So we are a rookie team this year from SoCal. Things didn’t go as planed at our regional so we did not end up going to Worlds. The upside to this is we have some extra money fund raised and need to know what it is best spent on. We want to look into building a swerve drive for next year’s comp but have no clue what goes into it. Other than that, we just need to know what our money is best spent on as far as what actually gets put into the robot.
I’m happy to clarify anything that could be asked. Thanks in advance!
P.S. We are working with about $3000 at the moment and should be pulling in a little more as time passes.
First off, I would say don’t attempt a swerve drive just yet. That’s pretty advanced, and there are a lot of other aspects to the robot that can improve your performance more. A basic drive train is completely capable of taking you to champs (and even to Einstein!), assuming the rest of your robot is good enough. But build a swerve drive that doesn’t work right, and it doesn’t matter how good the rest of your robot is, you’ll have a difficult season. Plus, swerve usually involves a lot more time and effort to build and program during the season, leaving you with less time and energy to put towards the other aspects of the robot.
Without knowing what you already have, it’s hard to make suggestions. I would suggest you start by looking at equipment - what do you have in your shop? If you don’t have a drill press, band saw, lathe, or mill, get those! If any are completely worn out and need replacement, replace them! A metal break and shear are also incredibly useful. These are all items that will last many seasons and directly impact what you can produce during the build season, thus being a very good investment.
Next, for the offseason you can work on upgrading your current robot. Find an offseason event near you this fall and sign up for it (great experience for new team members!), then work on redesigning and building new parts for your robot so you can perform better at that event.
Without knowing the game next year, it’s hard to suggest specific items to focus on. Instead, look back at previous years. Look at the games, look at the solutions that played on Einstein for each of them. Look at the different mechanisms employed, and look into how they work and how they were built (There’s a lot of good information on CD if you use the search function!). That sort of research will really help after kickoff when you start thinking about what to build. One of the other mentors on my team and I spend half the first week saying “what if we did something like team XXX in year YYYY?” (based off our shared experiences over the past 10 years of mentoring). It’s a very nice shorthand that gets information and overall design considerations across very quickly, and provides a point of reference if we need to find more information.
We are in a situation with the school district taking care of our machine shop (basically, we don’t have a say in what we get and don’t get). We have been in the corner of a classroom which has served us well for what it was.
Our team surprisingly has decent coders and mechanical team members.
The whole goal with attempting a swerve drive was not for the season. We wanted to do this as an off season project and hopefully get our younger members more experience and maybe even get lucky and get to the point where we have that process down.
For machines and tools, we should be decently covered so I was thinking more along the lines with common and useful things that people often purchase and would do us well for having extra of during the season.
This is all great advice! I agree, focus on things that will improve your build season and build experience. Not so much parts/systems for a robot, more so tools.
Example: One of our team’s off season project is to build a XY table so we can drill holes where we mean to…
You may want to consider investing that money in education. Our team is looking to run some CAD ‘classes’ for our students. We are lucky in that two of our mentors are very proficient in CAD so it will be at no cost. However that may not be the case for your team. CAD is a very useful tool in FRC and the Industry in general, bringing in an instructor might be a sound investment. I don’t have any solid advice for such a thing, but I am throwing it out there as an idea to consider. Perhaps other CD members could contribute on the subject. (I know there are a lot of free learning resources online, but face to face is sometimes the best for some students.)
Look at where your teams ability is weakest and put money in that direction.
What went wrong at your regional competition, that you would like to improve?
I’ve noticed that figuring out how to play an FRC game is very important, and making the parts of the robot that deal with the game piece is vital. The kit drivetrain works reasonably well most of the time. Since we have no idea what it will take to play next year’s game, follow the advice to look at past games. Does your team know how to build a mechanism to lift weight? to collect and shoot balls accurately? to grasp strange shaped objects? there are lots of fun things to figure out how to make robots do, that can greatly increase your odds of doing well at the competitions.
I would put swerve drive pretty low on that list.
You may want to consider investing that money in education. Our team is looking to run some CAD ‘classes’ for our students.
