Do you have any more info on how this works? This sounds very interesting coming from a team who struggled with consistent tension on our spool in week 1.
Sure, here is a cross-sectional view of the spool:
It consists of three 3D printed parts, the two spool halves and a cam. The cam has a round standoff pressed into it and is secured via two small shoulder bolts to the main halves of the spool allowing it to pivot. There is a .75" Hex OD, .5" Hex ID hub pressed into the two halves as well as a pair of standoffs in the smaller holes to clamp the halves together. From there simply feed your strap through the cam and adjust to your desired tension. Ideally one or two wraps under tension will be sufficient to clamp the cam down onto the strap and hold it from slipping.
Let me know if you’d like more information!
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Don’t you feel as though this is unfair to other teams? You are using your massive numbers to completely overwhelm any other team. For competing you guys were two teams with the same robot but for Chairman’s you guys were the same team.
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You’re a bit late to this argument
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To be fair, we were the second ones to show up at this party.
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Hopefully more teams get to do what we were able to do this season. Our students were twice as engaged at home, got twice as many matches with their team(s) participating to watch, and we had twice as many opportunities to work with other teams in matches and in the pits, both to learn from them and in some cases they were able to learn things from us. All in all we are proud of the amount of participation we are able to give our students coming off a two year hands-on robotics hiatus.
In terms of fairness, we played by all the pertinent rules and regulations laid out in the game and event manual and paid 2x of all registration fees, so yes, we do think this is fair.
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Are you under the impression that we submitted for Chairman’s with both teams?
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Wow its almost like @Drost was on 11 and 193
No way he knows how they run.
@Drost @SJaladi @Libby_K feel free to not respond to this person.
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I feel like saying another team is doing it so we can do it also does not truly address the problem. It should not be the standard.
Karthik and Bobby are referring to the arguments that already take place in those respective threads.
Your alt, assuming you’re already a forum member, isn’t helping btw.
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Try asking legitimate questions without replying with something that was very clearly rude. I don’t care if you don’t mean to come off as rude. You are.
A legitimate question would have been “How do you coordinate awards submissions and judging with this team structure?”
Signed,
Another 11 alum
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IF you are really interested in understanding why/how we run this program I would be happy to respond. The crux of it is, we have 172 students on the team, we have the resources to build multiple robots, but not the mentor base to build non-identical robots/run multiple teams. We want to give the students maximum involvement, and we want them to feel that they are still one team with one brand and one identity, because, well… they are! We also feel we owe it to our students to provide the best experience both in and out of events so this is why we made a decision to register a second team to enter a second identical robot to events.
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It’s okay, posts like theirs validate the robot names quite well 
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Before I got to the troll portion of this thread, I actually intended to pose a legitimate question on this topic:
How do you handle judging (both submitted and non-submitted awards)? I’d guess that you only submit one Chairman’s application since it would be largely the same content, but curious if each team submits their own Dean’s List, and how you handle non-submitted awards/pit interviews.
Seems like an innovative model for very large teams, and curious to hear more!
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This is very cool! Do you have the link to the strap you used? Curious to see what worked for you to balance the thickness building up the spool diameter and stretch of the material.
Serviceability of telescoping systems has always been something we’ve struggled with and this seems like a great step in the right direction.
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It was amazing to work with these teams to Semifinals at Bridgewater!
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2107N52 is the strap that we used. We cut the hook off to retain the pre-sewn eye and attached it to a pair of eye bolts on either side of our elevator cross member with two of these: 3709T21
We learned a HUGE lesson from our 2020 telescoping climber which worked great until the rope started to get frayed/caught and eventually it needed to be replaced which was nearly impossible given how low in the robot the winches were placed. This is why we went out of our way to place the spools for the climbers above the shooter to ensure that we could easily service them.
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These robots are awesome. I’m sure there are more truly elegant design details beyond the winch cams.
When I was a student, the Niagara triplets blew my mind. Once again, I’m similarly inspired.
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I need to be clear here; other than in the eyes of FIRST’s registration system, these are not separate teams. All of our students are on both rosters. At home, this is one team and program, following the same process we always have to bring them together to collaborate on this work. We absolutely never intend to split them up culturally; we are proud of the MidKnight family’s size and unity.
We have always been a large team building twins (and at least half a triplet) - this year we paid an extra $5k to put regulation bumpers on our twin and give more of our students drive team and pit crew experience.
Re: Chairman’s Award - Because it is one unit of students in our program, our outreach programs, budget, FLL/FTC mentorship, integration with the school, etc - are all the same. We only submitted for the Chairman’s Award under 1923 - the originating team number - as we felt pretty uncomfortable essentially ‘paying for’ extra interview time for the exact same content.
Chairman’s explained above; but for the other awards - our students did submit separate mentors for WFFA (wonderfully enough, Jeff who is one of the major drivers behind Project Gemini, for 1914), and we utilized the double-team to submit four total students for the Dean’s List. This is awesome for us, to be honest. It’s still only 2.3% of our student body; and it’s great to give them that honor.
We chose four students through the same processes we normally choose two - and then placed them on the team numbers, to be honest, at random… since they’re all enrolled on both, it wasn’t that each of them had a specific role ‘on 14’ or ‘on 23’ - they have their role on The MidKnight Inventors. Our district chose to have all four interview at the same event - not sure if by intent or by randomizing the interview teams - and we did have one advance.
For the pit awards - this was our first event trying it, and we sort of played it by ear. Judging groups came by for each team, and we did make sure that the students who spoke ‘for 14’ didn’t also speak ‘for 23’ - the event manager at one point did ask us if we could help be clear about that. In future events, we plan to give the pit crew members something to identify who they speak for - maybe pins, or some sort of other visual marker.
For context, because we share tools - again, we are one program and one group of students with one shop - we would obviously prefer to mush our pits together since we were next to each other on the pit map. FMA event coordinators reached out and asked us if we wanted to be neighbors, so we said yes. (We also cleared the double-truss situation with FMA ahead of time, and would not bring it to events where we have not verified it’s OK). I totally get where it might be confusing who you’re talking to, and we’re going to do better at that for our next event!
You too! We <3 Metuchen Momentum. It was so much fun to work with you. Thank you for being such excellent partners and we hope to see you again soon!
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