Welcome to Team 3161’s 2024 Open Alliance Build Blog!
FRC Team 3161 - The Tronic Titans(https://team3161.ca ) is so excited to start the 2024 season!
We are a Canadian team that was established in 2010 at Holy Trinity Catholic Secondary School (located in Oakville Ontario).
We are eager to share our build season progress with weekly updates and share our experiences as we take on the Crescendo season.
Hello everyone!
Welcome back to a brand new build season! We are excited to get back into coming up with robot designs and competing, and are even more excited to be sharing our progress with the Open Alliance.
We started off our kickoff by gathering our team In our schools theatre, watching the livestream all together. In order to best enjoy the experience and share in the kickoff excitement, we invited Team 9098, FireHawks and Team 9562, Bishop Reding to and after an anxious countdown, we all watched the game animation for Crescendo.
As soon as the game manual was released, we did a deep dive on the basic rules. In order to best condense the important information of the manual for all members, we split into groups and each read a section. After making sure to note down any vital details, we shared the findings with the rest of the team. This way all team members would be armed with the information to start coming up with some design sketches.
Post Kickoff Ideas:
These rough ideas are some sketches that we came up with before doing a deep dive into our priority list or taking any major game strategy choices into consideration. It’s important to throw out any designs we have, regardless of how outlandish they may seem. They can easily help inspire something more solid and can shape the way our final design ends up looking.
One initial intake design that was brought up was an intake with double rollers both above and below the note. This should allow for complete control over the game piece and keep it stable while other mechanisms move to aim the game piece or pass it off to a separate outtake system entirely.
This initial sketch was created with a similar intake to our previous year’s robot in mind. It has a simple arm and would be able to shoot into the speaker and amp from the same location that it picks up the intake. It would also be able to intake from the ground and source, as the intake would be able to change its angle in order to accommodate the notes.
This other sketch is a more fleshed out version of the previous one. It contains a wrist mechanism to rotate the intake, as well as a gear to allow the arm to move around as needed.
This design idea stemmed from this thread (Robot (CAD) in 12 hours), it was an idea where the game piece was intake, then passed separately to a shooter. It removes the unnecessary time spent for an arm to raise and lower, and with its small size would easily be able to cycle quickly and move under the stage. It also has as small elevator system on the side in order to climb up onto the chain and potentially score into the trap through using the outtake system.
This design is similar to the previous one featuring two different mechanisms for shooting and intaking. It was created in mind too contain as few moving mechanisms as possible in order to save both time and space. It would allow for the robot to quickly intake during autos and shoot as fast as possible, and It also has the capability to climb on the chain diagonally with a simple hook. It also has a special ”flap” on the outtake to open up the trap and score during endgame.
I hope that you all have had an amazing start to your build season and are enjoying the process of brainstorming with your teams. Make sure to read our week 1 update next week as we come up with more ideas and finalise our design priorities.
Week 1 Update
Hello Everyone! With week 1 coming to a close, we wanted to provide an update on how our team is doing. Its exciting to see the shop buzzing with energy and all of our team members working hard to create new prototypes and coming up with potential designs. We will provide an update to our build season progress every week so make sure to check our thread as we grow deeper into the build season.
To begin, we have created a loose schedule for what milestones we want achieved before our first competition taking place at Humber College.
The outline above is a tentative, non-granular schedule. We hope that his will provide the team with some structure and a set of goals on what we want completed at set intervals. By following our schedule, we will have have lots of time to ensure that the drive team is well practiced and that our autos are well tuned.
After spending the early portion of the week discussing the game and the most strategic option to take, we have created this finalised list of our priorities for the robot. There was intense debate between focusing on the Trap and trying to gain as many RP as possible versus building a robot with fast cycling and accurate shooting in mind, but ultimately we decided on a middle path between the two where scoring was held at a higher stance but a trap and climbing mechanism was still considered extremely valuable.
For more sophisticated prototyping to take place, we find it necessary to create our own versions of the field elements. There are lots of aspects of the game that can only be discovered through interacting with the different elements and by getting these completed as fast as possible we can be confident in our design choices and theories.
We also received some of our brand new swerve pods that needed to be assembled and spent some time getting those in order. This years game does not seem to conflict with our choice of drivetrain so we will procced with the swerve chassis.
Programming continued working with some older test chassis and getting the swerve pods back in working order. Its important that our code is running as smoothly as possible in order for us to start integrating our mechanical and design choices as fast as possible with some code in order to begin testing to see what works best.
We have been working on creating a shadow base for this year’s robot code. Since we don’t know what the real robot will look like, we are creating subsystems and commands based on the key elements that are crucial for this year’s robot, such as a shooter and a drivetrain, with plans to expand as the final robot design becomes clearer. Programming has also been assisting with prototyping a shooter mechanism, coding the motors and running the mechanism.
Intake prototyping:
One of the first prototyping work we have done this season was taking and converting our 2023’s intake mechanism and performing intake tests with it, since its double-roller architecture with urethane wheels proved valuable.
We did two test categories, the first one was to evaluate pickup with only a top roller and no bottom roller, just using a polycarb shelf in place.
while this did work, it posed a geometry limitation as steeper angles meant the intake was just pinching the note, instead of bringing it up into a robot.
This can be seen in action here.
The next category we tested was to evaluate pickup with both a top and bottom roller. this worked significantly better than the other one due to its more forgiving geometry and pickup, allowing pickup to even a 90 degree wall on the back, making it very appealing from a packaging standpoint.
A video of this can be seen here.
Side Shooter :
After deciding, our priority list, we brainstormed ideas on how to best shoot the note. In the end, this side shooter ideas was created and prototypes moved forward based off of using wheels to propel the note forward. The prototypes created were based off of this sketch.
Once the prototype was finally idealised, experimentation with different wheel types and sizes began. This was to gain further understanding on how the varying wheel sizes affected the trajectory of the note and what would work best moving forward.
Here are some videos on wheel combinations that we tested out this week which include, 4 inch colsons, 6 inch colsons, 4 and 6 inch colsons, 4 inch plactions, Green Compliant wheels as well as 3 inch flywheels we had casted and prepared:
A compilation of the trials can be found here.
Our testing with the casted wheels can be found here.
Top Bottom Shooter:
Another potential shooter that we want to explore would be a top bottom shooter. Similar to the side shooter, it would grip on the note. We didn’t have enough time to finish it, but by next week it will have been finished and we can compare our results between the two different shooters in order to see what we want to continue working with.
Trap Prototyping:
This prototype we created was meant to be able to score in the trap. It would feed through the bottom side to then be pushed open and shot directly into the trap. It evolved from the idea of a top/bottom shooter and depending on further testing could be used to create a mechanism to score on the trap
A video of this in action can be seen here.
