I am pleased to announce that the Zoukeepers RI3D team is returning for the 2024 season. This is now the official Zoukeepers RI3D thread for the 2024 season. We will post daily updates to this thread during our RI3D Season. We will be running a slightly different schedule this year due to the entire RI3D team deciding to volunteer at the local FLL event on the would-be second day of RI3D. As such We will have our day 1 update on Saturday and the day 2 update out on Monday with day 3 coming Tuesday. We plan to have our full reveal and robot breakdown out on Wednesday on the ZouKeepers YouTube channel.
DAY 1
Today’s progress was heavily based on prototyping. This year’s game piece is much harder to handle than we expected.
The day started with a planning session where we laid out all our ideas for various robot components.
Field/game takeaways:
- Driving under the stage area could help decrease the cycle time to the amp.
- Floor pickup will be advantageous early for the center field notes.
Prototyping takeaways:
- A Single row of Surgical tubes is not enough to drag the note.
- The amount of compression on the note matters. (no duh)
Taking these things into consideration we came up with the concept for our bot.
The plan at present is to use a slightly modified kitbot style shooter but with a pivot (everybot 2022 style) so that it can be lowered to drive under the stage. We originally wanted to try to drag a note over the bumper but we couldn’t get that working so we decided to clamp the note with a wheel and sheet of Lexan and then flip it into the bot. this has the added benefit of giving us a possible way to dump in the amp by lifting it parallel and lobing it in.
We plan to throw a climbing device on as well but at the current time, I don’t have any good pictures of that (sorry).
The CAD is coming along well, it is currently a mess but it proves that it all should fit under the stage at the current state. The current lay-flat design goes up to ~60 degrees.
The plan is to use a dead axel for the shooter pivot and that intake pivot so that the intake flip lines up at any shooter angle.
That is all I have for day one, if you have any questions ask below (I don’t bite). The day 2 update will be out Monday evening (hopefully).
(Writers note: I’m already going insane.)
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updates?
Hey! Im apart of this Ri3d team as well and we all volunteered at an FLL tournament yesterday and didn’t work at all so our 3 days are Sat, Mon and Tues.
We are currently working on day 2 updates!
Small video CAD update
Work is currently going strong!
We are also using the agile workflow system to keep track of what we’re working on this time around
DAY 2
As a reminder to those who didn’t read above today was our day 2 due to the local FLL tournament being held during normal day 2 (it was a good break).
Today we finalized a CAD design and began construction on the robot, as of now the robot is about 90% complete after around 15 hours of construction. Below are some images of the construction state and CAD.
All of the robot components are complete, in the current state the climber needs to be corrected and attached, the intake geared up, and a compression wall attached to the note shooter.
In the current configuration when folded down (and the climber is down) we are looking at about 26 inches tall, this means we currently meet one of our main goals which was designing the bot to fit under the stage.
On day 3 we intend to correct some construction quality issues with the intake, mainly an unlevel piece of lexan that drags on the ground. A big thing to note with this intake design is that a single bar over bumper style does have some wobble to it, however, the wobble has not proven to be a huge issue, and we have a potential fix to the issue called adding more arm bars.
Stay tuned for day 3 updates and some robot results tomorrow (or today, I lost track of time).
(Writers note: I’m extremely tired.)
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DAY 3
Oh what and RI3D it has been. Today’s tasks were mostly relating to dialing in and fine tuning the robot we finished building day 2. As a recap our goal was to build a robot that can be short and have modifiable shooting angles, our testing showed we met this goal, but more on that in a reveal and robot recap soon (Wednesday and/or Thursday likely because editing takes time).
There are a few flaws that I would like to note with this robot design, mainly the climber. Please, I beg you, unless you center your climber over the center of gravity of your robot, use two climbing arms. The biggest issue with our design is we didn’t have access to a second thriftybot climb kit, we were able to lift off the ground, but not enough to get the robot entirely supported by the chain. If you carbon copy this design and can only change one thing please add a second climb arm. The other flaws of this design is it didn’t integrate any vision and it used very old CIM and bag motors that got handed down from our host team (plus one v1 falcon we got permission to borrow). Also the chassis is kinda illegal because it is a little too big, hopefully this is the last year we have to use this aging chassis.
Now onto the pros. The design allows for shots into the speaker and amp, more on that in the reveal and recap. This design allows for varied distance shots and can drive under the stage.
If you add a second climber arm it will climb.
What can be learned from this? We learned that a kitbot style of note shooter can be used rather effectively, however if you have the ability to make the gear ratios on them spin faster than the stock motor speed you will see better range results.
That is all we have for RI3D 2024, we will have a reveal out soon (I’ll update this then). Feel free to ask any questions. Good luck teams.
(Writers note: I’m gonna sleep now)
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The reveal is out, go check out Brown!
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Hey! would you mind posting the CAD?
Here is a link to the drive folder with the CAD files, sorry for the delay. I should note the chassis in the CAD is still an illegal size just as it was the past few years as our team still can’t afford to make a new chassis, all of the mechanisms on it should be able to work as is on a smaller chassis with some slight modification. We are trying to get the money for a fresh chassis next year, so hopefully, this issue will be resolved and I won’t have to give the disclaimer next year.
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