Look at where your teams ability is weakest and put money in that direction.
Thanks for the suggestion about the education part and in particular CAD. Since our district is very education oriented instead of hands on which could be debatable when the majority of FRC is hands on. Anyway, this means for us we have an Engineering Pathway that goes 9th-12th that includes an FRC and CAD class that go over just about any theoretical aspect of the competition. That is a big reason why our mechanical team and programming team are further ahead that most rookie teams.
We are a second year team and so can comment on what might help you step it up for next year. Did you build a practice machine this year? If not, consider it. If we had to go to tournament with what we put in the bag we would be at a disadvantage. We have driven our B machine until the bolts are loose and the auto portion of the challenge in particular is much evolved.
Building two functionally identical machines is not easy. If you have some extra cash consider laying in a stock of 80/20 or similar stuff. The fasteners and widgets are a long term investment, we expect them to be reused forever. The long stock can be used in off season work or in next year’s “machines”.
CAD capacity is also good but I would say not vital for a young team. The Solidworks provided gratis to FIRST teams is nice, even if we only used it for widget design for 3D printing. We are trying to arrange loan of a few computers with sufficient RAM for students to play over the summer.
The earlier post that asked how you came up short at Regionals asks a fair question. It suggests that while you appear to have your act together that there is room for improvement somewhere. Otherwise you’d be heading for World as Rookie All Stars. Not a criticism mind you. Last year as rookies we had highest rookie seed and were an alliance captain. But not All Stars.
T. Wolter
5826
I think it is a great idea for OP’s team to use their extra funds expanding their teams knowledge toolbox by investing in a summer project like a swerve drive, or maybe a simple H drive, or maybe looking into a mechanism their team has never built before. That can be put on a showcase robot for outreach events.
The number one thing that holds new teams back from making engineering feats is they often hide behind the idea that they only have 6 weeks to do something with a limited labor base, so they don’t want to spend those 6 weeks figuring out something they have never tried before.
This is why off season projects that increase your teams knowledge toolbox are a great investment. Plus there is no substitute for the project style learning experience that it offers. I’d say off season projects often times give student’s the ability to learn and explore without the consequences and pressure that the regular season has. They make far better learning devices than the typical classes and workshops that some teams offer.
I agree that off season projects are an awesome way to improve. However, I don’t think a drive train project is the correct choice for a first year team.
I would suggest:
-Tune your current robots systems until you get them working just right.
-Design and build a mechanism for this years game that you chose to forfeit during the 6 weeks.
-Look back to previous years and prototype design and build mechanisms to manipulate game pieces you think could be challenging.
Something that completely slipped my mind in my first post but that I saw mentioned and I would like to emphasis:
Consider saving funds to be able to build a practice robot next year. Even if you chose not to build a second bot, buy a second control system. Accidents happen, having a backup is the best way to minimize lost time.
It can also allow you to have a previous year’s robot up and running for demo’s and outreach events all year long.
^^ THIS, so much this.
We have **four **control systems, and wound up pulling the one off of last year’s competition robot shortly after bag day this year because we had control systems:
- In the bag
- On the practice robot, being used for driver practice
- On the programmers’ code testing platform (which, OBTW, drove this year for auto testing)
- On the robot we were building to upgrade the practice robot to be more like the one in the bag.
I’m not saying you can’t have too many control systems, but we haven’t found that number yet. (We have twenty students and five “full time” technical mentors, and usually meet less than 20 hours per week during build.)
Before your team tries to tackle any ambitious projects like swerve, its best to make you have all your fundamentals down for the seemingly simple stuff first. Like others before me have said, you should spend your offseason building up your team’s “knowledge toolbox” that your team will access and use for future build seasons.
I’d recommend investing the time to build a simple yet sturdy west coast drive system that your team can utilize and iterate for future seasons. COTS suppliers today such as West Coast Products, VexPro, and AndyMark all offer a wide variety of products that make building an effective drivetrain much easier than it once was in the past. A simple WCD is often a highly effective drivetrain that applies to most FRC seasons year after year. It’s simplicity often grants it a degree of customization and versatility that the Kit of Parts drivetrain lacks. Having your team build one in the offseason is well worth the investment, arguably more so than building a swerve drive.
