Team 1640 in Week 4

FIRST Robot Showcase
#1

Week 4 was a great week for us! (Not that Week 5 isn’t holding its own)

  • Successful 4th-generation unicorn swerve drive code
  • Finished all (10) 2013 swerve modules
  • A wired (temporarily) identical practice drive base
  • A welded and painted base frame
  • Halfway through shooter and Level 3 Climber machining
  • Starting Arm creation
  • Almost-entirely-CADed robot
  • Prototype shooter is hitting upwards of 90% from the back of the pyramid (we miss 1 in 15-20)
  • Shooter also zips them all the way down the field, and we made 4 of 8 from the feeder station tonight (after this video was taken–more later)

Please enjoy a little video and our website.

See you at Hatboro and Chestnut Hill!

#2

Man you guys get better and better each season!

Question: Why did you choose to build a swerve again? Has it become so refined now that you can basically just get one machined in week 1? If not, what iteration went into the modules?

Do you guys plan to climb then shoot, or shoot first and then climb?

Looks great and I’m excited to see the full field shots!

-Akash

#3

Thanks, Akash!

We’ll be shooting first–our climber puts our shooter pointing basically vertical. We should be able to dump 4 colored disks, though.

We went for swerve this year mainly because we saw a lot of field-crossing in our future. (We’ve got a low-priority basic floor pickup, but there are still a lot of disks behind that wall.) We also like aiming with it. Really though, no matter how much we mentors try to temper it expectations each year, the students always want to do it–they love the challenge, especially the programmers! They find it inspirational, so we go with it :wink:

We can churn out all the module parts in about a week, and fabrication takes the sub-team much of the weekend. It’s definitely refined–fourth generation now–but it still evolves a bit every year. We’re happy that we managed to reduce the weight (8.6 to 7.9lb/ea), size (almost and inch off the width and height), and cost (not much, but with COTs prices climbing it’s still pretty good) this year. Mounting is a bit more robust, machining is a little faster, maintenance is easier…just all around a little tighter, stronger, smarter. Also, it’s back to RS540s (we had to run 395s last year), and we’re experimenting with the white HiGrips.

#4

The full court was a bit off. What is the percentage made?

#5

The night in the video was only like 20% in the goal. We’re up to 50% tonight, but it’s not really our priority to make the shots–we’re a low-mounted shooter (in order to climb well) and anticipate a lot of defense. More than likely we’ll use our high-angle shot when defenders move in; just shooting down the field to an alliance partner, or then swerving down to nab them ourselves. We’d only shoot to score from there if there was no defense, and even then I’d only expect to make 2-5 of every 8.

It would be nice to make the other two colored disks this way, though.

#6

It looks great so far, Siri and team.

We’re looking forward to seeing the finished bot and playing with you at Hatboro-Horsham during week one!