A highlight reel of our prototyping can be found here.
The team is talking about doing an alpha bot before our final competition robot for this year. This would be a simple shooter mechanism attached to one of our old chassis, but would give us further and more detailed testing and information when the time comes to cad up the final robot design. This is our first time attempting such an endeavor and if successful, we should have a running and driving robot that can intake, score and even do autos before our exam season (Mid-week 3) starts, as opposed to our prior years where we do not have such a robot till about week 5 at the very least. A decision on whether or not we move forward with an alpha bot and what specific type of design we should look into building will be decided early next week.
Attached above one of the design candidates for an alpha bot, since it leverages existing manufacturing processes and spare parts from previous years (primarily 2023), speeding construction time, while still meeting our overall design priorities, but several things need to be tested and deliberated before we can decide to do this or another design as an alpha bot.
The team is also going to start to do a more high-fidelity intake prototype next week, testing the performance on how an under-the-bumper intake works and interacts with the game piece while also evaluating our existing bumper solutions. the overall design of this intake was inspired by 95’s under the bumper intake idea(FRC 95 The Grasshoppers 2024 Build Thread - #34 by JamesCH95), and uses 2 dead axle abs rollers with, or without a grip substrate(something that we will need to explore with this roller type) with each wheels powered by separate neos (which is overkill power wise but from a mechanical standpoint, it was the simplest and most robust).
This intake attaches to the robot using our sds modules and their extra mounting holes with pre-tapped 10-32.
Our prototyping for both the side shooter, intake and top/bottom roller shooters will continue until we are confident in our choice of what to continue. Once that has been decided, the rest of the sub teams can begin to prepare for the creation of the final iteration of the robot.
Our Media team has also been active and created a flickr album to post our build season media which can be found here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/htrobotics/albums/
We are also going to start uploading testing and OA progress videos on our youtube page, so we can streamline hosting of our prototyping videos (which was previously done by converting videos to GIFs, or hosting them on a discord channel), while also at the same time, making them more accessible for everyone.
A Team-local copy of this thread and our 2024 build thread can be found on our team documentation site, this site also contains more information about our season endeavours such as our schedules, tracking lists, brainstorming documents and non video or picture graphic material hosting.
Thank you for reading our week 1 build post. Please be sure to check out our progress next week as we continue prototyping and creating some initial design ideas. Cheers to the start of another year and good luck on the rest of the build season!
Hello Everyone!
This is just a quick update to our week 2 progress. As a team, we agreed on the decision to move forward with the alpha bot. It’s a bit ambitious time wise granted that exams are coming up for our students and we will have less time in the shop, but by doing so should allow us much more time with programming and driver practice both of which we found invaluable to our success in the previous season.
In order to get the Alpha Bot shooter started, we continued with the construction of the top and bottom roller shooter. Although this initial prototype was a bit rushed, it still worked and manage to shoot the notes. We find that we preferred this shooter over the side shooter because it opens up our options to constructing a trap and amp scoring mechanism.
Once the shooter was completed, we began to test it. We tried different powers for the motors (30, 50 and 60%) just to see how the shooter would perform. We found though at higher percentages such as 60 %, the lower wheels began to shake which proved unreliable for testing further.
We also experimented with a ground intake system made from PVC pipes but found that the material was not grippy enough. Even after forcing the note in, it wouldn’t stick. Additionally, while building the prototype we did not have the right hex shaft in the appropriate length in stock so had to jerry rig a partial dead axle instead. When running the intake at close to full neo speed it introduced unwanted deflection and wobble on the pvc tubes but the rugged nature of the prototype may be to blame.
More testing needs to be completed with more rigorous prototypes, with some next steps being changing the ground intake material and increasing the robustness of the shooter but overall these tests have been helpful in directing our progress.
Currently, our mechanical team has been juggling the field element building along with other projects. In the past few days, we have been marking, cutting, and assembling the speaker. This project, taken up mostly by new members, has been a great boon as they learn how to work their way around a build season. We ran into some small challenges however we are on the right track and finding ways around them. While constructing, we had some fun and have brought our artistic ideas to life.
Thank you for reading our Week 2 mid-week update, I hope you look forward to reading our next post!
Hello Everyone!
This week, our team has been working hard on the field elements, the alpha bot design, and more prototyping tests. Here’s a quick update on what happened for the past 2 days.
Tested top & bottom shooter and ground intake prototypes (see next section)
Cut out wood shooter plates and began assembly of our alpha shooter mechanism
Assembled our alpha superstructure
Came up with more alpha bot designs
The above shows our Alpha bot as the meeting ended yesterday with the intake installed and ready for additional testing, and the superstructure assembled and mounted.
A new shooter prototype was built since the previous prototype had several issues regarding consistency, wobbling, and design.
The top and bottom rollers are placed at the end of the metal pieces instead of in the middle, and the casted wheels and petunia rollers are distributed more evenly to avoid the flexes we experienced with the previous shooter.
This new shooter gave a maximum range at 60% power, being able to shoot onto the speaker at about the end of an alliance wing. With sufficient calibration and proper programming, this ability can potentially allow more efficient autos by minimising travel time.
Although it showed more consistent results during testing, we feel the need to advance to a better prototype to further minimise inconsistencies and ensure cleaner shots.
Through our tests, we learned to take into account of feed inconsistencies. When a note is fed into the shooter inconsistently, the elasticity of the note can cause the note to wiggle in unpredictable ways, affecting our shots. As well, we have gained much experience with how the rollers can behave (to our disadvantage), such as flexing, uneven shooting due to wheel size difference (which spins the note), etc.
For our ground intake, we addressed several problems encountered in previous tests.
The aforementioned wobbles in the PVCs were greatly reduced and should not pose any significant problems to intaking. The geometry was also fixed, which ensured a good intaking mechanism. Furthermore, 1:1 NEO motors didn’t provide enough torque for the intake, and a 4:1 MPS was used instead, showing great performance. However, we are still exploring our options.
To alleviate the slippery nature of the PVCs, several materials were wrapped around them to increase grip:
Carpet tape (rug gripper): this solution overshot since it’s “too grippy” that it was rubbing note crumbs out.
Silicone tape: also worked great, but catches debris quite easily, which results in less grip again. Although cleaning can be done, it would be unreliable in terms of intaking and difficult to maintain.
For the following meetings, we plan to test out more materials and install wedges to center the notes and ensure precision. Discussions have also explored the possibility of using wedges to aid note intake.
For testing videos, check out this week 2 day 3/4 sum below:
We are currently building the Alpha bot while prototyping and testing different mechanisms. This specific architecture was inspired by the RI3D Quokkas Design, but with a decoupled shooter-intake mechanism with an under the bumper intake as we had concerns about the singular intake-shooter mechanism’s size and its necessity to be outside of the bumpers if we want to pass under the stage. We think that this was a very buildable design that possibly meets most of our priority list objectives.