If you have considerable time after building the base drivetrain, try experimenting with a superstructure mechanism your team isn’t familiar with. You can use this as an opportunity to acquaint your team with different applications of pneumatic cylinders and versaplanetary gearboxes for intake arms, rollers, and shooters. The longer you spend time in FRC, the more you notice certain mechanisms that pop up year after year to perform similar tasks.
While your team does this, try experimenting with different systems as well. For electrical, it’s well worth your time to label your wires and try different connectors (many here are fans of Anderson Powerpoles). If you used PWM this year, try CAN, and vice versa. Since you have a decent budget, it would be well worth trying out the Talon SRX series of motor controllers if you haven’t already.
Have your programmers study the code of other teams, here is a large directory of teams’ code that has been saved over the years. Often times you’ll pick up on interesting and ingenious tricks that teams employ in their programming.
There’s also a wide variety of resources available online for any mechanical application, such as the application examples and guides section of the VexPro website as well as whitepapers that can be found here on ChiefDelphi under the CD-Media tab on the top of this page. Other team’s websites, especially 1678’s and 1114’s, often provide archived presentations and slide shows that they’ve used for workshops in the past that talk about various topics involved in FRC. On Youtube, there are also archived shows that also talk about these topics, I’m personally a fan of the Behind the Lines series.
The Blue Alliance blog also has plenty of articles that speak about team’s different design choices and philosophies which you can try to adapt to your team’s build process as well, and its grabCAD page has plenty of CAD models of robots from various teams over the past few years.
As always, it’s well worth the time to connect with local teams in your area and ask for help or mentoring. While we do have a treasure trove of internet resources nowadays, nothing beats a face to face conversation.
Good luck with your offseason projects! 
(1) Why spend the money now instead of closer to next year’s build season? (There are good answers to that question, but you should ask the question).
(2) You will want a second roborio and all the pieces you need to power it. The one you have in the bag won’t do you any good.
(3) What are your plans for the off-season? You do have plans for the off-season, right? If you don’t, that’s where your focus should be. In particular, think about training up programmers and designers.
Saying, “The conventional drive we did this year didn’t work well, so we’re going to make a swerve drive next year because other teams are doing them well,” is kind of like saying “I’m not doing great in algebra, so I’m going to do calculus instead because it’s much more powerful.”
Don’t make a swerve drive until you’ve gotten really good at making tank-style drives.
If you want to make an off-season drivebase (which I recommend doing, by the way), I’d recommend perfecting something simple rather than tackling something overly complicated. It’s also worth time to train up your underclassmen in SolidWorks and whatever programming language you’re using, and to run through a mock kick-off to dial in your design process.
One more point on the swerve issue is that designing a swerve during build season is going to take a couple of “top level” students a week or two to get working, along with another week or so to get programmed. Designing a really good tank drive will only take a few days, and then you can put your effort into making a great manipulator with strong code running it. Time is a tight resource during build season and wasting it reinventing the wheel is pointless, especially for a newer team.
$3K is a healthy amount. A second control system is definitely a good idea, as is investing in whatever tools you think are particularly helpful. Something else to consider would be to invest in raw materials that you can then use to work on challenges. For example I’ve been advocating for our time to make a significant investment in VersaChassis and purchase a small horizontal bandsaw and a drill press for the pit. That way we can fabricate nearly anything we want.
There have been many great suggestions posted on this thread and most of them do not involve spending a ton of money. Our team has built our reputation around some basic principles which any team can follow:
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Tank drive works great in almost all situations (thanks 254 for the inspiration)
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During build season, focus on prototyping good mechanisms not spending time on fancy drive-trains that are unnecessary.
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Build season is 12-months long. Spend the summer working on a project (like designing a robot for an off-season competition). Sign up for one of your off-season events such as “Beach Blitz” or “Battle of the Border”.
