Last year at this time everyone was working on elevators for the 2023 game. We all thought it was going to be a pick & place game and it seemed like everyone was making CAD or real elevators to build their skills. I’m not seeing that as much this year. What is your team doing to get ready for 2024?
For us we upgraded to MK4i modules this fall. We assembled them and installed them on our B bot we made last summer. This was great training of newer students and also gave our software people a head start. We have also created a basic CAD using these modules to give us a head start. Other than that we have been just doing basic training in the shop and a bunch of outreach and FLL.
For what I am anticipating, We just had a 2 piece pick and place game with balance. The 2 prior games were both 1 piece shooters with mechanism climb. They usually mix it up so that would mean a 1 piece Shooter + Pick and Place with odd climb. So something with recycling balls that need to be placed at the end of the match eg. 2008 . And then a climb like the rope climb in 2017 since its been a while since we have had a different type of end game. Maybe a vertical bar climb like 2010.
We did an off-season elevator for a mini-robot event (the East Robotics Competition, put on by our fellow Chapel Hill team, the Eastbots.) Since we used a telescoping arm last season (and in 2022 for the climb) it was a good exercise in elevator design in case we need one for this year. We have good experience with shooter design, since we used that very successfully in 2022 too, with juniors and seniors who have those concepts down pretty well. We’ve also spent a lot of time working on design and strategic planning exercises to teach the new recruits about how we approach the problems of building a competition robot and to train them in some of the more practical aspects of mechanical and electrical work. Other than that, we’ve spent the balance of our time refitting our shop and organizing everything for the new season.
Our team is moving to swerve this year, so a good portion of our preseason was focused on building and programming it. Other than that, we attended Bash at the Beach as an offseason competition, disassembled our 2023 robot , and made enhancements to our 2022 robot so that it will be usable for outreach events. We did our best to include new and returning students in each of these to get some hands-on training and practice working together.
Our team worked on April Tag detection with the Limelight and the Gloworm since we basically ignored them last year. We will probabaly end up using Photonvision on both, just so we are running the same software on each one.
We modified our swerve code to make our tippy robot not so tippy. We figure out how to get the speed at which the robot was traveling and also added the ability to slow down the turning of each module based on that speed. So at high speeds we will no longer flip those wheels 90 degrees instantly.
Finally, last night we disassembled the robot to get ready to build the next one. Only 2 hours to take apart what took months to build.
It’s assembled ish minus a few bolts, 100 some concrete anchors, 150 feet of Velcro and some polycarb siding with assistance from a giant pile of VHB tape
I was going to quote this also. We did this also the past several days. We disassembled our previous practice bot, organize our scrap bins to take to recyclers or trash, and plan to re-use our 4 SDS modules on a new drive base for our programmers.
Mid to late December is when our shop is the cleanest, only to get all messed up again right after Kickoff.
Seriously this looks amazing. Glad that master carton of vhb is getting used . Was there any oil on the steel you needed to clean off to get it to stick?
The massive treasure of donated VHB will be used to hold the poly to the steel. Don’t worry, we’llLimelight, an integrated vision coprocessor be frugal with it.
Yes, massive amounts of oil. Wiped twice with mineral spirits and will be wiped again before VHB use.
, and made enhancements to our 2022 robot so that it will be usable for outreach events. We did our best to include new and returning students in each of these to get some hands-on training and practice working together.
