You bet your bottom dollar Ri3D plays in Peoria!
Day 0 Prep - Part 1
So, as you’d hopefully expect, not 100% of the work is done in three days. “Ordering parts and staring longingly at the front door” makes for a pretty boring stream. There’s a lot of prep work that happens first to ensure the three days are as productive as possible.
We fully believe that the steps taken mirror what an FRC team should be aiming to accomplish in their offseason, to make their own build season. For this post, anywhere I know we deviated from the “what could a normal team do” rules, I’ll make a note of.
Parts Stocking & Sponsorship
This work actually started months ago. Ben led the charge on making sure we had sponsored product in the door, and helped to procure parts to fill any gaps.
Recruitment & Teambuilding
An internal discord server was set up to coordinate planning efforts. Team members were recruited, and reached out to their networks to find even more available people. We had a number of planning meetings, including making sure people who were traveling in from out of town had places to stay and cars to get them where they needed to be. Food was planed out, along with a few small social events to make the “mini Peoria vacation” worthwhile. Also, hopefully, build up some relationships with people who share an interest in robots, but otherwise have never met.
Social Media Accounts
One main product of our Robot in 3 Days effort is educational content for teams to consume. Success here means having the channels available to deliver this content. Multiple team members have spent the majority of their prep time making sure these accounts are updated, consistently branded, and prepped for delivering information to teams.
Build Space Setup
A few different options for build area were considered. A basement was selected as the most viable option. As soon as that decision was made, work started on setting up the space. Plans were made for a temporary testing area, along with an organized workshop with multiple build areas. Safety concerns were analyzed to determine minimum acceptable PPE.
Hardware & Electrical Prep
Leveraging a few rules that were tweaked in 2022 and 2023, we went ahead to pre-assemble many different COTS components. This included a full SDS Mk4i swerve drive base.
Not yet pictured: some electrical work to get most of the standard components mounted and connected.
Caveat: This is only legal if used as a practice robot drive base, and isn’t taken to competition. However, the time spent to assemble modules was… not much. Four people got all four done in about 2 hours. The drive base was cut and assembled about an hour later.
Editorial from the Software Guy
These modules were phenomenally easy to put together. It’s honestly easier and more consistent than the kitbots I’ve worked on. Kudo’s to SDS on this one - what impressed me the most was that there was … almost … no way to make a mistake during assembly. If two parts weren’t supposed to go together, they didn’t fit together. If you had parts left over, you knew you did something wrong (guilty, 1x).
Honestly. It blows my mind that the same product that simultaneously won and lost Einstein this year is so accessible to even the teams who wouldn’t consider themselves great at doing mechanical things. My bar of “good mechanical design” has been set to new heights.
We also went ahead and flashed robot controllers up to the latest firmware. However, it’s likely we’ll have to redo that work after kickoff. At least we know we have a laptop that can do it.
Software Prep
Knowing we’d have some swerve drive modules on hand, as well as knowing some of the electrical hardware, we opted to try to write some software in advance. While we’ve had pretty limited time to actually test anything out, we’ve got a large chunk of the “thinking” work done for hardware we are very hopeful will appear in the final product.
Some repos to check out:
Robot2023-Simple represents the WPILib swerve example with pose estimation, updated to support the hardware currently on the drive base. It’s fairly bare-bones still, but represents the simplest, minimum-feature way to get our drive base rolling. Which, for three days, is what will matter the most.
Robot2023-Advanced was also tossed together, as reference for an integrated set of swerve simulation, path-planned autonomous, web dashboard, and a host of other bells and whistles. As we see what our build capacity is, it may get used either directly or as reference for demoing more advanced features.
Again keep in mind - neither has actually been tested on real hardware, yet. However, by about a week from now, there will hopefully be more working code there. We’ll be sure to update documentation to clearly lay out
AprilTags
With the AprilTag fiducial targets on the field this year, we’re not yet certain what the “best way” to process or use them will be. However, we are doing some work in conjunction with the PhotonVision team to trail a few solutions. Most will be raspberry-pi based, and involve a few different cameras and mounting solutions.
Latest CAD for that case.
Caveat: doing the 3d printing before kickoff isn’t acceptable per the 2022 rules. However, “watching a 3d printer for 3 days” makes for a boring livestream.
Again, we really don’t know what this will be used for, if anything. But the goal is to have prep work and tools at our fingertips, so that if it’s useful and we can demo it for teams, we’ll be able to do it effectively.
