2022-2023 Robot Progress
January 7th: Kickoff day
We meet at Greece Arcadia High School to watch Kickoff together. Before the game was revealed, we theorize what the game for this year is gonna be based on previous trailers that we've seen. We discussed about the gameplay when we're watching it. Then we dig deep in the manual to go through all the rules and have us memorize all the new and important rules for this year.
Week 1
We put great stress into the fact that we would not start working on designs. We got together to discuss our ideas for strategy instead. Everyone brainstormed their ideas and then shared out with other students. We will vote for the goal we are aiming this year and what we want our robot to do. Then sketched out what we want the robot to look like this and shared them out with the whole team. We will list the pro and cons of each other's sketch.
Week 2
This week, CAD mostly stood for Cardboard-Aided Design. We had many sheets of cardboard that people used to make different prototypes . Some people made moving parts, which helped to accurately convey the use of the possible intake.
Towards the end of the week, we decided to work with the Everybot design. Even though we brainstormed intake, we still kept our sketches for a possible intake.
Week 3
We started CAD out the Everybot, which we liked, but needed a few changes like changing the superstructure to match our 26 in. by 26 in. drive train. These changes meant that we had to add tubing to make the center of gravity more balanced.
Mechanical team started building the swerve drive with electrical team wiring it and putting the belly pan at the bottom of the robot to hold RoboRIO and PDH in the middle, with everything off to the side.
Week 4
CAD continued on modifying the Everybot Design. Mechanical team finished building the swerve drive chassis. Our electrical team was brainstorming about the layout of the board and battery mount and ended up with the RoboRIO and the battery in the middle, for programming’s sake, and the PDH off to the side with 5 Spark Maxes. On the other side, there are Spark Maxes on a DIN rail.
Week 5
Mechanical team finished assemble the structure and the intake on the robot. We installed the chain system on the robot so that our intake can work. We drilled more holes on the robot for electrical team to wire the robot easier. Electrical team also installed the electrical board and plan out the wire path. CAD team started extend the length of the intake in the drawing and create a custom mount for programming team, they also sketched a 2D side of the robot.
We have a finished robot! This is the earliest that we have ever had a robot, and we are so excited to work with it in the next few days.
Week 6
Our electrical team started putting Anderson's on the new Spark Max's. We also put the din rail mount on the robot and attached the limelight as well. Programming team improved auto leveling command onto the charge station; they adjusted some value for Path Planner drive; soft limits are added for the arms to prevent it from overextending in both direction; add a command to stop the robot when it started to unbalance. We built the nodes for cube and cone so that our programming can test their code and the drive can start practice driving. CAD team started creating ground intake and finished distance sensor mount. We had a chance to practice driving our robot at the warehouse to see what our cycle look like. Video about our practice is here.
Week 7
We need to disassemble the robot for our electrical team can trim off any wire extension. CAD team put the ground intake on drive train and started drawing the piano hinge, belly pan and a new limelight sensor mount. CAD team also modify a little bit to prevent slop. Then Mechanical and CAD team put the encoder on the robot.
we arrived at Penfield High School to have practice matches against 10 other teams. We took on many rounds and often played back to back matches. We practiced our different auto paths and docking and engaging on a Charge Station that has a similar texture to the fiberglass that will be at the actual competition.
Week 8
CAD team almost finish CAD out our ground intake and started creating the Robot Anatomy, The Robot Anatomy was a project similar to a Technical Notebook, but would also be able to help new team members understand the different components of the robot. We were worried that we would be caught by our chains, so we changed our chains from the outside to the inside. Our electrical team was planning out the wiring path of the ground intake.
Week 9
We added the chain guard to our robot to prevent our intake to get caught in our chain.
We also finished making our ground intake! The ground intake picks up cube and feed them to our main intake. Our ground intake has two in-tube bag motors attaches to 9:1 ratio on versaplanetary gear boxes.
