In the light of today’s changes to R302, teams can now use parts on their robots that weren’t fabricated post-Kickoff. Which means teams aren’t bound to stockpiling COTS parts (or clones of COTS parts).
This calls for a mindset shift, so now I’m wondering: What parts are you wanting to get fabricated ahead of Kickoff?
The random 3d printed spacers/tube plugs that we seem to use year to year that tie up the 3d printer for some time as soon as the season starts.
Fabricated:
We were already planning to CAD up our drivebase and electronics layout before kickoff. Now we might make prints like swerve covers beforehand. Similarly, electronics cases, such as a case that holds the CANivore USB cable in place.
Dug out of prior print bins: we have a lot of belt pulleys which are fine to be reused now that the rule changed. We also could reuse some parts from our battery mounting solution, perhaps.
I thought these were already allowed under the "cots functional equivalent " exception.
I’m actually hard pressed to think of anything. This off-season our kids did some nifty 3D printed mounts for electronics and such on our testbed bot that potentially could be used, but I’m suspecting they’re going to keep coming up with new iterations into build season.
As others have said, things that tie up printer time (radio mounts, pulleys, motor spacers etc)
Various gussets on the router that are more team specific and don’t have a COTS equivalent may also be useful. We are not limited on the router side, but this is a “nice to have on hand” thing.
Other smallish polycarb parts, such a wire chases and the like.
If they are cots equivalent then that was true, but we have quite a few that we seem to use year after year that I don’t know of an exact cots equivalent.
I’m making a large amount of 6328-inspired stub rollers!
I suspect a lot of teams will be printing TPU wheels too.
Would a belly pan / electronics board be legal to make ahead of time (or re-use from a previous year) under the new rule? The belly pan on its own does not seem meet the definition of a major mechanism. Once it is assembled to the frame rails as part of the drivebase, then it would be part of that major mechanism. Fabricating the belly pan is probably the one thing that prevents our team (and many teams) from having their competition drivebase assembled in the first week or two of the build season so having that built ahead of time would be a big step forward for our build season schedule.
Thoughts?
Without seeing the actual rules, hard to say, but based on what we’ve seen my opinion would be a bellypan with electronics and with or without frame rails is NOT a major mechanism until swerve or tank drives are attached.
Unfortunately, for us, I’m not seeing this helping us unless we make many bellypans as our constraint is getting the design team to settle on a robot size.
Yeah, I definitely get where you are coming from relative to frame dimensions. It used to be that we would try to build to the maximum perimeter and often that meant a 30"x30" frame (with slightly rounded off corners to ensure we would “measure in”). But the last several years we have been trending smaller due to end game constraints. Since those game constraints are pretty obvious in the first day or two after kickoff, we can determine whether we want to go 30x30 or try to go smaller. It’s conceivable to have a couple of different sizes already pre-designed and pre-cut (potentially from prior years) that we could grab and go.
Since we have been mounting our electronics on the bottom of the belly pan in the past few years, that frees us up to build up the drivebase without worrying about conflicting with the final mechanism designs.
We’ve thought about that, but there have been concerns…
Do you use some sort of bottom cover (polycarb?) to protect your electronics? Do you use some sort of quick disconnect so you can get it off in a hurry? Is turning it “upside down” in the pits a real pain?
Well, we were already making swerve module prototypes for our new version, but now we can build completed modules. This helps.
We can now also (re)build our battery box.
Bumper mount plates, wire strain reliefs, swerve covers, vision system mounting parts, intake roller parts, stud shafts for horizontal intake rollers
I am not in the team of the person you are replying to but we did the upside down electronics (brainpan) 2024 and it worked great. We used a polycarb sheet at the bottom to protect the electronics. For flipping it upside down, this year it wasn’t much of a pain (even with our robot being 124.5lb) but I could see it being more annoying with a taller robot. The brainpan allows for much better mounting and access to electronics and it is easier to build basically whatever you want on top.
Show and tell (along with a bunch of other team’s experiences) here:
From the post you quoted:
I was thinking if you mounted connectors in the bellypan you could avoid some of this difficulty and improve servicability? Something like dtm for signal-level (eg CAN, sensors, etc) wiring:
and something like this for power (eg motor) connections:
Have you tried anything like that?
We use powerpoles a lot, but we have not felt the need to integrate a central connector board to ease the wiring. The swerve modules are generally going to be close enough to the level of the bellypan that we can mount the motor controllers in places on the electronics board where the wires can reach the motors without the need for a separate disconnect.
If you look at the picture of our 2022 robot laying on its side from that other thread, you can see that we mount a lot of the motor controllers on the belly pan. Those motor controllers are going to have short sets of wires to powerpole connectors. So those become a sort of disconnect by default. Generally the team tries to keep those disconnects on the bottom of the board where they can easily reach them.
But by all means, if you want to use items like the ones you have posted to make the wiring more organized and modular, go for it.
Thanks! We bit the bullet and bought a bunch of Krakens this summer, so no more SparkMaxes for us – this has really neatened up our wiring, but I’m thinking having disconnects next to each swerve module so they can all have an identical “pigtail” on them beats having each with custom length wiring home run to the PDH.