Pearadox 5414 2025 Build Blog

[ahartnet]

Time for another optimistic start of the year where I hope we’ll be consistent with some build blogs!

EDIT: rookie mistake, some incoming links:

• Onshape
• code
• Youtube

A few things I hope to have a build blog written about in the coming weeks:

• DIY Inspection PEARfections
• Roles and OKRs
• Our experience with a trial run of Pods, as presented by @JesseK at the FMC
  • At it’s core, I would describe it as better defining subteams - but ensuring each subsystem has all the needed skillsets to function independently from the rest of the team.
  • I very quickly loved several of the things from the presentation. It felt like something we were so close to doing anyway, but just with a little more structure and intent to it
  • One of the biggest take away for me was I liked the definition of “done” used. So often a student says something is done and I try to re-direct them that it’s ready for the next step. It’s never done until after our last match. That word drives me nuts in an FRC context haha.

We’re trying a lot of new things this year in those capacities - and maybe more than a team should do all at once. The goal for all of these is to increase student engagement AND for students to better see how their work fits into the team’s achievements.

If there are other teams are familiar with what we do and they would like to learn more about how we do something via a DIY manuals, let us know! We currently have DIY manuals for:

• Gearbox Girls
• Brilliant Black Builders
• Grant Writing (the first 16 pages need some updating, but the tips in the last 4 pages are still relevant today)

Last thing for this post, I decided to make a quick Primary Geometry template in Onshape for tomorrow. I’d like to investigate a way to copy whole folders - it’d be handy to have the base document and PG document in a folder that you copy, where the Base Doc automatically would point to the new PG Document. I didn’t get around to making a template for a couple of the different common set ups we might use (MK4Is with the tube either above or below the main plate) - but it’s not too difficult to modify the PG if needed anyway.

[FinIce]

Never tracked something so fast as this

[TFM110]

OMG, its 5414? TRI Champions? 5431’s best buds? I am definitely not making this post to automatically track it lol

[TrevJag]

is that 5414, the creators of the

best 2023 robot

ROOT’N TOOT’N LOOT’N BELTON SHOOT’N CUBE RELEASIN’ ROSTER DEFEATIN’ RAPID SCORER CYCLE MORE’R BANNER WINNIN’ EVERYONE GRINNIN’ SWERVE MANEUVERIN’ CHARGER SCOOTERIN’ SPEED DEMON BOT UNEVEN DOUBLE ROLLER PID CONTROLLER HOLE PATTERN GRID BATTERIN’ FIELD NAVIGATION INTAKE AUTOMATION ELECTROMECHANICAL POSSIBLY MAGICAL PLASTIC AND METAL BALANCING LEVEL VERY EFFICIENT RULES ADHERENT DECENT QUALITY KINDA WOBBLY PARTIAL AUTONOMY BUILT WITH HEART PIECE OF ART IT’S A START HOPEFULLY PRACTICAL SPRING MATHEMATICAL PLAYING STRATEGICALLY VINLYED APPEALINGLY FLYWHEEL EXPANDING INDEPENDENT GAME PIECE HANDLING TEAM COLOR BRANDING REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT PINS GRIP TAPE CLAW SPINS CURRENT LIMITED DUAL DIRECTION EXTENSION PROHIBITED THEODORE ROOSEVELT 5 MILLIMETER BELT PULLEYS WITH FLANGES WHAT ARE THE CHANCES OF GETTING ON EINSTEINS, IT’S REALLY ABOUT TIME, BUT EVEN IF WE SETTLE THE ROBOT’S, REALLY, JUST A HUNK OF METAL

?
can’t wait to see what you guys create for 2025

[ahartnet]

I wasn’t sure if I should be impressed or scared that you were able to go find the full name somewhere. However, I see that it’s on our website, so I’ll just go with impressed.

Regardless of where you actually pulled it from, I’m going to tell myself it’s the webpage

[TrevJag]

I was looking for desktop background photos and I saw it on the website. You can imagine what happened next.

[ahartnet]

Wait - reefscape is an arm game?

Pearadox has never done an elevator before. We tend to find ways to do arms instead - they’re lighter, cheaper, and easy (and I’ve never done an elevator before ). Though elevators are definitely a lot easier than ever.

