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).
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 U of MN
Robot in 3 days Unqualified Quokkas
Robot in 3 days - Zoukeepers
Robot in 3 days - Cranberry Alarm
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:
The Note was coming out at highly variable angles, likely resulting from interacting with the shooting wheels in different ways.
This may be caused by the wheels not being symmetrically placed in the shooter, meaning that the bottom of the Note may be moving faster than the top.
The rear wheel of the shooter is passed through two pieces of wood that are not perfectly aligned, leading to some concerns about the quality of the contact.
The height of the shooter space may also be too great and allowing the Note to move too much. Our CAD is expecting to use 2.5", while our prototype is 3.5" tall.
The current wooden sides make is very difficult to mount the prototype shooter in any repeatable manner. This makes defining the optimum shooting angle and consistent loading of the Note very difficult.
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:
Placing a spacer below the wheel within the shooter to raise the center of the wheel to match the center of the Note.
Cutting shafts to the proper length to allow tension to be applied to keep the bearings in place.
The old drivetrain part can be used to mount prototype in a secure fashion.
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:
Robot Doesn’t Break Down: We need our third robot to be dependable. Regardless of how your first two robots do, losing 5 points/amplified period and losing endgame points makes it incredibly difficult to win a match.
Citrus Rankings: We value game sense and ability to work well in an alliance higher for our second pick. The ability to play situational defense and make smart decisions may seem like small contributions, but can have a massive impact on the outcome of a match.
Speaker Cycles: Our second pick being able to score once during an amplified period makes scoring increase dramatically. Doing it this way takes stress off of the other two teams as one is allowed to start working towards a cycle in the amp.
Amp cycles: While nice to have, our scouting sheets have indicated that our third robot does NOT NEED to be able to score into the amp.