Team 3926 MPAror Robotics 2023 Open Alliance Thread

[team3926]

Welcome to Team 3926, the MPAror’s (pronounced as in emperor penguin, our team mascot) 2023 Open Alliance build thread! We are a team from Mounds Park Academy (where the MPA in the team name comes from) based out of St. Paul, Minnesota and are so excited for our first year here! We meet every Monday, and Wed-Sat. This year have about 30 students, and are looking forward to a great season ahead!
Links:
CAD: Onshape
Code: mparobotics/2023-Season · GitHub

Tentative Plan for Season Schedule:
Monday after kickoff: Finalize Strategy
Wednesday-Saturday, week 1: Prototyping
Monday-Wednesday, week 2: Begin Cading, Designing Robot; Code Team wires and codes drive base, vision, basic autos, drive practice
DRIVE BASE COMPLETE BY END OF WED WEEK 2
Thurs-Sat, week 2: Start Cutting, continue designing; Code Team wires codes drive base, vision, basic autos, drive practice
Week 3, Mon-Fri, Build Robot, Integrate; Code Team designs and prepares electronics panel, final code, and drive practice
Week 3, Saturday, Catch Up, Finishing touches; Code Team designs and prepares electronics panel, final code, and drive practice
Week Four Mon-Sat: Test code, things don’t work, fix the things that don’t work
Week Five Mon-Sat: Code Team works on autos and drive practice; Build team works on Endgame and prototyping/building improvements to subsystems
Week Six Mon-Fri: Drive Practice, Implement Mechanical improvements from build team
Week Six Sat-Sun: Week Zero Competition!
Comp Week Zero: Drive Practice, Continue Small Mechanical Improvments. DONE MAKING LARGE CHANGES END OF THURSDAY
Comp Week One (Duluth Week!): Drive Practice Monday Tuesday, Fixing robot and packing
Comp Week One Weds-Sat: Northern Lights Regional!
Comp Week Two-Three: Spring Break; small mech changes and fixes LOTS OF DRIVE PRACTICE
Comp Week Four (Lacrosse Week): Drive Practice Monday Tuesday, Fixing robot and packing
Comp Week Four Weds-Sat: North Star @ LX Regional!

[iz_en_zi]

Update: 1/11/22

Hi! I’m Ian (any pronouns), and I’m a captain and lead programmer for 3926. While I am mainly a programmer, this year my personal goal is to take a step back from just coding and help lead the team overall, and to help in the design area of the robot.

Summer Offseason:

Over the summer, we met two times a week, with the goals of preparing for our first ever summer camp, and to reorganize our lab. Our goal reorganizing our lab space was to make it easier for communication between subteams to happen. To do this, we moved where code and design team operated to be on a sidewall in the lab, closer to each other, and moved shelving from the center of the lab, which created a makeshift wall between the build and technical areas of the shop. We wrapped up our Summer by participating in the Minnesota State Fair, demoing our robot.

Fall Offseason:
We began our fall slow by finishing cleaning our lab, and rewiring our 2022 competition robot, Permafrost, and our test-bases. Rewiring these bases was incredibly useful, as last year our primary electronics member graduated, and there was minimal knowledge of wiring on the team. The main event of our fall offseason, however, was The T.E.S.T., a fall mock season held in Minnesota similar to Bunnybots or ORRCA. The T.E.S.T. was an invaluable training tool for us, teaching all new members (which comprise about 1/3 of our team this year), the basics of prototyping and design in a condensed FRC-like season. From the code side of things, it was extremely successful, allowing the entire robot to be programmed by rookie programers. In previous seasons, our offseason training was minimal, and as we only have one dedicated programming mentor, who also mentors in build, design, and electronics, often times coders have been expected to teach themselves on the team, which has led to many not being able to get over the extremely steep learning curve for code. This is the first year in a while in which we have a high number of coders all able to contribute to robot code, in part due to me being able to help train new coders in the context of the T.E.S.T. competition.

