NRG 948 2023-2024 Open Alliance Thread

[poppyhill]

Hello hello!

Newport Robotics Group, or NRG 948, is pleased to announce the beginning of our training season thread! If you’re unfamiliar with NRG, our team is based out of Newport High School in Bellevue, Washington. This year, we’re once again a member of the OA, or Open Alliance. In this coming year, we’re looking to share more about our team, as well as our learning experiences with you all.

So… where have we been? Last year came to a close with our end-of-year banquet, but we haven’t been completely quiet during the offseason. Not only has NRG participated in various outreach events, we’ve also been involved with the creation of a new Stemnasium, and three offseason comps!

Stemnasium!

NRG is part of the BA, or the Bellevue Alliance, consisting of teams 492, 949, 1899, 2412, 7461, and 9036. Together, the BA has worked on pushing for the creation of a new Stemnasium.

You may be wondering, what is the Stemnasium? The Stemnasium is essentially just a term combining the words “gymnasium” and “STEM”. With our district having closed some elementary schools in the past year, last spring, we went to the district board and asked that one of the empty elementary schools be repurposed into a place where robotics and STEM activities can be nurtured.

Over the summer, our Superintendent, Dr. Aramaki, formally announced that the plan would move forward in partnership with the Bellevue Schools Foundation. He and the Bellevue Schools Foundation granted us the gym space at the old Puesta Del Sol Elementary School site to house a full field, the early learning center classrooms to be used as additional shop space, and the library to host any BA outreach efforts. To top it off, he and BSF generously gave us an extra 10k grant for any other costs we may encounter along the way.

Many FRC teams collaborate, and how they do so changes depending on the team, whether they do that through sharing knowledge, training materials, or practice fields. Having a shared shop space for the BA is something that would help foster a creative learning environment.

While the development of the Stemnasium is still underway, with numerous kinks for us to work out, we hope to have the space ready for kickoff in January!

Welcoming New Members!

During September, just like every other year, NRG focuses on recruiting new members for the upcoming season. These efforts include appearing in our school’s Back to School Assemblies, school Club Fair, along with hosting our own Interest Meeting, Open House, and Team Orientation.

We participated in these events in hopes of reaching out to students at our school, but we also spread the word through school announcements, Instagram (@nrg_948), as well as through word of mouth.

Funnily enough, every year, our roster for the coming year has about 110 people–quite a lot of people–so our goal in our “recruiting phase” is to connect with a diverse group. We’re looking to see if they would be interested in one of the many aspects of robotics. That said, while our starting roster is generally fairly large, in the past we’ve experienced some retainment issues, with rookies fizzling out through training and into build season. This year though, we’re remaining strong with a good participation rate.

There’s room for anyone here at NRG, regardless of whether they’re more inclined towards STEM, the arts, business, and more. Our goal is to be an inclusive group, recruiting underrepresented communities regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexuality, etc.

Grand Plans For A Rookie Bot!

Over these past few months, our CAD, Mechanical, and Systems VPs have been working together to plan out the construction of a rookie bot.

Our goals with this rookie bot are to provide rookies with a hands-on approach to learning so that they’ll be better equipped going into Build Season; this gives them a larger, more holistic view of how parts go together, and how a robot is constructed.

In addition, collaboration between subgroups is vital, especially for technical subgroups that have to work closely together during Build Season. In practicing going between subgroups for measurements, verifying questions, and more, rookies are building their collaborative as well as technical skill sets, setting them up for success.

One obstacle that NRG experienced last year was a less than successful Training Season, resulting in Build Season coming along with a lot of rookies not knowing how to do the work their subgroup required. Another challenge was subgroup communication, which led to a rabbit hole of more issues.

As of right now, Mechanical is almost done building their pieces; currently, they’re changing the steering motors on our swerve modules from Falcon 500s to NEOs. Once they’re done with that, the bot will be passed onto Systems to be wired up!

Off-Season Comps!

This year, NRG participated in 3 offseason competitions: Bordie Charged at Sammamish High School, WA Girls Gen at Tahoma High School, and PNW Block Party at Henry M. Jackson High School.

