Originally posted on ChiefDelphi on Feb 27, 2024: https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/frc-2412-robototes-2024-season-build-thread/448663/14
Open Alliance: A Working Robot
Over mid-winter break we were finally able to catch up a bit and assemble the full robot. We were also able to test it out with our programming!
Mechanical delivers
We thoroughly used mid-winter break, meeting every day of it for nearly the entire day each time (with mech meeting mornings and programming evenings). In exchange for our time, mech was able to deliver a fully-assembled robot.
As foreshadowed in my last post, we did end up increasing the size of our wheels. Our intake was just a bit too low to the ground to effectively intake notes. To do this, we ended up just printing larger TPU tires to fit around our billet wheels.
Low infill percentages make the tires a little squishy in a manner similar to Michelin’s Tweels
We started off mid-winter break away from the shop. With our school closed due to President’s Day, we met at the newly christened Steamnasium, which is an old school district building our district turned into a robotics hub (after advocacy from district teams). Go Bellevue Alliance!!
The Steamnasium a few weeks ago. The field elements are all mostly in place now.
Since we were away from the shop, we weren’t able to make massive progress with the bot mechanically. However, we were able to attach the intake rollers and test them out… at which point we discovered that we had made them too high off the ground for the notes to be affected by them. However, this was a pretty simple fix of just adding spacers to the mounting hardware for intake. Later, for a more permanent fix we simply decreased the diameter of our wheels slightly.
In general, we were able to fully manufacture each part of the robot either before or during the beginning of mid-winter break. However, assembly ended up taking a sizeable chunk of time.
Fixing the launcher to the pivot assembly.
However, by Friday night mech finally had a workable robot to hand over to Programming.
Programming gets the robot
Programming ended up with Friday night and most of Saturday to work with the robot. Wasting no time, they got right to work testing the core features of the robot.
Working from bottom to top, Programming started with intake. With the new wheels and spacers, intake worked quite well. Although worn down notes don’t slide as well on the carpet into the ingestion system, the robot doesn’t need to give much more assistance moving on top of the note for it to reach the index. Unfortunately, we didn’t capture any video of this in action.
Index and feeder systems also worked alright, but we did identify one case where notes can get stuck in the belly pan. This happens when we intake when the launcher is vertical, which is when we have the largest gaps in our rollers.
Before we added an extra bar, this pivot angle would sometimes cause notes to get stuck in the bellypan.
Finally, we tested out the launcher and pivot. These also worked quite well. We were able to make several shots from a few tested distances. For control, for now at least we’re using a combination of manual control using controller joysticks and presets for common positions such as at the subwoofer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4fpbbUsiAY
Video of the launcher making a shot into the speaker
For fun, we decided to launch a note straight up into the air. For reference, we estimate the room of the atrium (where the note is launched in this video), to be about 60 feet high.
At the end of Saturday, we had a bot that we reckon could compete competitively at our week 1 event, Glacier Peak. However, we do still have a week left to work, so we’re very excited to see what improvements we can make to the bot. More updates soon!