The Open Alliance - 2024 Highlights

[sjsands]

Week 1 & 2 Highlights

We are happy to present some posts that stood out to us in Weeks 1 and 2, look out for a YouTube video covering these highlights in the coming week!

95: Horizontal Roller Shooter and Under the Bumper Intake

@JamesCH95

We leveraged our knowledge of shooter design (another post will be done on this) to go for a prototype that would be powerful and consistent while relatively robust against game piece degradation. This is what we made (from 100% parts stripped from robots as old as 2016):

@JamesCH95

A quick update on shooter testing for tonight. More on robot packaging in the near future.

Here is the 28’ full-power shooting video.

@JamesCH95

We are heading down a path of a fixed intake inside the frame. I call it the inside-outside intake.

3467: Robot Archetypes

@Kevin_Leonard

Concept selection!

We had another snow day so no prototypes today either. We ended up discussing the pros and cons of 5 different concepts:

3847: Combined Amp/Trap Intake, Robot Archetypes, and Under the Bumper Intake

@AllenGregoryIV

Note Roller Testing

We built a simple test platform to test how the note interacts with rollers. We wanted to see how easily we could route the note in any direction we wanted and do some simple ground intake tests. We also built to test different scoring options for the amp, and trap.

@AllenGregoryIV

Design Recap

We listed out some various robot types we have seen, sketched, talked about, etc. The slides are linked with their source for current year designs.

@AllenGregoryIV

Thru-frame Intake

We also worked on ideas for the frame. After seeing 95’s intake plan we were pretty sure we wanted to do something similar if we could make it work. However, we also wanted to keep access for maintenance on our swerve modules and not change how the MK4is mounted that much. As we sketched it we realized we could probably intake the note through a gap in the frame. The concept below uses 2x1 and 1x1 to extend the belly pan 1 inch lower than a standard Mk4i mount. The front intake rollers (white and blue) could pass the note through the gap between two 1x1s.

@AllenGregoryIV

Intake Test

We were able to mount version 0 of our intake on the robot with mixed results. The note did go in the robot some of the time so that is a success, but it has a lot of work to do before we are happy with the design. In the process of building this, we had a design mishap that led us to need two 35t 5mm belts that we didn’t have, we were able to print them from Carbon Fiber TPU and run the tests with the printed belts. We also tested using hot glue to hold in our roller hubs on ⅜” rounded hex dead axles.

4481: Vertical Roller Shooter, Under the Bumper Intake, and Horizontal Roller Shooter

@Bjorn

Shooter Testing

Today, we started testing one of our Speaker shooter prototypes. We made an adjustable prototype which has the opportunity to change the following parameters:

• compression

• height

• angle

• speed

• wheel type and diameter

@Bjorn

Intake Prototype Testing

2 days ago, some videos were posted about our ground intake, so let’s take a deeper look at the final concept and how we came up with this.

Unlike last year, we decided that quality goes over quantity. This plus the fact that the notes wouldn’t arrive before Wednesday gave us the time to design and manufacture a decent first prototype.

Sunday started with a meeting in which we discussed what different concepts would work and which variables have to be taken into account while prototyping. We came up with the following concept:

@RonnyV

The Shamper & Top/Bottom Shooter Prototype Update

We’ve been working hard on trying to understand the different parameters that influence shooting a note.

One thing we learned: Shooting from the wing is going to be very difficult to do consistent!

We’ll be updating you on two different prototyping concepts in this post.

6328: In-Line Shooter, Horizontal Roller Shooter, and 3847-Inspired Dual Purpose Intake

@Advaith

In-Line Shooter

The in-line shooter has been progressing nicely over the past week.

@Advaith

Horizontal Rollers

We first tried to use HYPE blocks and a regular NEO to assemble this prototype, but the compression was way too high and the weird geometry led us to having an 8.4:1 ratio. This wasn’t close to fast enough for the rollers to shoot the notes more than a few inches.

@Advaith

Four Roller Intake

We are prototyping this intake to test the note’s ability to travel up and down a path of rollers for a potential over the bumper intake or AMP scorer. The concept is inspired by 3847’s design .