During our time at Bordie Charged, we ended our qualification matches sitting at rank 20, moving forward as the third bot on an alliance with 2122 The Tators, and 1319 IRS. It was a good review for our veterans and new leadership team as it was our first competition since the World Championships last year in Houston, while also giving our rookies a taste of what comps are like.

Fast forward a week, and we found ourselves at Washington Girls Gen. After quals, we placed 10th and were able to become the 6th seeded alliance captains! We had the pleasure of working alongside teams 4469 R.A.I.D., and 8249 ChainLynx. With our female and non gender-conforming members taking charge in our pit and our drive and strategy teams, we felt that we learned a lot, and were able to successfully empower the non-male members on our team!

Just this past weekend, NRG participated in the PNW Block Party. It was our designated rookie comp, meaning that our veteran members took a step back in the pits, as well as on our drive and strategy teams. We ended ranking 13th and were 7th alliance captains along with teams 7461 Sushi Squad, and Sushi’s other bot 9991. We were definitely on a roll in this alliance, making it three matches into semis before being eliminated. It was an amazing experience for rookies, and a great way to close off our last competition in the 2023 Charged Up season!

Links!

Visit the NRG website for more details: https://www.nrg948.com/

Code: GitHub - NRG948/NRGRobot2023: The robot code of FRC Team 948 - Newport Robotics Group for FIRST Robotics Competition 2023 CHARGED UP presented by Haas game.

CAD: Onshape

Closing

Thanks for sticking around! That’s it for updates so far, but we look forward to sharing much more about our team (our successes as well as our failures) so be sure to stick around!

Signing off,

Your friendly-neighborhood-documentation-person

Photos!

Photo of our booth taken at our school club fair

Photo taken from CAD during our first meeting of the season

photo taken of an NRG member waving our flag at Girls Gen

[taiga]

Anodizing

We’ll have more information about our training and offseason comps soon, but we wanted to first cover our anodizing process, even though it didn’t get fully utilized on our 2023 bot Dodo. It’s important to note this is just one way of doing it, and we’re still making tweaks.
Here’s our post from last year with some more pictures.
Our posts from last year around anodizing are here and here.

Why Anodize?

Unlike many alternative ways to color, anodizing embeds dye into the aluminum, rather than being a coating, which in theory limits scratching. With a chemistry teacher as our head advisor, we had access to a fume hood and proper chemicals. In addition, we could get our metal anodized during class outside shop time, meaning we didn’t need to send parts out for powder coating or spend time painting.

How does Anodizing Work?

Anodization, put simply, is to use electrical current to make a layer of Aluminum oxide, which then absorbs the dye.
Electrifying a mix of water and sulfuric acid (making it a conductive liquid) separates the water into hydrogen and oxygen, with the hydrogen heading to the negative side (in our case, a thin strip of lead). Lead is nice because it doesn’t really react with anything that we’re using. The remaining oxygen is combined with the positively-charged aluminum, creating a layer of Aluminum oxide on the surface.

Aluminum oxide, unlike iron oxide (rust), is actually stronger than the aluminum itself. It also creates crystalline structures for dye to sink into. This makes the dye embedded inside the metal rather than on top of the surface. As a result, it holds color very well and won’t easily scratch off.

The Process

1. Using soapy water with fine grit sandpaper, we clean the part, then wash it with isopropyl alcohol. This removes previous oils or cutting fluid that could interfere with the anodizing process.

2. The metal is soaked in sodium hydroxide (also known as lye, but chemistry teachers insist it be called by the proper name) for around 10 minutes to remove any oxidation already present. Once the part is rinsed off, it’s ready to be anodized.

3. Next, the metal is wrapped with 10 AWG aluminum wire to act as a connection point. This also gives us a handle for the metal. Being aluminum, the wire will also be anodized, with deep color. However, this also hurts the ability of the wire to conduct and the anodization of the part. More on this later.

4. Next, we submerge the aluminum in sulfuric acid and run electrons through for around 45 minutes. Note that too much anodizing can make the metal too crystalline and absorbent to dye, leading to results such as glowing orange gussets instead of the gold we were aiming for.

After a quick rinse, it’s dropped into dye for around 10 minutes.

In total, it takes roughly an hour per piece, but the vast majority of the time is spent waiting for anodizing and dyeing.

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Longer parts are also difficult to uniformly anodize. This is especially true with t-slot extrusion (also known as 80/20) as it has too many crevasses to cover and clean. When anodized, it forms patches of dye, concentrated on one side of the rail. The 1” square sides dye very deeply, though.

These gussets didn’t quite get anodized enough before the conductivity stopped (likely as wire anodized first). Fortunately, these can be dropped back into the sodium hydroxide and redone.

See more of our anodizing here:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/viFVRBf1tmdDpvfj7

Looking Forward

We made all of those back in February. A lot of those parts got removed in our redesign to a shooter robot between our Week 3 and 4 comps, but we took a look at the few parts that did see action. This was taken a few weeks ago:

(wire management is one of the goals for next year)

Despite being in low-impact areas, they did scratch, but they were right around areas we had put fasteners into. As comparison, here’s our bumper-protected, spray-painted 2022 tubing, which also saw the majority of wear from fasteners (you can see the aftermath of the Mk4s). The spray paint is a year older (these pictures were taken a few days ago), but the anodizing is a bit more consistent at the moment.

We’re planning on continuing anodization next year, and have begun preparing much bigger containers for testing longer pieces.

One major change we’re planning on making is to switch to titanium wire. As mentioned earlier, aluminum wire, though cheap and readily available, would anodize itself. We’ll be trying out some titanium wire instead. We’ve also moved all of our equipment from the chemistry classroom to our off-campus shop, hopefully allowing us to have true in-house anodizing next year.

Overall, we’ve learned a lot about anodizing this past year, and are super stoked to add color to our robot next year. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out!

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Written with contributions from @shanklin, Val, @MrDoran, Taylor, and Enrica.

[poppyhill]

Hey all, happy new year!

Kickoff is a slightly terrifying but mostly exciting three days away, so we’d like to take this chance to share some CADs that we’ve been working on. In the past few months, there’s been a lot of good CADing being done, and we thought it the perfect opportunity to share these for anyone who might benefit from these during build.

We hope that these can be of use to you all!

Bumper Generator

Starting off strong, we have our bumper generator! Just like the name suggests, it generates bumpers.

Onshape

Intake Roller Generator

Again, as the name suggests, this generates intake rollers. They support many different endcaps and deadaxle styles.

Onshape

Drive base Generator

Interestingly enough, two of our members have made drive base generators, so I’ll share them both here!

Onshape

Onshape

Magnet Holder

This one adapts magnets, like WCP ring magnets, into a 10 hole pattern.

Onshape

Omni Swerve Wheel

Onshape

(predates https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/swerve-crazy-wheel/446904 but took inspiration from it nonetheless)

SB50 Block

This one converts SB50’s weird 5 screws to 10 screws, with shock absorption built in (We haven’t really tested the shock absorbers, and it might be abandoned in favor of zipties).

Onshape

PWF Telescope

This uses the PWF telescope as a base but can use hole patterned tubing like MAXtube or WCP Punched Tubing.

Onshape

Different Bots: rookie bot, bot 2 + bot 2.6, and NEW Vortex speeder

First off, we have our rookie bot! As some of you may remember from our first post, this training season our team put together a rookie bot, so we’re happy to share the end cad!

Onshape

Next, we have bot 2 and bot 2.6 (in that order). Both of these 20x20 bots have capabilities similar to 5414. It was fun to make these fit, though it took forever. These were really learning projects for @taiga so there’s a lot that’s suboptimal from a design and workflow perspective, but it exists and only breaks the laws of physics a little, so there’s that…

Onshape

Onshape

Lastly, a NEO Vortex powered minibot with a top speed of 88.8 ft/s. Impractical? Well, yes. Interesting to design? Also yes!

Onshape

As the eNeRGy around robotics begins to Crescendo towards an all-time high, and with kickoff just three days away, we wish teams all the best!

Written with contributions from @taiga

[taiga]

We missed a few things in the earlier CAD release:

• Arducam Mount - a combination of 6328’s case and these cases. Completely untested but possibly useful for build season
• More stuff that may be marginally helpful - a plywood/dimensional lumber generator, milled bores (like hex and SplineXL), and an attempt at a CNCable 10DP rack.

Have a great kickoff!

[poppyhill]

Hello hello!

We hope that everyone’s had a good first few weeks of build season! We’ve made quite a bit of progress within this time, so we’ll be sharing a bit about where we are.

Current Robot Progress

With these first few weeks into Build Season, our CAD team has been busy putting together a design for us to build. While our original plan was to give our CAD team two weeks to completely finalize our work, we ended up going a bit over. Part of the reason this happened was was due to us teetering between two designs; ultimately, the design we’ve decided to move forward with is a roller intake that doubles as a shooter (idea inspired by Ri3D team, The Unqualified Quokkas (Unqualified Quokkas Ri3D: The First Ri3D Team in Australia)

This mechanism is mounted onto a 4-bar linkage, which is then mounted onto a rotating arm. We plan on shooting into the speaker while in a stowed position, with the arm only extending upwards during our climb to deliver notes into the trap.

We have all mechanisms but our intake/shooter cadded, so we will continue to work on that, hopefully completing it by this Thursday!

New CNC :D

This year, for the first time in many years, NRG has gotten our CNC up and running! One of our mentors graciously took it to their garage and brought it back with the capacity to start manufacturing some of our more difficult pieces.

So, how does this play into our robot this year? Perhaps the most tedious CNC project we could’ve chosen to start with, we CNC’d our belly pans. It took us about three hours to finish the whole project, with each part taking around an hour and a half (because our CNC can’t fit our entire belly pan size, we split the task into two parts). The piece also features a hole pattern for our electrical team! While it is time consuming, wire management has never been easier!

Other than the belly pan, we’re currently CNCing custom gussets to go on our arm mount. These are much quicker, and although we did come across an issue (to be explained in a later post), we were able to fix the problem within a day and resume our work.

Our team uses Onshape for CAD, but our CNC uses Fusion 360, so we’ve put quite a bit of work into figuring out new controls. That said, we’re becoming much more fluid in our process, and we hope to share more about it in the future!

Fabrication

As the CAD team makes their way through designing the robot, our mechanical team has been busy, working in tandem with CAD to build mechanisms as they’re designed. Right now, mech is working on making the arm mount, the 4-bar linkage, and finishing our drive bases. Technically, our practice drive base has already gone on a test run with our programming team, but it currently needs some tweaks before we start to mount our other mechanisms to it, so it’s back on the mech table again.

While we continue to work on building our bot, we’ve also implemented better measures to make sure the parts we’re constructing are of good quality. In previous years, students would willy-nilly measure, cut, and drill pieces, leading to unevenly measured tubing, holes not lining up, a whole mess of unusable pieces, and a very sad build season timeline that would become irrelevant as we fell weeks behind schedule.

So what is this new quality checking process, you may be asking? While it’s not the most optimal at the moment, we currently ask students to check in with either a lead or a mentor before moving forward on a piece. If a measurement is off by 1/32 of an inch, then the piece has to be redone. While redoing pieces may set us back a little bit as tolerances are pretty tight, in the long run, it ensures a better quality robot and that pieces fit nicely as well, which actually saves us time!

Moving Forward

Moving forward, we’ve set several next-step goals for ourselves. First, in regards to CAD, we should have all mechanisms finished by Thursday to allow mech free range to build the robot. Next, our CNC’d parts should be finished this weekend, to aid in speeding mech along. With those CNC’d parts is the belly pan, which–when finished–will allow electrical to wire up the comp bot.

We look forward to sharing more general robot updates, as well as our findings about CNC processes, and we hope everyone has had a great first few weeks of build!