↑ amp scoring config (this was an early iteration with a short superstructure, but the current one was heightened by about 4 inches to enable a possible trap scoring operation.
Shooting windows for both near speaker and wing scoring, while the extended version does not bode as well vs a shorter superstructure in terms of the window, it can be a compromise for now if this version has the possibility to do trap.
It is also designed to reuse some spare parts of our 2023 bot, speeding construction time. We are aiming to finish the bot from a mechanical standpoint by the end of this week 2.
The main objective of this alpha bot is to verify the handoff architecture, determine if the shooter mechanism can be consistent, as well as allow for driver practice and autonomous routines in a much earlier time than we usually have in the past years.
A concern that was found during initial testing was that inconsistent feeding of the note makes the shot greatly vary, and a concern with this architecture is that half the note is practically unsupported once its handed off from the intake, so that is a concern that we will hopefully find out if it happens with the more detailed alpha shooter prototype, and that brings us to the architecture below.
This alpha bot is one of the two potential architectures our final comp bot will undertake, using the same arm architecture, ground intake mechanisms and front-back shooting archetype. but the only difference is instead of shooting scorpion style, it shoots like a cannon. This architecture was inspired from 4481’s work with their shamper mechanism. While this architecture is not alpha-bot capable at the moment from a design maturity perspective, it is one of the architectures we will strongly look at and possibly pivot to if the handoff and shooting action of the alpha bot turns out to be problematic since this architecture has a more controlled grip of the note before shooting, and theoretically has a larger shooting window if we wanted to shoot from the wing.
One of our programming students started looking into possible auto pathing in Choreo. One of the main takeaways from this was that in order to do a successful 6 note auto, it would leave us with about 4 seconds to score, which means our intake-shoot time must be very low, or else we would have to shoot on the fly.
Thank you for reading our thread and we’ll see you tomorrow with more updates!
Hello Everyone!
This quick update will summarise some of the progress we have seen as this week finishes off.
One of the main focuses of the mechanical sub team this week was trying to finish up our field elements. We know that we cannot progress with programming testing without these pieces, and have been putting in a lot of focus into getting these done as quickly as possible. The Amp has been mostly completed with the other parts of the field still being worked on.
We made good progress on assembling the Alpha bot shooter, which has feeding and shooting mechanisms. The feeder rollers/wheels take the note from the intake and send it to the shooter wheels for scoring (shown below). In particular, we completed the shooting mechanism and ran a couple of tests to get a preview of how it might perform.
We tested 30%, 50%, 60%, 65%, and 70% power respectively. This top & bottom roller shooter shows great consistency with a guiding ramp; however, without the ramp, feeding inconsistencies persist, which can immensely reduce our shot precision.
Through a series of runs, we observed 2 main things:
One more concern we have regarding this prototype is its ability to shoot consistently: the feeder wheels spin slower than the shooter wheels, and they are spaced very closely. Therefore, it is very likely that the difference in speed may stretch the note inside the shooter, causing it to wobble during its flight. Once we install the feeder wheels next week, we will run more tests to explore this issue. Next week, we will cut more plates and construct another shooter prototype (shown below) for performance comparison. This shamper cannon style shooting architecture is explained in more detail in our previous update.
Please check out our prototyping recap of the day for testing videos!
Less time was dedicated to intake today. A metal intake was made, which we hope to continue prototyping next week. We are also looking at our options for the roller tape, which will be tested the following week as well and hopefully yield effective grip and intake.
One of the most important tools during a competition is scouting data. We have previously used our scouting app Manto for competitions, and are currently going through the process of updating and preparing the app for Crescendo. We went through a list of important strategic elements that we would. For example, we dedicated a section to both auto, teleop and endgame to see the capabilities of each scouted robot. Ultimately this should allow us to have high quality data when it comes to alliance selections. There are a few bugs within the program but these hoped to be fixed by the time our first competition comes up.
Thank you all so much for reading this end of the week update! We will wrap up our week 2 and create an end of the week summary, so make sure you check that out once its posted.
Hello Everyone!
We wanted to conclude our second week on a high note by summarising our week and sharing our next steps moving forward into the coming weeks.
As recounted in our previous posts, we decided as a team to start the creation of an alpha bot. This decision was made to see how anexperiment with shooting and intake mechanisms, as well as to give programming a head start in their progress. The development of the alpha bot can be seen in our previous posts from this week. Overall, a lot of time was spent testing the shooting mechanism of the alpha bot and in testing the ground intake system which was made using pvc pipes. Through both old gussets and freshly cut wooden plates, we have an almost finished alpha bot.
This video is a quick highlight of the prototyping testing we have done this week. More details and observations about our testing can be read through our previous posts earlier this week.
Next week we hope to continue testing out the ground intake with different sets of material surrounding the pvc pipe such as grip tape which should improve the handling of the notes and aid with the slipperiness of the intake which was causing inconsistencies.
With the general direction of the robot design established, we can begin cading the components for our final robot design. For example, knowing that we are going to use swerve allows us to plan out a 27x27 bellypan for our chassis. This should make space for any intake systems that we will use in our final design.
Thank you all so much for reading our summary of our week 2! Although exam season is coming up for our students meaning less work will be able to be completed, there are still many improvements planned that we hope to share as we head into week 3 of build season. Take care!
Hello Everyone!
Sorry for the late week 3 post, but due to exams and a snow day, This week was a bit less productive than the other but still fruitful nonetheless. Detailed below is our third week of build season, as well as a detailed breakdown of our competition design direction.
Inspired by 95’s Intake, and 4481’s “shamper” mechanism, our competition design direction differs from our alpha bot direction in the way that it uses a cannon-style shooting methodology instead of a backhanded Ri3D Quokkas-style shooting like what our alpha design was supposed to do.
This new method allows for theoretically faster auto routines due to its minimized handoff time and less actions on the arm to shoot. One of our main priorities was to optimize the bot for shooting as much as possible as well.
It also allows for our note to be stowed more securely, making feed more consistent and makes it less likely for the note to be dislodged off the bot during field cycles, collisions and general arm movements.
As you can see below, our arm intake and near speaker shoot positions are the same, this is so we eliminate a large aim movement that can speed up the first 4 autonomous notes shot.
This new method also shoots lower at the same angles for speaker and wing-line shots, allowing us to have a slightly larger margin of error when it comes to wing shots.
This has yet to be tested but it is supposed to be a shamper based mechanism meaning that we should have little difficulty in scoring.
With the shooter stored and the climbing mechanism extended, we should be able to climb on to the chain at endgame
The shooter angles towards the speaker and prepares to launch a note.
