Ri3D 'Snow Problem 2017

FIRST General Forum
1

http://snowproblem.org/themes/Skyline/images/logo.png

Hello Chief Delphi!

'Snow Problem is excited to be returning for our third (!!) season of Robot in Three Days.

We’d like to thank our sponsors, which include University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering/Student Union and Activities/CSE Expo, AndyMark, PHD, and all our friend and family who are supporting the build. We’d also like to thank Rev Robotics and iR3 Creative for their continued support of the Robot in 3 Days program and in particular Rev for offering support that due to a miscommunication we weren’t able to take advantage of.

For anyone that wants to follow along live with our build, we’ll be live streaming on Twitch at z.umn.edu/snowproblemstream

We’ll most likely be starting our strategy session around 3:30 CST and going until we’re done for the day. From there, the plan is to start around 9:00 AM and go until we’re done for the day. Myself and a few other people will be on the twitch stream to answer questions when we aren’t working on the robot.

We’ll also be a part of the daily summaries on https://www.youtube.com/Robotin3Days as well as being a part of the Ri3D Team Indiana Show on FUN which you can find at https://www.twitch.tv/firstupdatesnow.

If you want some behind the scenes looks at the build, you can also follow us on Twitter @SnowProblemz, Facebook at /snowproblemz, or on Snap Chat with, you guessed it, snowproblemz. We also have a website at http://snowproblem.org/ which will have our stream and any resources we post.

After the build, we’ll take some time to clean up our CAD model and then post that along with (hopefully for real this time) a white paper on our design. We’re hoping to get our reveal video out within a few days of our “stop build”.

Above all, we can’t wait to see what the FRC Community makes of Steamworks. You guys are why we do this!

We’ll be taking questions throughout the build in this thread and on Twitch, so feel free to ask about anything you see on the stream. Like I said, we do this for you guys, so we’ll try our best to answer any questions you have about our robot or even the equipment you see in our shop.

Best of luck, and we’ll see you at the competition!

2

I will not be involved with the 3 day build this year :frowning: but I’m really looking forward to seeing what 'Snow Problem comes up with for this year’s game!

Good luck guys!

3

Stream is currently down-- we have a small issue where the breaker for our office is in someone else’s space. We’ll be back on as soon as we can get someone over to let us in.

In the meantime, progress on the gear scorer, shooter, intake, and climber are all proceeding marvelously. It does mean we might not be driving as soon as we thought, since we still had a few frame parts to go and we try not to do things halfway around here!

Let us know if you have any questions-- I’m working on a strategy document that will be up tonight or tomorrow morning that summarizes the direction we’re going. Best of luck teams!

4

*Does your Ri3D build team have a simple text blog somewhere explaining what you are doing, and the design decisions you are making? Perhaps with some still pictures showing your mechanisms?

5

Not exactly.

We got a little thrown off last night when all of our computers got power cut off, but I’ll be posting a white paper in CD Media later today describing our strategy and the design decisions related to that.

Tomorrow I’ll be posting a similar document that includes a breakdown of our prototypes, and when we release our reveal video there will be a white paper describing the robot and mechanisms, with pictures.

The plan was to move a little faster than that, but unfortunately our building isn’t cooperating!

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Our strategy summary may be found here. Apologies for the delay.

7

Thank you. Reading it now…

Tomorrow I’ll be posting a similar document that includes a breakdown of our prototypes, and when we release our reveal video there will be a white paper describing the robot and mechanisms, with pictures.

Reps to you :slight_smile:

8

Nice job. This is an example for other Ri3D teams to follow.

9

Looks like our prototyping paper may be coming out tomorrow. We want to make sure that it contains as few errors as possible, which becomes more difficult the later at night we are working. On the upside, we’re aiming to make it as or more thorough as our strategy document, explaining not only what we prototyped, but our prototyping strategy and what we learned from our various prototypes.

In the mean time, we are more than willing to answer any questions that you have!

10

Prototype document is up!

You can find it with the rest of our white papers here.

11

Have you guys posted your reveal video yet? As of 1/14, I can’t seem to find it.

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Not yet but I do know that they are working on it!

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Our robot reveal video is up!

You can check it out here.

You can also check out our white papers here.

Those papers include a description of our strategic analysis of FIRST Steamworks, what our prototyping process looks like, some thoughts from our programmer, and a guide to how to do powder coating in-house like we do.

Without further ado… we present Lelantos.

14

As gorgeous as that robot looks plastered all across my computer screen, this might help.

15

Awesome reveal video! Definetly my favorite from the 2017 season! I wish you guys would’ve shown your robot shooting a bunch of balls all at oncr, instead of just one or two at a time. Im curious to see how accurate your shooter really is. What percent of balls do you guys when you storage is “full”?

16

Beat you to it. Sometimes I forget to preview my posts…

17

Pardon the spelling errors, im on mobile. That last sentance is supposed to say what percent of balls do you SCORE when your sotrage is “full”?

18

Our hopper to shooter transition is very inconsistent. I would say that our shooter, by itself, is quite accurate (when testing hand fed, we had an extremely consistent shot), but unfortunately the shooter is only half of the battle. Loading is paramount, and we unfortunately neglected the design of our loading mechanism, having only three days.

I would say that we were probably 60% accurate, maybe more, when we were able to shoot. Unfortunately jams or mispositioned balls made that rarer than any of us would have liked. This also made it somewhat difficult to actually gauge how accurate our shot was.

19

Totally understandable, thanks for answering! Awesome robot!

20

Great video and a great robot. I was wonder what gearbox, ratio and motor you were using on the intake/climber. The intake seemed fast for how much weight you had to pull up.

Thanks in advance.