Now, onto the on-season:

Kickoff:
While last year was the first full kickoff for a majority of the team, this year much of the team had previous experience. We started by watching the kickoff broadcast, followed by reading the rules in small groups to fill out a basic rules questionnaire. After sharing the rules we thought were important, we followed this by filling out strategy questionnaires in the same small groups. These helped groups determine what they thought would be valuable in the game. This followed by us playing a mock version of the game, with humans being placed on rolling chairs to LARP as robots, to help us get a feel for the game.

Finally, we went back into our small groups to create a list of priorities, of what we thought we wanted to accomplish. We would bring these back into a larger group on Monday.

Monday, 1/9:
On Monday, we regrouped to discuss team strategy. As we discussed, there was one question that lingered overhead? How does a team be competitive in such a swerve friendly game, without swerve? As we learned with our mock game on Saturday, Midfield defense seemed to be incredibly powerful in this game, and swerve helped to get around it. Unfortunately, we did not receive our SDS modules until late in the offseason, and ran out of time to work on it before a main season, so we will be running some form of tank drive this year.

There seemed to be two ideas of strategy forming. One was to attempt to place cones and cubes onto the high goal, with a single degree of freedom arm, with design inspiration from 1503 and 179’s Logomotion robot. Pictured Below is 1503’s 2011 robot:

The other strategy proposed was to be a low goal cycle bot, which would be simpler to build, and would prioritize cycling game pieces from the substations to the hybrid nodes, or potential alliance partners by being, small, light, fast, and highly maneuverable. We saw this being a strong potential second pick at our regionals, especially if being small would increase the chances of a triple climb.

In the end, we were unable to decide on either strategy before prototyping, so we created a prototyping/strategy priority list for both:

For both strategies, we emphasized the need to have a slim drivetrain that could be easier to fit onto the charge station, as well as easily drive over it, as an advantage of tank drive is that it will be more suited to constantly cycling over the difficult terrain of the charge station (especially if retrofitted with pneumatic wheels, which we are looking into testing), and this would free up the two lanes that could easily get congested.

Wednesday, 1/11:
Today, we started by finalizing our decisions for our drivetrain. While we have built custom drive trains between 2019-2022, this year we decided to use a modified KoP drive train to save time, and because the configurations it allowed were suited to the robot we wanted to create. The kit base will be in the slimmest configuration possible regardless of design. We will most likely power it with 4 or 6 Neo motors. After making our drivetrain decisions, we began to research and prototype in 4 groups: Low Goal bot, High Goal Arm, Intake, and Cone Uprighting (a priority of the low goal feeder bot)

I was lead the intake group (the leaders of the other groups will share what they prototyped soon):
After researching, we came up with two concepts that we were interested in prototyping. The first was a setup with four powered compliant wheels, with two at a wider distance in front and two with a smaller distance in back. The wider opening of the front wheels would intake the cubes, while the smaller wheels in the back would be able to grab the cones. While we ran out of time before being able to test both sets of wheels at once, we were able to find the most effective distances for the black compliant wheels that we used. We found that 7 inches from inside edge to inside edge proved most effective for the outer set of the wheels, and are still testing various distances for the inner set of wheels (as well as vertical heights to mount them out as the cone diameter changes). Overall, we learned a lot about how these game pieces interact through the prototyping, and hopefully we will have a complete prototype by the end of tomorrow.

[iz_en_zi]

Update 1/13/22
Section I, Progress update:
Over the past two days, we continued to prototype potential intakes and high and low goal scoring options. As we quickly discovered, a 1DoF arm, while possible, would be highly constrained (and most likely require a virtual 4 bar increasing complexity). Right now, we have noticed that between the arm and intake prototypes, our experienced leadership resources have been spread too thin, and tomorrow we will most likely make the difficult, but necessary choice to only attempt the low goal, to build within our resources (This has been decided in all but formality, which we will most likely make official tomorrow morning). As a result, we will have more energy and experienced members to dedicate towards creating a low goal robot.