Visual overview of the versatility of the robot design and all of the actions that can be completed.
Another big architecture attribute that we decided was to abandon a physical trap mechanism. We decided that taking on this endeavor is going to take way too much time that could be dedicated to other subsystems. Also, the fact that we do not have the space to build a partial stage to test it reliably with.
Instead, seeing the viability of shooting into the trap by teams such as 5406, we are betting on being able to shoot into the trap instead. This was a big gamble that the team decided to be worth it considering time, and resources.
Overall the current architecture lines up with our original week 1 priority list. We seem to have followed our picks pretty well and are happy with the capabilities that our final design has.
Due to the architecture change, we felt that it was not worth it to pursue the alpha bot to a fully operational state, given the incompatibility and differences from the comp design.
It will be continued to be used in its existing state for advanced intake testing and preliminary driver testing though, as well as testing auto pathing. It was a good experience to be able to have something solid for testing and is something that our team will discuss about continuing with for future build seasons.
The overall architecture decision was unfortunately decided by external data and insights from other open alliance teams’ blogs versus our own testing data. We were supposed to test the feasibility of the alpha architecture, as well as this new one last week, but a snow day plus exams put a big damper to that decision which delayed that to the end of this week. This is very not ideal and will put our build season behind schedule so, in order move ahead with more certainty, we decided to go with this direction instead.
Fortunately testing that commenced right after exams has confirmed that the direction we chose works
We have decided from the start of the season that we are going to leverage existing knowledge and techniques from the past year into this robot, seeing the potential for a lot of commonality and easily transferrable mechanism and subsystem design methods that worked for us then, unlike in previous years.
Modularity is also a big factor that we wanted to continue, all of our subsystems are designed to be easily detachable mechanically using bolts from each other for easy iteration, as well as maintenance. If something needs to be fixed or replaced during an event, we want to be able to either quickly diagnose the issue or replace any broken parts.
Our chassis design is pretty straightforward and similar to last years. It’s a 27 x 27-inch SDS MK4i based swerve chassis.
The decision to do 27-inch square chassis over something smaller was simply easier packaging. Compared to something larger like our 2023 28 x 28 drive base size, it would have given us suboptimal space to integrate an under-the-bumper intake.
Material wise we chose a solid 0.120 aluminum belly pan to hopefully help reduce our CoG.
One big change for this year is regarding the implementation of a brain pan. This allows us to put half of our chassis electronics into the bottom facing the ground, allowing a larger and more accessible space for wire management and maintenance.
Covering the bottom is a metal pan lined with a thin sheet of polycarbonate. This was chosen due to its cost effectiveness as it is being made by our sponsor, and in result, us not needing to get an appropriately thick (and conversely expensive) polycarb sheet of that size. It also allows for easier climber mechanism installation/removal for servicing.
The base is a 1x1 bar sitting on top of the chassis, only secured by 4 bolts. It hosts the same construction and mounting methodology as our 2022 and 2023 superstructures. This allows for faster dismount and installation of the upper structure., and has been proven to work for us for very well.
Our arm gearbox resides on the superstructure as well. The gearing setup is exactly the same as our 2023 robot, 60:15 final chain stage, then a 24:84 stage to the initial 4:1 maxplanetary gearing. Outsourcing the what would be 2nd maxplanetary stage to a spur gear reduction was ideal due to packaging, as well as protecting the planetaries further from sudden loads.
A change we have implemented was to add a cam-based tensioning mechanism. Our 2023 chain mechanism did not have it and we got very lucky that one of the holes happened to allow for a tensioner shaft and bearing, allowing it to tension just perfectly.
This is not exactly replicable for future years and something we have to keep in mind.
The arm is very simple, not much to talk about. It houses 2 60t sprockets that interface to our arm gearbox and holds mounting provisions for our shooter mechanism.
The arm crossbar is held by WCP tube blocks to the arm side rails which is the first time that we are trying such a mounting method for one of our bots. The pulley on the arm is for an absolute encoder that resides in the chassis. it also acts as a dead axle shaft stopper for the arm.
The intake is a very slow-to-intake subsystem for us to get up to speed and into the condition we want it to be for comp. We expect to have a lot of intake geometry and wheel type modifications over the coming weeks. The current design employs 3 rollers, one of which is a dead axle powered guide roller lined with grip tape, while the other two are custom urethane rollers we call “petunia wheels”.
IT’s a 95-style under the bumper extension intake. It is not really under the chassis but just simply a frame perimeter intake.
It’s the simplest theoretically and most robust for us to implement due to its protection given by the bumpers, as well as its modularity potential. It mounts to our MK4i’s mounting provisions and the frame is decoupled from the actual intake plates for easy iteration.
The Internal Gusset construction for the frame (inspired by 1114’s 2019 elevator gussets) give us a strong platform to mount the intake to the frame given the geometry limitations posed by the MK4i Modules.
We also had a minor design requirement that necessitated this mounting solution as we wanted to keep our 2910-style bumper mounting system, and that meant no protrusions or plates outside the physical frame itself. Since this is partly uncertain and new for us, we will subject it to more durability testing when it gets built.
The shooter uses a horizontal shooter architecture with 0.5 inches vertical and 2 inches horizontal compression. It has been demonstrated to work really well both from our own internal prototyping as well as the testing done by OA teams. Each roller is powered by NEOs on a 1:1 ratio
Our wheels for the shooter are 4 3x3 inch lightweight custom-cast urethane wheels for the flywheels. The Indexer is composed of 30 2 inch urethane compliant wheels and compresses the wheels by about 0.25 inches. This is powered by a single NEO, currently shown as 1:1 but may change to a 3:1 or 4:1 with maxplanetaries when we do come to assemble it.
The Indexer floor is composed of 3/8 inch shafts on bearings. We felt that making the floor as frictionless as much as possible was important for feed, and this worked for us.
The shooter sides are lined with a thin sheet of hdpe to reduce friction and shield the note from the metal pockets. However this may not be the case if we decide to make it out of polycarbonate instead.
While the top and bottom are currently separately driven, we might and have already designed provisions for a mechanically linked top and bottom flywheel rollers in a bid to mechanically match their surface speeds.
The spacing between the flywheels and last indexer shaft allows for a shamper redirect of the note for amp scoring.
also it kinda looks like a shark 
We initially wanted the climber to be integrated to the arm, like WCP’s CC robot for 2024, and RI3D Quokkas. However that proved to be incompatible without some major sacrifices to our shooter arm mechanism, due to our existing geometry being barely over 28 inches at max arm angle to boot. So instead we opted to use TTB 1-stage climbing blocks.