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During build season, build a practice robot (even if it’s just a kit bot) so you can get more driver practice and develop your mechanism design.
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Attend more than one event next year so that you have the opportunity to learn and improve.
With respect to #5, maybe you should save the $3,000 and put it towards the registration fee of an additional event next year. This will probably have more impact on your team than any parts/supplies purchase.
Hey rookie… heads up you can fundraise and that’s a huge plus for your team, as will those coding/CAD skills. Congrats on your first event and your well earned. **Rookie Inspiration Award **
Perhaps use that “extra” money to go to two events, and get more opportunities next year as Citrus Dad stated.
As for going to the worlds, that is pretty darn hard (I/we know that first hand) only a handful go, we got somewhat lucky as RAS first year with our simple defense-only design, we could have easily been overlooked but they liked our business plan and we ranked 23 (did not get selected) . That world experience helped us to realize we certainly wanted to get back and what it takes to play at that level. We understand how hard Blue Banners are to come by and are happy with what we achieved year one. Three more years, close no cigar. Oh well, its just a game… always next year.
My advice is start a scouting/ outreach department in the off season, read the rules, study past years results (we did all this our second year in terms of scouting/study). All this is pretty much free. Become an expert at what it takes to move on in First.
If you want to do offseason simply prototype different mechanisms, find better code, do CAD. Think about how to win some of the other ways in: Chairman’s Award, Engineering Inspiration Award. Waitlist if you want.
Its your first year don’t be hard on yourself… You’ll grow next year. Add what you had no idea to add next year… spend time analyzing the game , don’t overextend yourself beyond what you a capable of, bite off what you can and try to be “reliable and rare”. Look at the bots that win this year what qualities did they have ? I don’t think all had swerve.
Make sure everyone on your team is doing the role(s) they have passion for. That’s why I’m still there every year , its fun and not “work” its simply robot season.My family understands they won’t see me for many weekends
The breakdown we follow is and works for us : Driving-Engineering-Scouting
…all these are equal weight and we try to keep it simple to ensure all three areas are well covered and solid. We pride ourselves on not having fouls, trained humans in the game and in our pit , making connections with other teams, and being on the field with a plan: enhancing other teams gameplay through game planning and insights then giving the other alliance all they can handle. We continue to try to build up to the Chairman’s and other ways in like Engineering Inspiration…it takes time.
It was an honor to see your team in action in Ventura you all have a bright future. You compete in California congrats, so expect all regionals in the area to be very tough, just the way it is. I would not change that, makes us better to go against mix it up and play with some of the best teams anywhere each year. Team 599 yesterday after 17 seasons in California earned their way in as finalist/wildcard at Orange County…this shows its** very hard to do **. I’m so happy for them.
Now for some relevant insights from the week 3 Ventura competition we were in with you …here is our actual 27 deep end of day 1 pick list from Ventura as 3 Captain (see attached)… look at it and ask yourself why were you not on our list that my lead scout student diligently made up? More importantly why were the other teams on it? Think … he watched all your games along with our scout team’s input. There has to be a reason, my advice is learn to how to impress the scouts "be a scout " helps you to learn how they think…they are watching and/or analyzing. If you are not on any list that explains why your team was not selected its that simple …so get on these lists. We do, in SD we were ranked 55 at end of day 2 (rope/strategy issues until we settled down) …still got picked and made it to SF3, and my team was worried , I was not at all… why??? we made the list by climbing twice at the end and could run gears as the 14th best gear bot there. Scouts saw that and added us to several of their lists, helped that 399 knew us from prior years competitions and was literally right by us in the pits. Then in Ventura added Gear auto with 50 cents worth of parts , raised up to 8th best "gear bot+auto/climb’ and earned the 3 captain spot just one week later. Improvement.
One thing being a scout… rank means nothing. Its “other metrics” that mean more to us and other teams. Helps to have solid team connections too. Teams if given a choice will pick the team they know typically, so get known by many. Iterate. Be solid.
