2024 Crescendo

Season Summary

Crescendo was fast paced hard hitting. Our robot, Sonic, left it all on the field. Sonic suffered 2 concussions, left a few parts on the ground, and required some repairs between matches. Our skillful drive team and pit crew kept Sonic going and competing. We finished the season with a record of 6-3 placing us 26th out of 63 teams. Overall, it was a great season, everyone on the team learned a lot about designing, building, and repairing robots; but more importantly, they learned how to do hard things.

Kickoff - January 6th

The team is excited to learn about the challenges presented by this year's game. It all begins on the first Saturday of the new year. We hope to keep you all updated on our progress throughout the season. So stop by to see how things are going. We have been working on our CAD a little bit before the season started. You can take a look at it here (requires an OnShape account).


Game Manual Link

Timeline/Orders

First Meeting!

Strategy Discussion Resources:

View from right driver's station

View from center driver's station

View from left Driver's station

Sight-lines of source from the driver's stations. Also notable that it is nearly impossible to view the speaker opening from the driver's station.

Robot in 3 days Unqualified Quokkas

Robot in 3 days - Zoukeepers

Robot in 3 days - Penn State

Open Alliance - The Grasshoppers

Open Alliance - Spectrum 3847

Build Update - Week 2

The image shows the order and components necessary for the shooter prototype. Note that the spacers above the pulley are not shown, but will be necessary to avoid binding with the bearing. May only be 1/16" thick. The piece from last years drivetrain is shown with 0.5" spacers, 1" bolts will be necessary to connect the top plate to the rest of the apparatus.


Also Note that only the front portions of the plates will be present in the prototype. We will have to evaluate the necessity of a metal strap crossing the gap to provide additional support.

Shooter Prototyping

On Saturday we finally got our Speaker mock up built, which allowed us to test out our shooter prototype. The results of this prototyping demonstrated that our current mechanism was too inconsistent to provide reliable measures of its shooting capacity. There were likely several reasons for this inconsistency:

Based on these results we elected to redesign the shooter prototype to fit on one board, using a direct drive of the wheels vs. the previous prototype that used a belt drive of coupled wheels. It may be possible using last years drivetrain sidewall and a spacer to test the 2.5" spacing of the CAD design. Other things that will be important are:

The delay will likely allow ordered 9 mm belts to arrive to allow us to use smaller belts on the shafts.


The final product. They have issues maintaining their shape, but shoot very well. They are a little stiff for the intake, but provide a good stress test. They have dramatically reduced our production of orange dust, now we make grey dust.

Note Damage

During our shooter prototyping we learned what many teams have been reporting, the Notes are pretty fragile. This is a problem as there is a worldwide shortage of Notes and we only have one. We listed them as our highest priority on First Choice, but did not receive any. We are not alone in this dilemma, there is a whole Chief Delphi thread about trying to find new approaches. 

On approach was to take some pipe insulation with an outer diameter (OD) of 2". The main complaint about this is that they are way too light. A quick search on the HomeDepot site finds that 3/4" self seal foam insulation has an OD of 1.98"; not too bad for our needs. However, a 72" piece only weighs 0.132 lb, which is ≈ 60 grams. This is 0.83 grams per inch. The note with an average diameter of 12 inches has a circumference of π*d = π * 12 = 37.7", which weighs about 31g. According to the Game Manual™ the Note weighs in at 235g. So the pipe insulation is some 200 g less than the official game piece. 

So, how to add weight? Our pipe insulation has a nice central core, it occurred to me that this might be a good place to hide some of that needed weight. Although it will need to be uniformly distributed if we are going to try and use it to shoot. So we need something with an OD of ≈ 3/4" and a weight of about 5 g/inch. So it turns out that 25' of heavy duty garden hoses with an outer diameter of 5/8" weighs ≈ 3.7 lbs, which comes out to about 5g/inch. So we are going to try and build our own Notes. I already have the pipe insulation and the Garden hose (which oddly is not in stock) will be here at the end of the week.

Getting Picked

One of our goals this year is to play in the elimination round. The most likely way this is going to happen is if another team picks us to join their alliance. To that end I found the following to describe what highly accomplished teams (teams 111 and 112) are looking for in their picks.


1st Pick Priorities:

1a) Cycles in Auto + Location: Compatibility (in terms of starting location) high scoring autos are going to be especially important this year. The limited number of notes in the center of the field are going to be essential for maximizing auto scoring and having a partner that can capitalize on them is something we value greatly.

1b) Cycles in Teleop: We expect a majority of the scoring to be done by the alliance captain and its first-round pick. Because of this, we need a second robot that can cycle quickly to maximize our number of amplified cycles.

2a) Speaker Accuracy: With amplified scoring being as important as it is, having a partner that can hit speaker shots reliably makes a big difference in our total point output.

2b) Citrus Rankings, the metric we use to measure driver skill. Citrus rankings often serve as a tiebreaker between two teams that have similar scoring output. Citrus rankings generally reflect a team’s game sense and ability to make split-second decisions.

2nd Pick Priorities: