Hi guys!
My team wants to get some ideas for offseason projects! The goals are to keep new members engaged and help them feel like they’re part of a team while they aren’t building a competition robot, and teach essential building + programming skills so they can transition into kickoff easily. I also want to see if we could better some existing mechanism (like swerve or vision). What have you done with your team during the offseason?
Last year we rewrote our codebase (keeping the subsystems mostly intact) to clean it up and get familiar with command-based syntax and pattern changes.
This offseason, my team is building a slightly smaller FRC style robot to use for demos around the community. We are using the power cells from 2020/2021 as our game piece since we had a large amount of them sitting around and using mainly pieces from old robots to build, in order to keep costs low. We are emphasizing finding designs for our mechanisms that are different than designs we have used in the past 5 years.
Our team had a large number of graduating seniors so we thought that this project would give all sub teams practice with designing and building an FRC robot as well as allow some of the younger students to start stepping into leadership roles.
We always try to do a few things in the offseason. Usually play catchup on Technologies we haven’t worked with.
This past year we developed a shooter prototype and did a lot of characterization on it. Probably a borderline ‘lock’ that gets used within the next 3 years.
We also build and programmed a swerve chassis to understand how to build it and control it.
This offseason we might look at using a rotary joint on an arm to create a double jointed arm. Obviously a lot of fancy control comes with using those effectively!
Last year, working in August and into the fall, we got swerve drive working on a wooden test bed, assembled two Prusa printers with an enclosure for one of them, and revived a defunct CNC router. The latter did not turn out to be very useful in build season but it was a good project nonetheless. We’d like to prototype a shooter or an elevator this time around and will be modifying a basic hydraulic cart into a custom robot transport unit. We are also working with a local electronics recycler to revive and upgrade laptops for basic use.
My feeling is the two current frontiers in FIRST are autonomy (and not just for the auton period) and computer vision. I am also seeing an uptick in the use of carbon fiber, which might be an interesting skill to gain.
a few years ago we built 2 minibots and taped a mariokart-like path on a carpet so we could race the minibots and bring them to demos and community events.
we’ve also restored/turned our 2008 robot into a go cart as an offseason project
current offseason project is the boston all stars team which i prob wouldn’t recommend for ur purposes
We’re designing and building a new robot cart! Although our current one makes for a really cool place to sit!
Well we have a ton of community events we attend but in lieu of them here are some of the project we tackle.
Update / fix our t-shirt cannon which is a revised 2010 chassis with two scuba tanks for air flow.
Invite other local team for our soldering class, teach all of our students wire soldering with a fun activity that includes a 3d printed LED team number sign. Each team that attends will receive one.
Have our students learn 3d design via Solidworks and import as a workable 3d printable file, print that file, and have fun with it.
Over the summer we typically focus on our outreach and cleaning up the mess we make during build season. This summer we are also working on a minibot project for mid level students to build and maybe compete with at an offseason.
Code. Give the code team some time with just the chassis + limelight and try to get autonomous code working well (i.e. drive to position)
3D printed LED sign sounds awesome, do you have a STL or curriculum?
If you have old, largely complete robots laying around, why not get a few programmers to re-control them?
Advanced vision (AprilTags/Reflective Tape) through a Limelight or PhotonVision is a good thing for programmers to work on as well. Advanced vision also directly feeds into advanced autonomous; learn how to create complex paths and run them accurately and use vision systems to align to a piece or scoring location, or even localize during the path to make sure you’re correct.
This year we have a few projects lined up:
First, we are designing a T-Shirt cannon robot. We saw a few other teams with them at events last summer, and figured it would be good to keep students engaged.
Once we finish that, we plan on building a cart for the Omio CNC that we purchased earlier in the year. We received it in the middle of build season, and haven’t had the time to even learn how to use it. Once we get a cart built, we’ll be able to figure out how it works.
Once that is done, we want to start with swerve drive. We purchased 4 modules with some left over grant money, so once they arrive, we’ll be able to spend some time learning the ins and outs of it.
Finally, we’ll be looking at rebuilding our robot cart. Our current cart is difficult to maneuver and a little too high off the ground.
These projects will probably lead us into the late fall, and there will probably be more side projects along the way. Last year we built a battery cart and did a lot of reorganizing in our shop in the offseason.
We plan on doing outreach and fundraising events throughout the summer. We also do lessons on cad and programming throughout, since they tend can be used in multiple other projects.
We are in a similar position, would you be willing to share those cart plans when you finish? We don’t have a shop until the fall since we are being moved. So we can plan but can’t actually start til you’ll probably already be done with yours. Maybe we can learn from your team?
We are working on our bots…modifying and repurposing them. Starting on our swerve base for next year…figuring out the code for the drive stuff before we work on everything that is super structure (above the base).
We are also sending some of our students to Kettering for robotics training since we really don’t have the resources here for learning more to help us in classroom…we get help from partner teams here…just need the kids to understand the basics of robotics.
On one of the bases we are planning to build a t shirt cannon for football games. Just to see what we can do.
AND of course drivers training…on both the KoP drive and swerve.
We’d definitely be able to share our design once it’s finished. We’ve only just started the preliminary design process for the t-shirt cannon, so I don’t really have an estimate on when the CNC cart would be ready. Our summer meeting times are still waiting for approval from our district, but I would imagine the latest it would be done would be early-mid August. Even if we can’t meet in the month of July (which is looking fairly likely), we’d be able to have our students design the cart in cad from home so that we could construct it as soon as we get back.
We are working on the curriculum for the signs, we actually saw these at Worlds this year as the team was walking around the stands with the led signs (I can not remember the team name I apologize.) Once the lesson is finalized I can post the paper copy.
wow! these are awesome ideas, thank you so much everyone!
we do have a cnc mill, lathe, and router in our school. I want to see our build team figure out how to use them (our school does not make good use of these machines) and hopefully use them throughout the season.
I’m also thinking about autonomous scoring. At Hofstra 1, our team saw how cool 3015’s autonomous scoring was- they were able to pick nodes on an ipad and have their robot effectively score in the selected node. This would be something great for our team to establish offseason, in my opinion.
Though I have no strong idea of what type of game Crescendo will be, I think my team could spend time creating and programming an elevator and better shooter mechanism.
We’re also going to finish up our T shirt cannon!
Once that is done, we want to start with swerve drive. We purchased 4 modules with some left over grant money, so once they arrive, we’ll be able to spend some time learning the ins and outs of it.
Good luck with swerve drive!!!
also, I am wondering how you guys are structuring meetings during the summer. I want to have meetings throughout the summer as well, but am concerned if that would work out or not. However without summer meetings, I am not sure if we can make much progress off season.