The gearing is not yet final but a fixed 72:20 3rd stage and 2 Stage MAXplanetaries make it versatile enough for us to several ratio combinations to test. probably looking at around 70:1 to 90:1 per gearbox.
The climber is placed at the approximate center of the robot, and the geometry allows for us to climb either facing forwards or backwards giving us versatility when it comes time to start game strategy.
Thank you so much for reading our bot breakdown summary. We hope to have been able to provide insight into our design choices and our current design path. If we make any changes or come across any other information when creating the design we will be sure to share the progress. Please be sure to check out any updates we release as we get our parts from our sponsors and begin the assembly of the final design.
Hello Everyone!
There was unfortunately a lull in progress as team members were busy studying and taking their various exams. Additionally, there was a snow day due to inclement weather leaving little room for our team to host meetings on the third week.
To put this into context, this was our week 3 and 4 in schedule view. White are in-person meetings, Grey columns are in person unavailable due to weekends, events, holidays or shutdowns, and the Black portion being exams.
With all those negatives out of the way, we have a few weeks with little interruptions to look forward too. With no exams and the semester starting off slow, there are a lot of opportunities for us to catch up! There’s a lot to get into and share from our work over the past two weeks and we are excited to be able to share once more.
These 2 renders provide a view into what we are looking to build for our final competition bot!
Our robot design has been finalised with drawing already drafted and our parts having been sent to our manufacturing sponsor Sable. In-house manufacturing has also already begun with details being shown later in the post.
A detailed breakdown and rationale for this design can be found in our accompanying post for this and last week.
Due to the shortened time we were not able to gather a lot of data to compare the alpha bot style versus the finalised bot design so we made decisions based off of findings of other Open Alliance teams. The time we had afterwards to prototype was spent confirming our decision and figuring out specifics that we were still unsure of
Early on in week 3, we wrapped our ground intake with CatTongue grip tape in order to help alleviate the issue of the ground intake not gripping properly It performed better when compared to other alternatives but as a whole was not extremely impressive in its performance and in the end didn’t seem to offer too much. Although our current design for the ground intake utilises the grip tape in conjunction with petunia rollers, once we construct the ground intake with all of the rollers we will continue testing it out and see the changes need to be made.
During our week 4 prototyping, we tested out a wide variety of different aspects of the deigns using the alpha bot. The ground intake to shooter would allow us to quickly pick off notes from the floor and transfer them to the shooter. Being able to perform this action quickly gives an opportunity during a game to take advantage of both amplified points and opens up the possibility to a 4 note auto.
The testing completed with our new casted wheels is more similar to the shooter that would be used for the competition robot. The feeding of the note, along with passive rollers for the note to roll on and 0.5" compression are all aspects that would be seen on that design that so it was important to ensure that our design choices seemed to be in the correct direction. Additionally, different speeds and angle seemed to affect the trajectory of the note differently so time was spent testing out different speeds for the top and bottom roller.
We also tested shooting from different distances from the speaker in order to mimic shots from different points on the field. Once more the notes began to start flipping so more testing will need to be completed to avoid having this on our final design and ensure that all of the notes are perfectly straight regardless of the angle or distance in which we are shooting.
The ground intake before this wasn’t meeting our expectations so we continued testing with this example showing the petunia rollers instead. The ground intake is up in the air right now and our final design of the ground intake will mostly likely combine several different elements of all of our trials.
One last thing to mention is our idea of adding a wedge to the ground intake to help guide the note. This has not been tested but is an ongoing idea we would like to mess around with to see its impact on the intaking of the note.
As we stated previously, In-house manufacturing for our final pieces has already begin. Manufacturing sheets were created and split out amongst students as we have a lot of pieces that need to get done. We spent a good chunk of the few meetings we had for this week getting these started as we need to finish them as fast as possible for these parts to be ready when our sponsor order is completed.
This screenshot shows the progress right now and how many pieces need to be completed on our end
While most of the pieces are simple tasks such as cutting to size, some more intricate pieces require machines such as the CNC or lathe which will take more time to get done as less students have experience with those machines when compared to others such as the drill press or chop saw.
Celebrating both the end of the exam period and boosting morale for the rest of the season, our team went out to go roller blading all together! Mental health is extremely important and we don’t want anyone feeling too stressed for the upcoming longer meetings for the season. It was a great way to end off the week and a good start to both the second semester of school and prepare for the fifth week of the build season.
Although in person meetings were cut short there was still a lot of progress that was finished this week with finally being able to get started on completing everything and begin testing and fine tuning the robot design. Our updates should begin getting a lot more consistent now that there are few other tasks for students to get done. Lots to look forward to in the coming weeks. Thank you so much for reading, and I hope that you all have an amazing day!
Hello Everyone!
This is a short mid week update from our team as we continue working. We have worked on manufacturing our pieces while we wait for the majority of our plates from our metal manufacturing sponsor Sable, and have also continued testing out various prototypes for the shooter and the ground intake.
A large part of our pieces that simply needed to be cut or have holes drilled into them have been finished.
After a quick refresher from mentors on how to properly use the lathe, our new team members have taken charge with using the lathe and have worked hard in finishing all of the required pieces.
This chart from earlier shows our updated progress on our parts and how many pieces we have left to manufacture.
Throughout the early portion of this week, we continued testing out various aspects of our alpha bot design.
We continued testing our shooter to look for any changes that need to be made aware of when constructing our final competition robot shooter. Note flipping was once again observed as a persistent issue, but it is mostly caused by the discrepancies in the speeds of the top and bottom roller. These issues along with any other issues such as the tightness of the belts should be eliminated on the actual comp bot shooter. While running the tests, we also widened the shooter to reduce the side compressions on the note which reduce the effectiveness of the shooting.
Another portion of our robot that needed some more testing is the ground intake. We have previously expressed our dissatisfaction with the state of the ground intake and plan to hopefully improve and change it until we come across something that we are happy with. This new ground intake design uses our petunia rollers, and have a much flatter angle of about 5 degrees from the horizontal and yielded better results in terms of intaking notes. The angle of the note after intaking should also allow for consistent feeding into the shooter which is extremely important that it does so consistently in order to have a fast scoring robot. Seeing that one of the things missing from the current intake design is a wedge to help centre the note, various different options to try to center the note were tried in an attempt to gather more data.
During additional testing for the shooter, both the top and bottom rollers were run at the same speed. Note flipping continued to be an issue which was theorised to come from the gap between the feed roller and shooter rollers, which allows the note to dip down and hit the bottom roller first. We plan to test out different fixes such as adding a bottom feed roller or adding another “support” shaft at the bottom between the gap.
This diagram shows the current motion of the note as it passes between the shooter wheels and the feeder wheels.