Section II, or How to be Competitive with a Low Goal Robot:
Playing low goal competitively is a tricky game. While certainly easier in a Pick and Place game, it is by no means trivial, especially when constraining one to low goal limits scoring opportunities by 2/3. The question is then, how does one make themselves a desirable pick? To that, we have three crucial pieces to our strategy:

1. Enable scoring from high goal robots: The analysis for this one is simple. Each score in this game costs time in two components: Obtaining and Placing game pieces. If you can shuttle game pieces to and from the substation to robots with high scoring capability, you can enable them to get increased cycles: instead of two robots wasting time traversing the congested midfield, only one smaller robot has to do that - also leaving the community more wide open. Our target for this would be to achieve 8-10 full field cycles a match - this would mean 12 second cycles if you ignore auto and allocate 15 seconds towards climbing. At this amount of cycles, a high level robot could potentially double its scoring capability in a match: by not having to participate in the part of cycles that will most likely take the longest, especially for larger scoring robots. The question is then - can a cycler + scorer + defense combo work better than two scorers + defense? On one hand, this strategy would create less congestion throughout the field as only one robot would be trying to cycle, and only one trying to score. However, the benefits of this scoring method fail if the cycler cannot cycle around the same speed that the scorer can score. In this scenario the scorer would not be able to do anything except for cycle themselves. A potential strategy to mitigate this (as we believe teams will be able to intake and score on a high post in sub-12 seconds) is to have the scoring robot start cycling pre-placed game pieces not used in auto while the cycler creates a buffer of game pieces brought to the community. Regardless of the solution used for this, however, one crucial thing needed for this strategy to work is:

2. Being as fast as humanly (robotly?) possible:
   This one is pretty self explanatory, with the exception of how to be fast and get through midfield defense without swerve. This will require significant driver practice, and the ability to cycle over the charging station. We plan on using 8 inch pneumatic wheels to enable this. Another way we plan to avoid defense is in area 3

3. Being small, and lightweight. Being a robot that can easily participate in a double balance is a must to be picked. Being able to enable a triple balance will be extremely helpful in getting picked, although this will be a hard challenge for any robot that is not very thin. This will also help us avoid defense when full field traversing.

Tomorrow, we will continue to prototype the mechanisms to enable this strategy.

[AJT]

Hello! I’m Anthony Troullier, build captain of 3926.

Here’s an update of our progress over the last week:

Last Saturday we made the decision to go for a low goal robot, with us focusing on speed and low cycles. This decision also led to us deciding to go with a shifting gear box, specifically the Andy Mark EVO Shifters, so we can minimize our time driving times across the midfield. This will significantly help us reduce cycle times towards our 12 second goals. We also chose to use 8 inch pneumatic wheels on the kit base, which will allow us to traverse over the Charge Station with ease.

After our deliberation, we continued prototyping our intake. At this time we were independently working on separate cone and cube intakes, as we were considering either one intake that can pick up both cones and cubes, or two separate intakes. The two separate intakes idea would have had the cone and cube intakes on opposite sides of the robot. We considered this idea because we wouldn’t have had to worry about how two different designs would mesh with each other, and if there would be any problems in the geometry. However, we decided against using two separate primarily because of space concerns. Since we are building this robot as small as we can to facilitate easier balancing on the charge station, space is extremely valuable, and mounting two intakes would have left us with an extremely difficult time mounting electronics and the battery. The preliminary layout of electronics we made leave very little room for a hypothetical second mechanism.

Our cube intake was just four compliant wheels, two stacked on top of each other, that would bring the cube into the intake. Through testing, we found the black compliant wheels worked the best at picking up the cube and subscribing to the rules of touch it own it. We also found that a distance of 7 inches between the edges of the wheels worked well at keeping the cube in place without putting too much pressure on it.