While we probably wouldn’t pursue this too seriously, you could make a max height robot that on the arm has a slope starting from the coral station height down to an end effector. That’s what the solid blue line that isn’t a part of the tube represents. If you make your base long enough (about 39" total including bumpers), it works pretty well for scoring L2/L3 coral in one direction with your base at the reef, and L4 in the other direction with the coral at your reef. You could utilize the new bumper rules to have extra cushioning on one side vs the other and reduce how long your robot frame actually is.

There are some serious downsides to that though - in quick play it would really stink to have to rotate 180 degrees last minute due to defense, someone else scoring, etc. It also means if we do any auto-aligning based on april tags that we’d have to have that ability from both directions too. Also, even if you assume the 4.25" bumpers on both sides, your robot frame would be 30.5" in one dimension. That’s much larger than I’d like.

[ahartnet]

Day 1

Kickoff day came and went. It was a long but good day!

Our goals for kickoff day were:

• read the manual more or less cover to cover (this took about 2 hours for us to do)
• determine a robot action list (for all possible robots, not just ours)
• start discussions on some possible robot archetypes (algae specialist, coral specialist, what we think Everybot would do, etc)
• have our parents / alumni start building the field

We had nearly 118 non-Pearadox folks attend our kickoff, plus over 20 alumni and alumni parents, and approximately 60 Pearadox students + 20 or so Pearadox mentors and current parents. It was a lot.

Day 2

Our day 2 goals were: * review Pearadox resources - what are our strengths and weaknesses * define how we want to play the game * define the Pearadox must/could/won't list * get into KrayonCAD /prototyping (which we only marginally achieved)

Resources

Pearadox has worked very hard and are fortunately doing pretty OKon most of our resources. If you check out the categories @Katie_UPS came up with in this awesome table, Pearadox's biggest need is knowledge and experience. Not that we don't have capable students, just many students are filling in to new roles

After discussing our resources, we talked about how we wanted to play the game. We were able to pretty quickly come to a consensus that:

1. we want to win matches
2. being a good coral scorer is the most reliable way to win matches
3. the Auto RP should be a top priority for us. Score coral in auto, and be prepared to push alliance partners past the starting line.
4. the Coral RP most aligns with the strategy needed to win matches
5. The Barge RP is the last priority of ranking points for us. It might be an easier RP to get if you focus on the deep cage, but if you make sacrifices to your coral scorer you are less likely to win matches, which is the top priority.

While we didn’t explicitly state it during the meeting, this results in the team priorities being:

1. Driving
2. a fast and accurate Coral scoring
3. Deep Cage climbing
4. algae scoring if we think it’s necessary for the co-op**

We then moved into a long must/could/wont discussion for the Pearadox Robot Action list.

must: This will be on the robot. We are willing to make sacrifices to the overall robot design to ensure it makes it on
could: We are going to prototype it. If it fits into the robot, it will go on. If it doesn’t fit onto the robot, we are willing to make sacrifices to this task/feature to fit it on the robot (it might be slower or only used in special cases). If it doesn’t make it on, that will be OK (even if maybe sad).
won't: we will not spend energy prototyping it. Either because we believe it’ll happen on it’s own, or we don’t care if it happens.

Most things went pretty smoothly. Since that image is pretty tiny, a pretty high level summary:

• must swerve
• must leave in auto / drive autonomously / score preloaded
• must score L1 - L4 coral
• must knock off algae from the reef

While we didn’t get 100% consensus, most of the team landed on also:

• must have ground pick up
• which also means must have some way for re-orienting the coral (either pre or post hand off). This will hopefully be a passive feature that “just happens” while intaking

We will prototype, but might cut some of these items:

• get algae from the ground into the processor (helpful for Coral RP)
• collect directly from the coral station
• hold both pieces at the same time
• stablize the cages

We could not build consensus on the following things:

• scoring L2-L4 without good alignment (ie coral is pushed up against the base)
• whether we shallow or deep climb
• if we need protection for swinging cages

What now?

The things we couldn't build consensus on were between coulds and musts. So we will plan on prototyping for it all, and depending on the results of some prototypes, we'll come back and re-evaluate our coulds vs musts. Personally, I think we have too many things as "musts" especially given the lack of mentor and student experience/knowledge at the moment. However, until we have consensus on what to cut from the "musts", or it reaches a danger zone where I just have to make executive decisions, we'll have to truck on. We'll hopefully learn quickly where our limitations are or what tasks on this lists will be too big of a resource sink where it harms our overall performance!

We’ll be doing lots of prototyping between now and next Saturday, and re-evaluate then!

