3D team has some updates as we prepare for kickoff!
Based on the input we received and our goals for participating in Ri3D we have preemptively assembled the standard KOP drivetrain (specifically in the long configuration).
While this technically means that we will have built our robot in more than three days, this allows us to focus our limited time and resources on providing the FRC community with better game specific mechanisms and documentation than we would be able to otherwise. We were short-staffed over our winter break, but even with only two people (and having to salvage the CIM motors from some very well-loved ball shifting gearboxes) we were able to get the entire drivetrain together in a few hours (sans the control system). Having designed and built several custom FRC drivetrains myself, I can personally recommend the KOP drivetrain unless you absolutely have the resources and design reasons not to (also see https://johnvneun.com/blog/2019/1/10/a-weak-robot-cart). Check out how fast the KOP drivetrain comes together in this timelapse we put together!
Beyond that, have the 3D printers on MSOE’s campus mass-producing quite a few of the HYPE prototyping blocks and Quick Build Clamping Blocks so we can hit the ground running after our strategy discussions and deliberations on Kickoff! We wish teams the best and will be back with more on January 8th!
We are continually grateful to all of those who are generously supporting us in this Ri3D endeavor and we have a few more to thank since last time including:
MSOE Ri3D will be going live on Twitch after the FRC Kickoff stream ends. Feel free to stop on in and check out what we are doing throughout these next 72 hours!
At this point we’ll be starting with just a live camera feed (feel free to ask us questions in chat and we’ll do our best to answer them), but we are also planning on hosting live Q and A sessions that will be scheduled and announced here!
