Hey FRC Community!
In August, we hosted the Spartan Series with presentations that cover a wide range of topics, from robot design to team sustainability. We’ve posted videos and the slides of every presentation on our website. You can find them all at this link: frc971.org/workshops.
We hope that you have fun with them and learn something new!
The list of presentations is as follows:
Control System Modeling & Test Driven Development–Austin Schuh
Designing for Controllability–Travis Schuh
971’s Sustainability Practices–Wyn Schuh & Finbarr Crispie
Intersection of Electronics, Programming, and Design–Brian Silverman
Strategy Techniques and Scouting Management–Jocelyn Baird
Building Your Team’s Resume–Megan Guttieri & Ginger Schmidt
An Overview of 971’s 2017 Robot–Ginger Schmidt & Adam Snaider
Being a Student Leader–Bahar Maghbouleh & Ginger Schmidt
Thanks to Steve Silverman, Sean Doherty, and Lyndsey Dworkin for recording and editing the videos. Thanks to Michael Schuh for developing the website page. Thank you to everyone who attended. It was a really great experience for members of our team.
If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to PM me or send email to [email protected].
Thank you for posting these, excited to watch them.
Thanks for sharing these lectures/workshops. I’m a relatively new mentor and I done a lecture myself so I know how hard it is to express tried-and-true advice and knowledge to high school students. These presenters did a great job and there is a lot to learn from them, teaching wise!
These are great! Thank you so much for posting these, and Happy New Year!
Thanks to 971 for posting these! I thought the controls lectures were really well done, and a great source to compile a lot of info in one spot. I will return to these often!
Anyone know why Austin ignores the force of gravity in his simulation calculations?
Amazing videos! I watched most of them, personally the designing for controls was my favorite. Thanks for these, I’ve learned so much in just one day of watching youtube 
Gravity is treated as an unmodeled disturbance that the control loop compensates for on the real system. One way to do this is with an integrator somewhere in the controller.
That’s one way to solve it. Another is to realize that gravity will result in a constant offset from your goal, which for some applications is good enough. Your system will stop moving down when the motor is applying a voltage to counteract gravity. That will be v_holding / kP. With a sufficiently stiff controller, that displacement will be O(1 cm), which for most applications in FRC is good enough. (I really hate integral if you can’t tell)
As an exercise for the reader, you can add gravity back to your simulation to see how well it handles it.
On 971, we don’t bother modeling gravity and it seems to be working pretty well for us 