---

** while coop is the first tie breaker, the 6 RPs may mean it comes into play less. We also saw last year how sometimes opponent alliances are unable or unreliable in completing their portion of the task. It may be faster for us to just score the 5 coral than to score 2 algae + potentially 2 opponent algae.

Bonus picture: I always wear my “not all dreams can come true” shirt for the day after kickoff. Bonus-bonus: new build season, new beard

[ahartnet]

Quick add on - I did a kickoff vibe check, and here are some of the feedback about our 2 hour manual read through. I’m always concerned about if it’s too slow or boring, but it was very re-assuring to see this:

On the flipside, the “engagement” bar was only slightly above average:

so there’s still plenty of room to improve in how to make kickoff more engaging.

[riaz321]

Day 2 we started the morning off with some rough match simulations. We gave kids different robot archetypes which would dictate how much they would move and what the could score and proceeded to use random objects as game pieces. We did full match times and it was a great way to start seeing how the matches could be played/getting kids up out of desks and moving around. It seemed to be a great way to get them more into the game and delved right into talking strategy.

[ahartnet]

Days 3-5

No meeting for students on Monday. But we had parents, some retired mentors, and alumni come in to work on the field during the day on both Monday and Tuesday. By end of day Weds, they’ve got pretty much half a field complete and ready to roll

Huge thank you to Spectrum for lending us some unused Trusses so we can have a full field of barges for when teams come over to practice!

We had 3 swerve bases ready to roll for kickoff:

• our Thrifty Swerve base (from 2022 time frame) for drive practice
• our “programming” base that we’re in the process of swapping out motors and adding a canivore to. The goal is this base can be dedicated to programmers for developing autos early and be the same config as comp bot
• our “prototyping” base, that is suppposed to just be our mk4is + a mezzanine bar for easily attaching prototypes too - However, the mezzanine did not make it on before kickoff… This was just our “alpha” base from last year. We’ve decided to also rebuild this one with the 2x1s in the “below” config to make prototypes a little more like how a real mechanism could be, and to make it easier to have our mezzanine attached.

We are now down to one. . But will hopefully get the others back up again soon

Also, FIRST Choice Rd 2 has some good stuff this round. Make sure your team fills it out!

Hopefully we’ll get some good prototype video this weekend. We’ve also ordered a net (non-andymark source) and will hopefully be able to test how well one barge can hold up to all 18 algae. We’ll definitely post videos of that whenever we get stuff in if no one else beats us to it. Like Spectrum covered in their post - at high levels the game might be won or lost based on stealing algae. The team will need to have a discussion and build some consensus being able to score algae in the net. That was totally of our radar the day after kickoff.

[ahartnet]

One of our mentors received the two offical cages that we ordered and weighed them as well:

The blue one with everything but the eyebolt attached to truss is 19 pounds. The red one with no hardware is 16.4 pounds. The blue one without hardware was 16.8 pounds.

After putting the hardware on the red one, it was 18.8 #s.

The Andymark chain is 20 links, but I think the actual field is 19 links - so there’s potentially one links worth of weight to subtract out as well.e

[ahartnet]

Took a couple very quick videos tonight. I can try to get some more tomorrow if there’s things people want to see:

Coral flooding:

What happens if we try to just dump a bunch of coral on the field? Will they hit each other and get closer to the reef over time?

Survey says - the landings don’t seem to consistent. Maybe half of them make their way halfway to the reef? So might be argualby further away or in corners/up against walls which seem to traditionally be a hard place to pick up some game pieces, They’re also in all sorts of different orientations…I hope you’ve got a great ground pick up/hand off if this is your plan.

I can try a test tomorrow with the video further back, and another test with pushing them down all vertically rather than letting them roll down horizontally

Coral Flodding

Here’s the field area after dropping the ~15 coral

How much will Algae cause cages to swing?

The cage with no chain weighs about the 16.5 - 17#s we’ve seen. I was taken buy surprise when I went to go lift up the box of 20 Algae (“Did I order gear boxes I don’t remember???”). Do the Algae weigh enough that a loss one rolling around will wreck havoc?

If it has some force behind it (like an errant launch), yea maybe. Just a light roll? Not too much.

Algae and Cargo

This was at the end of the meeting and I wanted to get out, so this was more just recording some curiosities that I hadn’t gotten to yet. It there’s other more useful things people would like - I can try to get that tomorrow too