Inspired by 1678’s Golden Rule #3 “Steal from the best, invent the rest”, I thought I’d share a resource I put together for 5985.
The Unofficial FRC Mechanism Encyclopedia is a resource to assist FRC teams in the ideation phase (first few days) of an FRC season. The page is essentially a list of YouTube playlists each focusing on a game piece type (E.g. ball or cube) and a robot subsystem (E.g. drivetrain, intake or shooter). Each playlist has a notes section with a brief explanation of what is included.
The mechanisms are sourced from a variety of robotics competitions, such as the FIRST Robotics Competition and VEX Robotics Competition, as well as real life applications. It allows for any team in any robotics competition to quickly access new ideas and sanity-check current designs against those that have been successful in previous years.
Using the Encyclopedia is extremely simple. Select the mechanism in which you’re interested, then select the playlist that best suits your requirements. For example, the Shooter section contains a link to playlists sorted by projectile size.
With the 2022 FIRST Robotics Competition kick-off right around the corner, I hope both Rookie and Veteran teams find the Encyclopedia useful.
If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to contact me on here or email me at [email protected]
Good luck to everyone in their respective robotics competitions in 2022!
Luin (Alum and Mentor of FRC team 5985 Project Bucephalus)
Thank you! I figured I may as well do something with the hundreds of hours of robot reveals I’ve watched over the years. And yeah, it was an extremely innovative robot!
I should chime in that we’ve found this to be particularly helpful for rookie teams - showing the essential nature of the idea without giving them the solution.
I like what you are putting together here because if this grows enough it can be a living resource for teams long term. Do you want to include How-To type content in this resource?
Thanks, im going to be updating it every time i see something worth adding. In regards to how-to type content, I hadnt thought about that before, so thank you for bringing that up. I’ll add a section, when I get a chance, and link to existing teams websites and playlists where they have uploaded the content they have made. There are some amazing ones out there already, much better than anything I could do.
Just wanted to reply to this post to bring it back up to the top as I truly believe in this resource and it’s potential to assist all teams in FRC with the beginning of the season.
Second day of build bump, will only do this once or twice more in the first week of build. Once again, this is an extremely useful resource for both rookie and veteran teams.
this has been soooo valuable as a starting place to grab mechanism concepts. I think maybe sections of the most effective teams by year, or a few more subdivisions of parts could be cool (e.g. over-bumper vs through-bumper intakes) but overall super useful to have this all in one spot
That’s awesome, I’m glad your team has been getting good use from it.
I will certainly add the through bumper and over bumper playlists when I get time, that’s a good idea!
More work I know, but while having intakes/shooters/indexers sorted by game piece style is great for initial mechanism research for a given game, having a subsection with links to common specific mechanisms would be really helpful for myself (I know, selfish ) and I’m sure other teams too.
This year for example with shooters, if a team decides that they need/want to go for a single wheel flywheel because of packaging reasons (random, hypothetical reason here), I currently need to sift through the various playlists to find specific examples of single wheel flywheel shooters.
Single wheel shooter (think 118 from 2017)
Double wheel shooter (think 254 or 1678 from 2020)
Catapult (think 148 from 2016)
Over the bumper intake
Spindexer
Conveyors
These would be an initial list (off the top of my head) of categories/playlists that would be super useful.
Yeah, I have been planning to do this when I get the time. I hate how you can’t have sub folders on youtube though, it really makes it so much harder than it has to be!
) and I’m sure other teams too.