Our design aims for the black lines to be the note, but currently the blue lines are an estimate on where the notes are actually going which is enough of a difference to change the trajectory of the note.
Thank you all so much for reading! Make sure to check out our next update as we continue sharing our build season progress.
Hello Everyone!
We finally received our Sable pieces, which is our sponsor that provides us with the metal for our robot. Being able to get started working on the pieces was an amazing opportunity for progress to move forward and for us to be able to get a start assembling and fine tuning our robot design. It was really exciting to be able to get started and is something we have been looking forward to for a while.
Sable has been absolutely amazing and we want to give a big thank you to our sponsor for providing us with this opportunity! Our season would not have been the same without their contribution to the team.
We spent a long while deburring and cleaning up all of the pieces to prepare them for our assembly.
When the parts were finished being prepared, we were able to rivet together some of the pieces of the superstructure.
It’s really rewarding to be able to see the final design all come together. Although still not finished this would be the superstructure with the ground intake on top of the chassis.
Assembly also began on our climber. No extensive testing has been done with the climbing so we are unsure of how strong the grip is or how long we are able to hang on to the chain, but this can be verified later with more testing.
With the current chassis and superstructure architecture, everything should remain accessible for both mechanical and electrical. This design also looks much more aesthetically pleasing and looks much cleaner.
There were a few parts left that we still had to manufacture in house that were very delicate, such as a few pieces on the cnc. In all these past few meetings have granted us the opportunity to move on to the next stage of robot design and really fine tune any important details that come up as we prepare for comp.
Prototyping continued with testing various changes to the shooter so that once we finish assembling the final shooter we know what areas to tackle or improve on.
Prototyping resumed with the same shooter design as the one on the comp robot. As previously hypothesized, the large gap between the feed roller and shooter rollers made the note dip down before shooting, causing backflips. To improve the issue of the note flipping, we installed an extra shaft/slider between the gap. Initially it seemed to fix the issue of note flipping, but it returned once more although much lower in their magnitude. We realised that the notes were not properly fed flat on the set of sliders and even the slightest feed variation can cause inconsistencies. This variable was removed by using the feed roller exclusively when shooting the notes. This seemed to mostly remove the issue but could only be confirmed through further testing.
These shots with this shooter and the new changes gave pretty good consistency, and after a large number of tests, we finally concluded that with this prototype, it is impossible to fully eliminate the flips since the mechanism is extremely sensitive to any feed variation. Thankfully, our official comp bot shooter will be assembled for testing next week and with its longer length, extra sliders and other shooting path constraints it is expected that this should be able to eliminate any feed inconsistencies. Moving forward, we plan to switch to larger wheels to give a 1/2” compression instead of the 1/4” currently in place to increase the power of the shooter and velocity of the notes.
With the arrival of our pieces, we are able to start working on doing the electrical wiring for our chassis. This way it can be passed on to programming to start working on getting the basic movement for the robot done and speed up our progress. Following our chassis design and architecture ( which you can read about in one of our earlier posts ), we are mounting several pieces of the electrical architecture bellow the bellypan such as the pdh and swerve sparkmaxes, and have another protective cover underneath that to ensure nothing is being exposed. This should make being able to access these components in a hurry much faster and save time in having to replace any faulty components.
Once the rest of the superstructure and arm have been fully assembled, wiring can continue with placing all of the sparkmaxeses and neos for the rest of the robot and finish up with the can and power.
Wrapping up this weeks post, we would also like to take a moment to thank Team 1360 for giving us enough extrusion to remake a piece! There was unfortunately a mistake when cutting one of our pieces and Team 1360 thankfully offered to give us enough material to remake the piece and save us the associated troubles. We really appreciate this act of kindness and are so thankful to be a part of such a giving and warm community.
Thank you all so much for reading! This week held amazing progress for us and we hope that we were able to share our work and excitement in continuing this build season and getting started in building our final robot design.
Hello Everyone!
This week was a shorter week than usual due to a day off of school for students, but a drastic amount of progress was made throughout the week. It was also Valentine’s Day, and although robotics is our one true love, it’s important to recognise and spend time with the people that matter most in your life.
Assembly and Integration - Finishing up manufacturing, assembly and wiring for the competition robot
Programming - Robot handed off to programming for software integration and tuning
Drive Team- Our 2024 Driver is chosen and also began the process of choosing the rest of the drive team for this year
This week we put a focus into wiring the robot as soon as possible in order for programming to begin their work on the robot. Although the chassis was wired last week, this week with the superstructure assembled we were able to wire and place the sparkmaxes and neos for the intake, shooter, indexer and arm which completes our electrical architecture with the exception of the climber. We really wanted to insure that wiring looked clean and was organised this year so we spent time dressing the wires. We felt that this aspect of robot design is critical to long term success and spending the time now to ensure there will be less pain later is definitely worth it.
Prototyping shooting continued this week, with us fine tuning any issues that we find with our shots.
3 distinct changes were made to the shooter this week that are important to mention; the extra slider to avoid backflips is not currently installed in this version of the shooter, feed rollers and both pickup rollers have also not been installed and because of the bigger shooter wheels shot compression is 1/2” instead of 1/4”. 2 extra strips of HDPE were taped to the sides to smoothen the shooting process and avoid note damage. Overall, this shooter performs very consistently and effectively even at a far distance of ~213 inches (nearly distance of comp field centre line). We plan to install the missing sliders to avoid backflips, and install feed & pickup rollers to avoid human feed inconsistencies.
This week for manufacturing, we finished all of the initial competition robot parts both the ones in house and the ones sent out to our sponsors. With the initial push to get everything over, next week we can be more focused on iteration and spare parts manufacturing.
We also got started on building the bumpers as we are nearing the stage where we can begin driver practise and need the bumpers ready for tuning things like autos. A set was finished (albeit illegal for competition due to a manufacturing error resulting in more gap than anticipated) for tuning to continue.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/htrobotics/53539319114/
Excitingly , we assembled most of the robot mechanically, or about ~85% of the way through. This was enough for software integration and tuning to start which was a priority for us to get started. We anticipate to have it closer to 100% by the end of this week with the addition of the climber mechanism and fixing a few small mistakes such as missed loctite. Some other goals we have for the end of next week would be to work on intake and handoff testing, integrate QoL features such as signaling leds and protection/sponsor panels as well as continue on finishing the bumpers.
With the exception of the climbers, our shooter and superstructure components package extremely nicely.
With electrical and most of mechanical finished, programming can now start on coding the robot and getting it ready for practice, and higher fidelity testing.
Movement with the chassis was being prepared and different directions were set, with the intake being forward and the shooter as the back.
Both the indexer and the arm were also tested with the initial parts of the code being implemented and tested.
Because we had a 4 day long weekend this week, the robot was taken to a programmer’s house to commence initial software integration and tuning.