When we first started to protype an intake for the cone, we tried to make it so all had to do was touch it to pick it up. We 3D printed a mechanism that had two bars connected to a bar. We connected the bars with surgical tubing which kept acted kind of like a spring. At the ends of the bars there were motorized wheels that when making contact with the cone it would draw it in. The surgical tubing would help with contracting the mechanism around the cone. We continued to work with this concept, but ran into problems when we considered how we would power it. After some discussion, we decided to use a constant wheel spacing that would be behind our cube intake

We eventually combined the intakes into one (Our first version of which is shown below) and hooked it up Neos to test. We found that our distance between wheels was too close, resulting in cubes being less than halfway into the intake before they hit the back wheels. We went back and recut this intake design, dividing it into two parts. Two arms that had the Cube wheels, and a base that held the cone wheels. The base had .25” wide grooves cut in it that allows us to change the distance between the two set of wheels, so we could find a more ideal wheel spacing that allowed us to have about 75% of the cube behind the middle of our front wheels.

On Wednesday we continued to tinker with spacing and considered the possibility of tilting our intake so we could catch cones slid down from the loading station. At this time, we hadn’t decided on how the intake was going to be deployed (We had a few ideas that are mentioned a bit later), but there was a possibility we could tilt the intake and receive upright cones from the station in a quick time. We just lifted up the drive base we had our prototype mounted too, but we were able to consistently get the cone after a few attempts.

On Thursday, we moved towards finalizing our intake, and we designed an intake that matches our spacing we found to be optimal, and matches belt and pulley sizes we had. We cut out both sides on Friday and started construction, and will finish construction on Saturday. This is not our final intake, as we will be making at least more version, but it will help us finalize our deployment system.

We decided after a significant amount of deliberation to choose a four bar linkage. Our options were using pneumatics to extend our intake out, an arm powered by a motor, and the four bar linkage. This decision was made because it allowed for greater control and more durability for intake mounting along with the preferable center of gravity from storage. A four bar linkage is defined by three specific points, we chose these three points as one for floor pickup, one for stowing and fitting inside frame perimeter and finally, after some testing we determined that with the right angle our intake can pick up upright cones directly from the loading station. We will be finding the optimal middle position with our new intake during our next lab hours, so we can start finalizing the design.

In the next lab hours, we will begin construction of the drive base, build our first version of our finalized intake, and finish the four bar mechanism. Along with this, the coders, who started coding the drive base and intake over the past few days, will continue to work.

[AJT]

Here is video of our prototype intake catching a cone off of the loading station.

[AJT]

Here is the sketch of the four bar linkage and its three proposed positions.

[vargoose84]

@AJT

Here is video of our prototype intake catching a cone off of the loading station.

Doesn’t this alliance station have a Plexi flap that would prevent an upright cone that is sliding to be knocked down as it was travelling down the chute. I think this would cause the cone to slide base-first at your mechanism.

[iz_en_zi]

Yep, it seems like it would. After some experimenting this morning, we actually decided to ditch that idea altogether as from the field tour, and our field elements we have, it seems like the cone won’t have a super hard time landing upright on the floor, and not making that mechanism (instead a simpler for bar for extension/retraction of the intake), would allow us to spend more time on a potential cone uprighting mechanism (although this isn’t top priority).

[iz_en_zi]

Tuesday, 1/24/22 Update

An update by me earlier than midnight!?!? I must’ve fixed my sleep schedule or something (or I’m just procrastinating my homework, I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which is the case).

We have only met for 2 days since we last posted an update but we have made quite a bit of progress since then.

First, we have started construction of the drive base. Our Evo Shifters and Pneumatic wheels arrived last Friday, and we cut the remaining pieces we needed to on Saturday for the drive base. We assembled the frame, but realized that we had the incorrect wheels for the front and back. The pneumatic wheels we ordered had hex hubs on them, which are the correct ones for the middle wheels that go on the output shaft; however, we need wheels with a hub to press a bearing for the front and back wheels. The correct wheels were re-ordered and will arrive Wednesday so we will fully assemble the drive base then.

On Monday, we began the four bar linkage. The arms of the linkage were cut out of polycarbonate, reamed, and had bearings pressed and we will begin construction of it on Wednesday. The mounting bar to the robot and to the intake will be cut out of aluminum Wednesday, and we’ll begin assembling them together over the next few days. We changed the 4 bar from being able to intake from the chute to only being able to intake from the ground, as we decided that that would be faster, and have a lower CoG. The 4 bar will be actuated by two pneumatic pistons of different lengths attached to each other, giving us for different positions it can be in (11, 00, 10, 01). Our three primary positions will be stowed, intaking, and shooting (to get cubes to higher nodes). We may use the fourth to get a different angle between High and Mid Node Cube Shooting.

We combined our cube intake and cone intake and cut it out using polycarbonate. The cone intake is in the middle/inside and the cube is on the outside. We used the same methods of obtaining the game pieces. We first assembled it with NEO, and then switched to Neo 550’s on there with a 10:1 ratio (Which is what we will be using on the actual intake) We discovered that with this configuration and the right angles and speeds, we should be able to shoot cubes onto the mid and high nodes (as you can see in the video). A downside to this configuration is that, if run too fast, the cubes will get squeezed into the space for the cones and then pop out when the green compliant wheels are no longer being powered as the wheels expand out to normal size.

That’s it for this update. As of now we seem to be on track for the robot to be mechanically complete by the end of week three. At that point it will be handed off to controls and drive team while build/design continue to iterate on the mechanisms. On one hand, I’m incredibly excited for controls to get the robot 3 weeks earlier than any other previous year, on the other, well, it looks right now like I’m on track to be showing off some team spirit up at Northern Lights Regional…
(all team members participating voluntarily signed up)

[iz_en_zi]

1/29/23 Update

I would like to recognize that all of my previous posts have been labeled with the year 2022 rather than 2023. Yikes its taken a bit to get used to the new year .

With that being said, as of last night, we have a robot! The pneumatics still need to be hooked up and tested, but as of now the drive base and intake is working, and the wiring of the robot is complete.

Here is a video of it going: (clicking the image will take you to videos on our flickr page)

As of right now, our robot drifts to the left while driving straight, so we will have to fix that on Monday, as well as mount the pneumatics.

On code team’s side, we are overjoyed to have a robot to work on three weeks early (at the small price of blue hair) and have learned a few things as well. By setting a very low stall current limit on the intake motors (about 3 amps as of now), we are able to keep our game pieces held in without browning out and burning out our motors. We’ve also been mapping out the autonomous code options we will want:

This week we’ve made a ton of progress and we can’t wait to make more next week (and can’t wait to share the robot driving 19ft/s over the Charging Station!)

[AJT]

Update 2/5/23

Since our last update the vast majority of work done has been on electronics and code with them working on cleaning up and fixing everything. We had electronics mounted last Saturday, but that was missing all the pneumatics as the correct pistons had not arrived yet. The correct ones came in on Monday and were mounted Wednesday and tested on Thursday.

Over the week build continued to work on field elements, bumpers, and made a few fixes that were needed on the robot like covers for our gearboxes to prevent wires from feeding into them. We also started work on redesigning the four bar linkage to increase strength, along with an intake modification in which the front arms would move in and out to pick up tipped cones. We will cut it out during this week and will see whether it is work us continuing with that idea or sticking with our current intake design depending on how well it works.

Controls: Code team has continued to work on our autonomous code, as well as work on programming a CTRE CANdle, which will allow us to signal which game piece we want to our human players via LEDS.

Electronics meanwhile plumbed the pneumatics system and reworked the wiring to make it much neater. On Saturday we encountered an issue (Rev PH not turning on compressor when code previously worked and CAN loop is functional) with our PH that we have yet to resolve. We believe it most likely has to do with an error made when rewiring the CANbus and will investigate more on Monday.

[iz_en_zi]

An update on this: At the end of lab hours today we were able to get the compressor running! (This update was written yesteday) The culprit? A faulty wire on the 120psi switch.

[AJT]

Update 2/9/23

We finished up our redesign of the four bar linkage on Wednesday after a few day of working on it. Our primary goal with this redesign was to increase the strength of the mechanism as we had a few points weak points in the last iteration. Fixing these problems involved double stacking the polycarb plates that connect the intake mounting bar and the drive base mounting bar.

The two mounting bars were also totally redesigned. Starting with the bottom one, it is now one continuous block that will be machined out of aluminum by one of our sponsors. Previously, we had two 3d printed parts, one that attached to the front drive base bar and one that attached to a cross bar. Now this continuous bar is significantly stronger and is attached to the front bar of the drive base.

The new intake mounting bar will also be machined out of aluminum by one of our sponsors, this new bar is attached to the rest of the 4 bar structure on both sides and is significantly stronger than before. It will attached to the intake as the same way as before with a piece of 2x1 going across In front and the intake mounting in the 2x1 bar.

Moving onto the intake, it has had a few modifications. We designed a version of our intake that would have the two front wheels actuate in and out with pneumatics to pick up tipped over cones. With the arms our, the intake functions like our previous iteration, but with the arms moved in the intake wheels would then be able to go inside the bottom of the cone and pick it up. We have not started to cut it out yet as we are unsure if we want to move forward with it as the added pneumatics would be more of a plumbing challenge for electronics and would necessitate another air tank. We will decide whether we want to move forward with this idea soon.

At the same time as this work, we also did a quick redesign of our current intake with a few changes we wanted to make. Those include a deeper well behind the cones, moving the motors back to a more protected area, and creating mounting plates for our motors so it is easier to take them on and off.

The build team will then work on cutting this out and assembling all this, along with assembling our second drive base over the next few days.

Now for some video of our robot doing stuff!!

Due to some spacers on the 4-bar’s pistons, the angle for shooting is not as high as it will be on the final robot. This gives us an angle less suitable for high goal shooting, but one that works for shooting into the mid goal for now. The final robot will be able to do both.

Seen below is a gif of us picking up cones from the Chute. With our current intake iteration, we struggle to pick up cones against the wall area due to the cube intake. In our next iteration, we will make the cube intake closer to the cone intake to alleviate this.

[iz_en_zi]

One of the strategies we set after kickoff was that, as a non-swerve team this year, we wanted to be able to differentiate ourselves from a swerve drive by being able to cycle over the charging station without losing time. Now, I present a robot traveling almost full speed (20ish ft/s) with 8 in pneumatic wheels driven into a Charge Station:

Suffice to say I think cycling over it will be fun.

[bcon]

Well i will be watching your matches closely… i would love to see this in a match…

[iz_en_zi]

It’s week zero already!?!? sound the alarms!!

Daily Update 2/20/23
Wow it’s been a bit since our last update. Things have been quite busy over in our lab preparing for our week one regional in Duluth! With only seven days to work on the robot before we head out, and a massive winter storm heading Minnesota’s way to mess everything up, we’ve been in full steam ahead. Build has been busy working on our competition bot (which, while I’d love to talk about, I’ll save it for them to show off the design changes in an update they’re planning to write about tomorrow).

