Hello Everyone!
Welcome to X-SHARC #6838’s 2023-2024 season build blog. We are really excited to be a featured OA team for this season! I am Mohamad, the team lead for this season, and I will be helping with the blogs this year. We’ll be 6-person crew who will keep the blog up to date.
Mohamad - Team Lead
Berra - Team Lead
Zeynep - Electronics Lead
Ece - Mechanical & CAD Department
Emre - Electronics & Programming Department
Gökalp - Youth Mentor
A Little Bit About Ourselves
Our journey in FRC started in the 2017 off-season, and we have come a long way since then. This year will mark our 8th season competing. We are a school-based (SEV American College) team located in Istanbul, Turkey. We have had a last couple of successful years here in Turkey, and we hope to grow as a team this year as well.
In 2024, we will be competing in:
- Istanbul Regional | 5-7 March (Week 2)
- Haliç Regional | 19-21 March (Week 4)
Team Links
What We Have Done So Far:
We decided to build a new off-season robot, however due to unfortunate competition conditions we never got to participate in the offseason, and never actually got around to fully finishing our robot when it comes to the software aspect. You can see a more detailed blog, about our offseason robot right here:
During the off-season, we aimed to teach our new members as much as possible. We held workshops for each department, as the new members got involved in mechanics, PR, CAD, electronics and programming.
Our new members showed great progress in such a short period of time, which we hope will be a large benefit for us during the season.
Crescendo Season General Team Goals
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Increase in-house manufacturing and make use of the CNC router as much as possible.
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Produce faster prototypes through the CNC router’s use.
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Fast outsourced manufacturing.
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Improving all the skills of our members, especially newer members.
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Increase the participation of all members during the robot assembly process.
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Increase social media usage (YouTube, Instagram) and have a stronger outreach.
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Establish a great workflow that strictly complies with our season calendar.
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Establish great communication between all members during the robot-making process(One way we plan to do this is by making use of Spectrum’s task manager spreadsheet).
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Enter the competition with a robot that shows consistent and reliable performance.
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Consistently iterate through the season, essentially having a very much improved robot compared to the beginning of the season.
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We are aiming to win both regionals, either as alliance captains or first pick.
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Therefore we hope to qualify for the Champs and get to Round 2 of the playoffs in our division.
Crescendo Build Season Goals
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K.I.S.S. - Keep it silly simple
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Steal from the best, invent the rest
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Touch & Grab intake
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Define Design requirements for each subsystem and consistently work towards them through the season.
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Iterations
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Consistently iterate throughout the build season for performance gains
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Follow a fast iteration process
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CAD iterations if not major should not take anymore than 2 days
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Review CAD iterations as a whole and bring them to the best state possible
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The manufacturing process should not take more than 2-3 days.
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Try to keep iterations as simple as possible to maximize process speed
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Account for a minimum of 6 days for any iteration.
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All iteration’s mechanical assembly and program planning must be done before manufacturing
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Use in-house manufacturing methods to maximize the speed of manufacturing for polycarbonate plates
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Iterations that require CNC milling machines should be accounted for in a longer time frame
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Show constant and significant improvement with each event, and drive for simplicity combined with efficiency when doing so
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Have a modular design
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Have a robot that consistently achieves the defined design requirements and fix all inconsistencies before competitions
Prototyping
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Mostly all designs should favor manufacturing by our in-house CNC or any sort of in-house
manufacturing to maximize speed -
Make prototypes adjustable to test multiple orientations and degrees of freedom
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Gather all possible data from prototypes
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Materials
- Wood
- Polycarbonate (3mm) (Only if required)
- Plexiglass (3mm, 4mm, 5mm)
- Aluminum (3mm) (Only if required)
- 20mm x 20mm sigma profiles
- 3D Printed parts
- Last year’s protopipe blocks
Manufacturing
Outsourced
Similar to last year, we want to maximize manufacturing speed. This year we have 4 sponsors that will help us with this matter and we aim that our parts will be manufactured within a 3-day span. We are very thankful for our sponsors Nitrocare, Altınay, Ofisline and Koç Otomotiv. Due to their support we will have access to laser cutting, sheet-metal, CNC milling, and lathe parts made out of aluminum, polycarbonate, steel, and wood.
In-House
For in-house manufacturing this year we will be making use of our milling machine, CNC router, drill press, and belt sander machine.
Thankfully this year we could finally get our CNC router up and running. Currently we just plan to use it for prototyping, and intake polycarbonate plates. All of our aluminum plates will still be outsourced from our sponsors as we still don’t have enough machining experience.
We made this bearing jig to test our machining tolerances for ½ inch hex bearings, and find the right size fits for the prototypes we will be making.
Build Season Calendar
This year we tried to make a highly detailed season calendar and have everything pre planned as much as possible to ensure less time loss during the season.
We’ll be updating you soon on our Kick-off! Until then we hope you have a wonderful Kick-off!