Thank you all so much for reading this week’s update! We can look forward to seeing the robot complete hopefully by the end of this week and have all aspects fully integrated together with one another. Looking at some of the week 0 and week 1 events will give us some further insight into the strategy for this years game and give teams a chance to discuss any changes that need to be made. Good luck to you all!
Looks fantastic! Out of curiosity, do you have the weight of the robot?
that’s some aggressive pocketing 
Our CAD estimate is 98lbs. Comp bot will be weighed when we have a scale available.
It’s 120 lbs at the moment! Much heavier than we expected from CAD estimations.
Week 7 was full of progress! While we are admittedly behind in terms of practice field readiness relative to 2023, we got the robot to a point where it is mechanically complete with the competition intake. What we need is more integration, full wiring and setting up/tuning subsystems, as well as tweaking some parts to make the robot better and more ready for competition.
Our initial CAD estimates put our bot within 100 lbs, but upon weighing it at the end of the week we discovered that the robot is 120lb! 20lb over our initial estimates.
While this is not bad in a sense since the robot was already fully integrated and wired by the time it was weighed, it means little wiggle room on our planned iterations on the intake and shooter handoff mechanisms for next week.
We attribute the excess weight than planned on wiring and some electrical components, 3d printed parts (which were not accounted for in CAD, and are collectively responsible for 4-5 lbs. of weight), unaccounted bolts and other undetermined factors.
with the robot’s wiring finished last week, all that was left for week 7 was minor troubleshooting when errors came by, integrating climber wiring to the rest of the robot, as well as starting installation and integration of signalling LEDs and more cable management.
Pictured above is our chassis electronics protected by a bellypan cover.
First thing in the week was the assembly and integration of the climber in the robot.
Initially when the climber was installed we determined that it needed a crossbar due to its initial mounting point not being rigidly adequate.
Thankfully the crossbar supports were an easy addition the next day using PC-CF printed clamping plates (will be changed to polycarbonate or aluminum in the future if needed) and lathed shafts from the climber, to the superstructure.
The climber was also initially geared to a ratio of 72:1, which seemed fine until we assembled the climber and powered it on. It proved to be way too slow and too overpowered
At one point needing two people applying full pulling force to even budge the climber to unspool a little amount with the robot unpowered!
We ultimately geared down the climber to a ratio of 18:1 by removing a MAXplanetary stage to each climber, which ended up being faster from a deploy and climb time perspective, and removed the unnecessary torque and holding power 72:1 yielded, while still keeping the robot upright within the 5 second post-endgame timeframe.
We also cut and finished assembly of our bellypan cover, which consisted of cutting a 1/16 polycarbonate sheet to match the metal cover’s profile, then double-side taping it to the metal cover. the polycarbonate sheet provides additional dust and foreign object protection, while the metal part provides additional weight and structure to the cover.
With the robot mechanically done and mostly handed off for programming and more prototyping work, mechanical set off to working on parts for prototyping, as well as making spare parts for our arm gearbox, climbers and intake for the rest of the week.
Prototyping this week can be broken down into 3 parts: 1) Intake, 2) Handoff, and 3) Shooter.
3 more editions of our centring wedge have been tested. All of them still leave various gaps for notes to get stuck in, but another version will be tested on the upcoming Monday, so stay tuned!
Apart from the centring mechanism, we have also considered alternative solutions. Since the motors’ edges keep catching the note, we can flip them as shown below to avoid contact with the notes. This would also mean decreasing the width of the intake, but it should not affect our intake process if proper under-the-intake wedges/funnels are added.
We tested the handoff with the feed wheels we have on the arm plates (2 sets of rollers perpendicular to arm length). It intook smoothly at angles as small as 30-35°. However, considering the possibility of needing to intake under the Stage, the minimum angle at which note can still be fed from the intake into the arm has to be at most 20°. At this angle, the note is unable to be fed due to the large gap between the feed and intake rollers.
We prototyped an additional part for the feed mechanism, which includes 3 sets of rollers instead of 2. There are a couple of benefits to this methodology:
If this were to work, that means we no longer have to rotate the arm to a 90° angle (vertical) for amp shots, leaving more space on the feed side for other fancy mechanisms/parts we might want to add.
The first edition of this prototype is shown below:
The extra/third roller completes the equilateral with the existing 2 rollers. As shown in the prototyping video, this worked extremely well for handoff, but not so well for amp scoring: the angle of the shot is not close enough to the vertical to make a “floating note” shot (see prototyping video). Therefore, a second version was created by adding another set of rollers (the more the merrier!):
(Amp shot config)
This week’s shooter testing has been somewhat frustrating. From this video on Instagram, you might have noticed how we gave a spin to the note by having different-sized wheels on the left and right (1/4" and 1/2" compression respectively). By eliminating the backflips we continuously experienced, it made our shots much more consistent.
However, due to the difference in contact time, the note is deviated and its trajectory is curved. We experienced quite a bit of bias at around 3 metres from the Speaker. After some tests, we decided to switch back to same-sized wheels, and subsequently reintroduce backflips. There is certainly a tradeoff between not having bias and not having backflips. At ~231" from the Speaker (maximum distance/alliance wing line), the note can flip from 90° to several turns!
From various slow-mo videos shown in the prototyping video, our theory is that when the majority of the note exits the shooter, the exposed section droops down due to gravity, giving the bottom shooter roller a longer contact time and thereby giving the note an upward kick in the very end. We will be exploring our options and solutions next week.
Some other things we noted were the heating of the top shooter hex shaft and gears and the bending of HDPE strips that line the inner sides of the shooter plates.
For next week’s prototyping and testing, you can expect updates on new intake wedges or flipped motors/smaller intake if the wedge fails; testing of the new feed mechanism with 4 rollers; amp shooting; updates on shooter and backflip elimination; etc. Stay tuned!
This week compromised mostly of testing commands with the comp bot but also included the integration of the newly added climber. The shooter and intake commands were tested with controllers for the first time, and the drive controls are nearly complete. PID and FF for the shooter were tuned early on, allowing for better and more effective tuning. Major testing used simple button bindings, but certain tests were conducted specifically for more complex, competition ready sequences, such as a trigger to run the shooter and feed a note as soon as the wheels reached the target RPM, allowing for a seamless shot. Arm PID and FF were also configured over the weekend, and vision targeting has entered its early stages of testing. Much work has been done, bringing hope for great progress next week.
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↑ button bindings for driver and operator
↑ Operator controls with testing buttons, and early sequences
↑ Fundamental Driver Controls: includes gyro and vision alignment
Thank you all so much for reading, see you next week!
Hello Everyone!