Meanwhile, code team has gotten a working 2 cube auto that engages the charge station. Originally we were not planning on running this until our week 4 regional at North Star, but during week zero, we discovered that, because our intake stows at a slight backwards angle, we are able to shoot cubes behind us, allowing us to outtake from the opposite side in which we intake. When running this auto without balancing, this allows us to score both game pieces in the grid, with one scoring on the middle tier (and possibly the high node with the intake modifications being made for robot v2) and the other in the hybrid node. When balancing, wether or not we get two cubes scored is more of a crapshoot. At least one will score in the hybrid node, and the other will bounce when shot, hopefully into an empty node. If it doesn’t, it can be pushed in and scored in tele-op relatively easy. The reason for this is that the Cube nodes don’t line up as well with the pre-staged game pieces, meaning we will be shooting and hoping the second cube pachinkos it’s way into a score. If it doesn’t, we lose one point and about 5 seconds, which isn’t the end of the world (and it certainly beats a one cube auto!)

Here’s a video of it in action (although of course the one we video taped is the one where we reset the cube incorectly haha)

Now for our Week Zero Recap:
This Saturday we attended the Blue Twilight Week Zero Invitational at Eagan High School, graciously hosted by team 2220 (The entire event was great and ran super well – thanks for hosting!). After working through some mechanical breakages and radio troubles in early matches, things went pretty smoothly. We also, as alluded to above, discovered we were able to shoot backwards. This came about because, there was a small leak in the pneumatics system that we were unable to detect before one of our matches was scheduled, so we were unable to deploy the intake during autonomous. Instead, we shot it backwards onto the charge station, and then drove over it, popping in in a very tragic fashion. We did however, realize that the cubes could be shot far enough to be scored backwards, which enables us to score more in both teleop and auto.

Another struggle we faced was the dreaded tippy robot syndrome. While we believed a robot with a low CoG like this one to be untip-able, we defied the odds when reversing after cycling at top speed. We have made a fix to ensure this does not occur again. Below is the glorious footage of the tip however – it was quite funny when it occurred (imagine the wii sports bowling “ohhhhh” sound effect with Sandstorm by Darude being played as audio over the gif)

Our best match was our final one, seen in this timestamp on the livestream:

Eagan Robotics Week Zero 2023

Overall we scored 6 game pieces, leaving 30 seconds to climb. This is well on our way to our goal of 9 cycles/match, as with more driver practice, the 2 game piece auto, and climbing closer to t=0, we will be increasing our scores. I can’t wait to see what comes next for our robot at Northern Lights regional next week!

[AJT]

A quick build update of our robot

We have started (and are almost complete) with out second drive base which will be the robot we bring to competition. We have the electronics board mounted, the gearbox and motors, and one side of the wheels attached. We will hopefully finish it up today.

I have already outlined the changes to the four bar we made in the update posted on February 9th.

As for the intake, we decided to stay with a static intake for Duluth, but we made a few changed to improve it from our current intake.

The motors were moved all the way to the back of the intake to protect them more, we slightly moved the front wheels closer to increase compression, and we added a curved backstop for the cones to hold them better. This intake will also be cut out of polycarbonate we now have the stock to do so. We are also using Neos instead of Neo 550s to get more power so we can shoot game pieces. We have been successful in shooting cubes, which we did a few times at week zero, but have not found any success with shooting cones.

We will work to assemble this second robot as quickly as we can so the coders can make any adjustments needed with the new robot, and with lots of snow on the horizon we will be working extra hard over the next week.

[iz_en_zi]

The backstop being curved should also hopefully help with shooting cones. It is inspired by the intake on team 7028’s robot, which can be seen here: No Elevator / No Arms - YouTube

[iz_en_zi]

Well, it’s official, we have no school tomorrow and thursday… …plans incoming.

[iz_en_zi]

Update 2/28/23
T-Minus 24 hours until we leave for Northern Lights Regional in Duluth.

We are rapidly approaching our first regional of the season! While the 2 snowdays may have set back our progress a bit, we quickly got back on track and are ready with our competition robot.

While build was assembling our main robot, code and drive team took our practice robot out and made a reveal video! You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7nvirQ-8Js&t=26s

With that, final preparations are being made, and packing has begun for Duluth. We can’t wait to meet our competition there! And with that, good luck to all teams competing in week 1!