Pre-Rookie team here! We were trying to start up a team at our school for the 2020-21 season this year, so we gathered a small-ish (29 people?) group of people who were interested to form a potential team. We were going to try to get the people involved through off-season competitions and taking them to see actual competitions, but then everything shut down because of COVID-19.
Are there any digital resources, materials, or activities that can introduce people to FIRST and its different aspects? Our people don’t really know what they are interested in yet (Electrical, Mechanical, Programming, etc.) Is there any way to let people try things out that’s lockdown-friendly? Any introductory youtube videos, quizzes, etc? Thanks!
One of the best CD papers on design IMO, should help you guys out on the thought process needed for designing a robotThe Grabanski Design Manifesto.pdf (3.3 MB)
Lots of teams have posted workshops on various topics onto youtube. The videos serve as great introductions into different roles on the team. I personally recomend workshops from team 1678 Citrus Circuts and team 971 Spartan Robotics.
Rookies should always also reach out to teams in your local area - especially if you’re physically close to any of them, it could be great (once quarantine is mostly over) to visit their shop and pick their brains about how they do things. Reading/watching tutorials on something is always a bit different than seeing it in person, and seeing how teams operate irl will help people decide what they want to focus on.
You could try to have an online meeting and analyze an FRC game from previous years, and then brainstorm some robot ideas and compare those to the robots that won championships that year. I think its a really great exercise because it can help the team get familiar with the different mechanisms that were used over the years.
This. Getting good at CAD has saved the Pandamaniacs mountains of frustration and wasted material.
Double cosigned. In particular, their Guide to the FRC MCC was instrumental in taking 1293 from “second pick three times in 15 years” to “two captains and a first-round pick in two years”. We adapted it into our own set of design standards, to distill things a little further (and account for our own preferences).
I do not know what you all have for financial resources, but if you want a solid practice bot platform, this looks incredibly promissing. We have been looking for something like it for years, and have a bunch of motors and controllers so after asking around on CD, @bobbysq mentioned the vmx-pi (which is the brain behind it), and we bought one. It is coming tomorrow. It is a board that attaches to a raspberry pi. Come May it should be able to run a full version of WPILib.
The VMX-Pi is 200.00 at Studica and does not come with the pi.
I know the price for the kit is steep, but a lot of teams want to practice before they get the KOP. This would be a way to do so with the same software. I should note that though the vmx itself is FRC legal (as a gyro or co-processor only), none of the motors or controllers in the kit are.
However, the VMX is capable of running FRC motors and controllers. Kuai labs is really supportive as is Studica. You should be able to actually swap the VMX-pi for the rio (using FRC controllers and motors). They do this at Kuai labs currently. It has both PWM and CAN support. Currently, it is only in beta with WPILib 2019, but full release with 2020 support is supposed to come out soon.
The Spartan Series of workshops are available through this YouTube play list, and also the 971 team website which includes a description of each seminar and links to download most of the presentation slides.