This is just a quick mid week update. After the progress and finishing touches of the last week, we were able to start making some productive changes to the intake as well as get started on some drive team practise.
With the robot being mechanically completed, it was time for us to pick a name for the bot and start the official branding. Our team names our robots from the roster of Greek titans, and in keeping consistent with the pattern we found the perfect fit for this years game. Without further ado, please welcome the 3161 2024 bot …. Leto! Mother of the god of music Apollo, we thought she would perfectly represent the abundance of notes that our bot will be scoring.
We made very significant progress with our intake. As you may have seen from our previous videos , we had a rough time centering the notes in the intake. Moreover, notes were constantly stuck in every small gaps in the intake. Along with a newly designed wedge, we decreased the number of rollers on the intake to concentrate grip in the centre. Both of these changes served well as it is visible that our intaking and handoff/feed process is extremely smooth and clean.
With more programming work and the installation of beam break sensors, we were also finally able to run full cycles on the robot for subwoofer shots. We did our first cycle without human aid which was an important milestone for our team and encouraging to see our progress. We can now confidently begin practicing cycles with our robot and ultimately work on refining the hand off process even further.
Code-wise, we have begun finetuning and adding fine details such as beambreaks and LED’s. We are also working on streamlining controls and turning towards a competition control set, so that operators and drivers to practice with. Vision targeting has also entered early stages in terms of testing and tuning so stay tuned for future developments.
We have now reached a point in our robot design process where its important to get started on our driving practice. Using our make shift field we tested out the bot in picking up notes and cycling them. Drive team got their first taste of maneuvering the robot and are already getting used to the controls.
Giving the drive team practice time lets us film some cool shots like these!
Thank you all for reading this mid week update! As our drive team practice continues and we further improve our intake we will be sure to continue the updates on our progress
Hello Everyone!
Finish off this week, Programming spent lots of time with the robot getting fixes ready for the drive team to continue practising.
With the new feed, we are able to score amp, though more tuning would be needed for a more reliable/consistent scoring. Because of the new feed there may be less of a necessity for some of the top rollers which may be conflicting with our shots. We’ve also made significant progress on vision tuning, however a rightward bias constantly showed up throughout testing. . Another problem that arose were brownouts, which is causing our swerve wheels to experience jerky motion. We’ve theorised that it could be due to the velocity control on the swerve modules or could potentially also be an error with wiring or our battery breaker, but this issue will be further investigated in depth later this week.
Additionally, we were granted the opportunity to test out our bot at more robust practice field. We tested out being able to shoot in the trap without a dedicated mechanism, but it didn’t seem fruitful unless shot at a very specific angle that we currently aren’t capable of replicating consistently. Intake from the human player at the source seemed to work well and acts as a contingency incase our ground intake fails us, or grants us flexibility in terms of strategy during comp.
This week brings many great advancements and some setbacks in terms of programming. To start, LED’s are fully functional and look incredible on the robot, allowing for accurate information relay to the drivers. As driver and operator practice continues, the controls for the robot have also advanced, with the majority of buttons being convenient and almost completely automated sequences, allowing the driver and operator to run the robot with a few simple buttons. Our first practice field session yielded some interesting results, with our first auto running the robot into the speaker, as well as an unfortunate spin caused by some bugs. Vision shooting yields promising results, and on-the-fly shooting becomes more of a reality.
The team is also grateful to one of senior mentors for his donation to the team of a Lenovo Thinkpad as our new driverstation, a welcome upgrade from the old driverstation.
Thank you all so much for reading this weeks update! Good luck to all of the teams competing this week and we hope that you all find lots of success!
Hello Everyone!
The next week is our march break, which means we won’t be able to meet in the shop or have access to many of our materials. Fortunately, we are able to spend the whole week doing drive team practice and testing out our autos before comp.
Now that mechanical components of the robot have been finalized for competition, the main thing that remains is tuning the shooter for consistent shooting. Apart from a faulty NEO and SparkMax, the arm and interpolation have improved significantly in terms of consistency, with the bot making the majority of shots taken. The programming team also added an on-the-fly shooting option that, allows the bot to shoot while driving around. While it does require some tuning, it does show great promise.
Following some small adjustments and the addition of an extra motor, the amp shooter has now been improved, with increasingly consistent shots, except for one particular roughed-up note.
Our climber is now able to smoothly extend and retract itself. Following an incident of one of the cables snapping due to a setup error, programming has finalized the climb command, and added a homing function to reset the climber automatically in the pits.
9562, Royal Robotics, our friend and rookie team, joined us for a day of joint preparation for their first competition. Our (on both teams) programming subteams and mentors worked together to resolve an issue they were facing with one of their swerve motors.
We were sadly not able to fully resolve the issue they were having but we enjoyed having them with us, and look forward to more cooperation in the future
We were granted an opportunity this past week to showcase our robot progress at our school boards STEAM Expo. There were so many amazing projects and experiments being shared and was an absolute blast to attend!
By using our amp outake we were able to showcase the full capabilities of this years robot as safely as possible. We got lots of excited questions and we hope to have been able to set a spark of curiosity for all of the students who participated in the outreach event to look into joining a FIRST team.
Having our sponsors on our bots is an important way to show our appreciation for their support, and this week with competition in the horizon, we began cutting and decorating our sponsor and protective panels, sponsor panel placement has been an interesting challenge to do given the overall design of the robot.
We wanted a placement that did not obstruct the overall side profile of the robot, while not sacrificing functionality, but still meaningfully showing our gracious sponsors and their logos when you approach the robot, or look at it from the stands or on a stream.
Upon these goals, we decided to put the panels on the chassis, doubling as a protective panel for above chassis electronics and it turned out well.
We did have to add a cutout for our breaker, and made sure visibility of its location is seen easily.
For other panels and trinkets, we also decided to decorate our bottom electronics panel. incase of the unfortunate (and please don’t happen) tip.
Not so much of a panel, but 2024 is our first year since 2017 where there is no wood that is intended to be a competition part on the bot! So we added a little panel to give an ode to our wooden competition bot era.
With this week being the last week before march break and the week after it is the immediate start of our first event in humber on Monday, we had to pack for comp 2 weeks early
Our trailer has been in a rough shape for a while now so as a little side project we laid down a fresh coast of paint over the entire trailer in an attempt to refurbish the design. Although not completed yet it will be amazing to enter the competition season with a vibrant trailer.
Inside of our trailer we packed everything we need for comp, while separating vital parts needed for the bot to function at the practice field for us to easily carry and bring. We won’t have accesses to anything at all throughout the week so it was critical that we had everything organized before hand in order to ensure both the practice field and our load in process go smoothly.
Thank you all so much for reading! We will be sure to maintain updates on our drive team practice throughout this week and share any new details we find out through testing things out.
