Saints Robotics 1899 Build Thread | Open Alliance 2024

FIRST FRC Open Alliance
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Saint’s Robotics (FRC Team 1899) is thrilled to join the Open Alliance for the 2024 season!

We’re a school based team (Interlake High School) from Bellevue, Washington! We are part of the Pacific Northwest District. We have 90-ish members mostly split between five subteams: Business, Imagery, Programming, Control Systems (wiring), and Mechanical. This is our second year as an OA team and we hope to contribute more this season!

Here’s a bit more about us:

Team History

We were founded in 2005, and have always connected with Interlake High School. For most of our team’s life, we worked at our school, but a few years ago we moved into our new workshop: Ivanhoe! We’re extremely thankful for the facilities we have, and our wonderful mentors which have helped us throughout.

Team Structure

Here’s a quick graphic (mildly outdated) detailing our subteams:

Most of the names are quite self-explanatory, but the Competition group is a little more complicated. The Competition group is not a group of subteams, rather a group of individuals responsible for enforcing or guiding the rest of the team on these respective topics.

As for leadership, we have 2 main divisions.

The administrators [admin] (President, VP, Secretary, Treasurer, Director of Engineering, Director of Communication, and Director of Competitions)

The leadership [leads] (Mechanical Lead, Control Systems Lead, Programming Lead, Business Lead, Imagery Lead, DEI Captain, Safety Captain, and Strategy Lead).

Directors are responsible for representing their leads:
Director of Engineering: Mechanical, Control Systems, Programming
Director of Communication: Business, Imagery
Director of Competition: Safety Captain, Strategy lead, Drive Team Manager

The Bellevue Alliance

We are part of the Bellevue Alliance along with other FRC teams the Bellevue area. The purpose of this alliance is to network between teams and share resources to create a safe and fun community that allows every robotics team in Bellevue to grow and strengthen. We have monthly BA meetings where representatives from all the teams meet to discuss FRC things.

During the off-season we meet Mondays and Fridays from 3:45-5:45 (a good time for us after school) with drive practices on Wednesdays (this year) from 5-7pm. Unfortunately we believe we will not be able to meet in the summers because of our school’s policy. In build season we plan to meet almost every day with varying times each day.

Links:
Linktree: saints_robotics | Twitter, Instagram, TikTok | Linktree
Youtube: SaintsRobotics 1899
GitHub: Saints Robotics · GitHub
Website: https://saintsrobotics.com/

Looking back, last year we were not very active in the OA, however this year we plan to fix that and be more active. We also hope our format this year will be more useful for other teams.

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A delayed post from kickoff weekend:

Our team spent this kickoff at our local kickoff event. At the event we watched the stream then split up into different breakout rooms with many other teams. We have found this to be a very useful strategy to help our members collect their initial thoughts about the game and come back with important information and lots of ideas. After kickoff we had a short lunch break before returning to our workshop to discuss as a team.

This year we decided to try a new, strategy based approach to brainstorming after kickoff. Inspired by a mentor from another team in the BA, this approach simply focuses on deciding the strategical aspects and goals of our robot before beginning to design mechanisms. This was meant to solve a problem that we have sometimes had in the past of rushing into designs without fully considering all aspects.

So far we have had many discussions about what we want to prioritize and have made some tentative decisions that will hopefully be finalized within the next few days. We spent a lot of time considering the merits of focusing on either the Amplifier or the Speaker and decided that we will primarily attempt to design a mechanism that can do both, while also planning a system that focuses on the Speaker as a backup. Finally, at the end of our meeting on Sunday we also reviewed some initial sketches and tested driving over a game piece.

In the coming days we hope to draw up some more designs and hopefully begin some prototyping. We have found using KrayonCAD in Onshape to be very useful for our team members to explain their ideas. We also plan to mount a kitbot on our swerve base for testing and also begin prototyping ground intake designs. Our team is hoping to finalize rough designs for scoring mechanisms by the end of the week, and have a full robot CAD within two weeks.

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Do you have any pictures or videos or anything? I’m curious about some of the concept ideas.

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Sorry about the lack of updates from our team over the last two weeks! It has been a very hectic time and we just have not had anything to share : (

Unfortunately, the day before kickoff at the peak of our excitement about the new game, Murphy’s law kicked in and we found out that our workshop had been damaged due to inclement weather over winter break.

Due to the problems we had to deem our own building unsafe for work and thus have been unable to use it for the last two weeks. our teacher has graciously allowed for us to meet in her classroom after school - however, without access to our workshop, we’ve been limited in how much we can prototype and test.

Although these have been a gloomy two weeks, we received excellent news yesterday that our workshop is back! We also received our shipments of NEO Vortexes and Spark Flexes!

With our new motors, we’re working on migrating all of our connectors to power pole, including CAN bus. This has let us create a common connector block for all of our swerve drives and mechanisms, ensuring that switching out whole components is much faster and more reliable as we do not need to reroute every individual connection.

Even with our major delay we are excited to hit the ground running! We have already begun working on our swerve drive and a CAD for a backup robot (in case our main design fails). We also plan to finalize our superstructure for our final robot on Tuesday.

We also have a number of outreach events coming up including the Washington Tech Invitational (WTI)! We have been preparing heavily for that event as well as developing curriculum for the FLL teams that we mentor to keep them engaged between seasons.

Things are looking much better for us now. I hope to have some photos or screenshots of CAD for our next post! Until next time!

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I will get some pictures of our designs to share tomorrow