Sunday, June 21, 2026

Open Alliance: Manufacturing and Assembly

Originally posted on ChiefDelphi on Feb 20, 2024: https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/frc-2412-robototes-2024-season-build-thread/448663/13


This post was written on Friday the 16th

This past week has been hyper-focused on manufacturing, assembly, and general preparation for robot testing.

Mechanical Work

Mech has been working to catch up to meet the robot deadline but has been set back by assembly errors and some issues regarding organization. Nevertheless, Mech has been making some serious progress.

It drives!


Early in the week we assembled our drivebase and tested it out. We were extremely pleased by the bot’s speed. We’re running a 5.4:1 drive motor gear ratio which comes out to a calculated free-speed of 18.9 feet per second with our Kraken motors. We’re also running 3d printed TPU wheels to improve grip and we’re considering increasing our wheel diameter to improve some aspects of our intake design. Overall, it runs well and we’re quite happy with it.

Index and Intake Assembly


We’ve prioritized our intake and index for assembly over our launcher. Our 3d printed belt sprockets double as spacers in this design, minimizing assembly time. Or, that was the idea, but an error in sizing with the first iteration of the sprockets caused a delay in assembly. Regardless, we’re well on our way to functioning intake and index by this point

Pivot Plates
















Our Omio CNC has been super busy this past week cutting both aluminum and polycarb plates. Here’s a nice photo of some cut aluminum plates we’re using for our pivot this year.

Programming Prepping

Programming has spent the week finalizing robot code and adding additional functionality anticipating issues during robot testing. For one, we’re adding diagnostic commands to each of our subsystems. Running these commands tests all functions of the subsystem. Once Mech hands over the robot, we should be able to power through each these diagnostic commands and figure out quickly what needs to be fixed.

As mentioned in my last post, we’ve also been focused on adding logging and we hope this will also speed up our testing of the robot. Generally, with mechanical delays adding up, programming is expecting to have its timeline shortened, so we’re trying to prepare for that possibility.

Finally, our fully integrated launching command has also been implemented. We use a vision-enhanced robot pose to calculate the robot’s yaw angle to to the speaker, then use PID control to rotate the robot to that angle. For launcher angle and RPM, we use an interpolating tree map with data interpreted from a CSV file. Once the robot is aligned to the speaker and the launcher is up to its target RPM, the drive controller vibrates to signal to the driver that the robot is ready to launch. We used a very similar setup two years ago for Rapid React and it worked well, so we’re hoping for good results this year as well.

As for the general mood on programming this past week… well, there’s been a lot of references to one of our Instagram reels we posted a few weeks back.


That’s about all for now! I’ll have more updates soon as next week is Midwinter break for us (aka next week is all robotics).