Hello Everyone!
Welcome to X-SHARC #6838’s 2024-2025 build blog. We are hoping to up our Open Alliance game this season by giving more frequent updates of our progress. We will work as a team on keeping you guys updated throughout the season.
Nuh -Team Lead
Emre -Team Lead
Zeynep - Mechanics Lead
Nedim - Programming Member
About Ourselves
Our team has been competing in FRC since the 2017 Off-Season. We have made immense progress ever since. This will be our 9th competition season this year. We are a school based team (SEV American College) in Istanbul, Turkey. We hope to grow and improve as a team further this year.
Regionals
This year we will be attending 2 regionals as usual.
Bosphorus Regional 4-6 March (Week 2)
Haliç Regional 7-9 March (Week 2)
Reefscape General Season Goals
- Increasing our in-house manufacturing
- Producing prototypes at a faster rate
- Fast outsourced manufacturing
- Training our new members and introducing them to the FRC community
- Increasing our PR activity such as social media usage, projects etc.
Off-Season Recap
Hi everyone, I’m Zeynep and I’m our new head of mechanics this year. On October 18-20, we attended Cezeri Robot Ligi Umraniye Off-Season. It was overall an amazing experience for us. We were chosen by the first seeded alliance and became event winners alongside team #6459 AG Robotics and team #8058 IELRobotics. We were also granted the Judges Award.
We joined the event with our robot Blackout. The structure of our robot remained the same, although we did make some minor fixes and adjustments. During the season, we had witnessed some bending with our steel intake plates. So for the off-season, we decided to replace them with 3mm polycarbonate plates. The polycarbonates made it more stable overall. This definitely improved our intake accuracy. Our centering pieces were also an issue with the steel plates because as they kept bending, the screws wouldn’t hold the 3D printed pieces. When we fixed the plates, we saw that the stability of the centering pieces was no longer an issue.
We finished 2nd in the qualification matches and emerged to the playoffs as the 1st ranked alliance. We remained in the upper bracket throughout and came out at 1st place.
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Kickoff
Hi again everyone,
We’re all very excited for the Reefscape season!
As usual, we kicked off the new season at our school with our loved ones. We invited our friends, family, and alumni to join us in learning the new theme for this year’s game.
Team Presentation:
We see Kickoff day as an opportunity to gather our friends and families together, which is a great time for everyone to socialize and get to know one another. This is also one of the rare times we get the chance to unite our parents together, we use this opportunity to inform them about our team missions and goals.
Some Fun Activities:
Kickoff is also a great time for the team to have fun! Our PR team put together 2 games to play between the presentation and the broadcast, a Kahoot and a trivia game. Both the parents and students participated in the game which was a great bonding experience for all.
Strategy:
That was a wrap on our Kickoff plans. We followed the night by carefully going through the game manual and coming up with some strategy plans. After some careful consideration and brainstorming, we had a meeting and decided on the main outlines for this year’s strategy.
For the autonomous period:
Must have:
- 1 coral placed on L4 + taxi
Nice to have:
- 2 coral placed on L4 + taxi
Explore:
For teleop:
Must have:
- Scoring coral on all 4 levels of the reef
- Intaking from both the source and the ground
- Score at least 2 algae into the processor
- Score as many coral as possible
- Controlling of the algae and scoring them into the processor
Nice to have:
- Continuous and fast cycles, maximizing use of time
- Score at least 12 coral
For endgame:
Must have:
- Must climb (shallow or deep undecided for now)
Nice to have:
- Climbs onto the deep cage
- Climbing as fast as possible
Priority:
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Communication and Dedication
-
Maximize match points
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Maximize RP points
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Have fast cycle times
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Score as many coral as possible
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Get at least 2 algae into the processor
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Score at least 2 coral in auto
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Be able to climb
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Get maximized time for drive practice
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Explore deep cage climbing
This is the general idea we have for our strategy so far. Although nothing is set stone just yet. There was some discussion on whether or not it is worth attempting the deep cage climb. We are focusing on getting most of the algae away from the reef and emptying up space to score the coral. There was some discussion on whether or not it is worth attempting the deep cage climb. We want to make sure we can climb, but the level of it will most probably be decided later as we proceed to determining the structure of our robot.
We will update you guys once we lock in our strategy and feel free to ask any questions you have!
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Final Strategy:
Hello again everyone! Last night we had a meeting and talked in depth about our finalized strategy. We have made some changes and now that everything is finalized, here is the locked in strategy for this year’s game:
Autonomous period:
Must have:
Nice to have:
Explore:
- Multi coral on various levels
Teleop period:
Must have:
- L1-L2-L3-L4 coral placement
- Algae removal
- Source pickup
- 8 coral placement
Nice to have:
- Algae control
- 10-12 coral placement
Explore:
Endgame:
Nice to have:
Explore:
We decided to prioritize some things over others and made up a summed up version of our strategy. For now, we aren’t prioritizing coral ground pickup and still exploring ways to climb. We will wait until we have some general ideas about the structure of our robot to figure out if we can add ground pickup. The same goes for our climb mechanism, it will most likely depend on how our robot structure turns out. We are prioritizing scoring coral for the time being, and will explore how we can score algae into the processor.
We have decided that our robot won’t be scoring algae into the net by shooting it, at least we won’t be working on a mechanism that does.
Build Season Calendar:
That’s all we have for now, our CAD team will now start working on robot architectures. We will update you soon!
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Robot Updates:
Hey guys, welcome back! Since our last update, we have been busy at work. We have experimented on some Krayon CAD models to help make the decision easier and started our design process. Afterwards, we did some prototyping to ensure the most efficient outcome. Here are some examples of our Krayon CAD models:
Robot Structures:
2 Stage Elevator + Fixed Coral Intake:
2 Stage Elevator + Coral Intake + Ground Algae Intake:
Final Decision:
3 Stage Elevator + Pivoting Coral Intake + Algae Intake :
We got some inspiration from the Penn State Ri3D robot due to how time efficient and compact their design is. We liked that it could drop off the coral while also intaking the algae. We have all agreed that an elevator is the best choice we had for this year’s game. It has always been a priority that we keep our design compact and effective, which is why we decided to work on a 3 stage elevator. As for our intakes, we tested several different prototypes for the coral and algae and have been working on improving those designs. Here are some videos of our prototypes.
Prototypes:
Coral:
You can find the drive link of the videos below:
(prototype videos - Google Drive)
We used 4 inch compliant wheels at different compressions to figure out which one worked best. At first we used 60A compliant wheels but since the coral is very rigid, this didn’t work quite as well. We switched to 35A compliant wheels and increased the compression which produced better results. The switch to the softer wheels also allowed us to intake the coral inclined up to 45 degrees.
Algae:
For our algae intake, we used the 4 inch 60A compliant wheels since the algae has a more compressible structure. We found that a 2 inch compression worked well for the design we had in mind.
That’s it for todays post everyone, we will see you soon with more CAD updates!
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