Monthly Archives: January 2022

We had a lot of fun this week here at Team 972! We’ve made a final decision on our cargo mechanism this Friday. All of this was powered by our prototyping teams making some incredible progress, with multiple designs being rapidly tested and iterated. At the beginning of the week, we had narrowed down our cargo mechanism to either two designs: either an s-shooter with an over-the-bumper intake or an arm, which would function both as an intake and an outtake. CAD for both of these options was made, and after examining the pros and cons of each, the team put it to a vote on Friday. We’re going to have an arm this year!   On the machining side of things, we ran into a few hiccups. Both our drivetrain rails and our electrical board turned out to have to be re-machined. Our incredible machining team worked overtime this week, and we’ll have our drivetrain fully assembled by Sunday at the latest. The CAD team is also hard at work integrating all of our final designs, and the programmers are experimenting with Limelight vision on our robot, with exciting results.  Now that our robot design has been decided, the team is revving up into overdrive for the next week, [...]

And we’re back for Week 2 of Build Season! It was an exciting week, full of new ideas. Of course, we enjoyed the snacks as well. We began the week on Saturday, January 15, with a full day of prototyping. For prototyping, we split into many groups, with one of two focuses -- climbing in the Hangar or shooting/depositing into the Lower Hub. Our philosophy was “KISS: Keep It Simple Silly”. The week ended on Friday, January 21 with a design review! The groups worked very hard on diverse and unique ideas. One design was an indexer + C-Shooter, which was able to consistently shoot over 4 feet. Another design was the Yanis Claw, which has a consistent intake and can shoot over 4 feet. Fittingly, it was shaped almost like the letter ‘Y’. For climbing, the Pranav Climb was demonstrated, which can integrate with a claw and doesn’t need to switch off but has many moving parts. There was also the Dante Climb, which has fewer moving parts but the arm has to switch off. Other than that, the electrical board CAD has been more or less laid out, progress is being made on the drivetrain, gearbox, and bumpers, and we worked on configuring limelight for vision. We've yet to finalize our design, but we've significantly narrowed down [...]

After 2 years without attending any competitions, Team Iron Claw is finally back for a proper FRC build season!  On Saturday, January 8th, we gathered in the robotics classroom—with masks of course—to watch the FRC Kickoff Twitch Stream, expressing amusement at the blatant Ford advertising and surprise at the fact that human players can score during auto by throwing game pieces into the goal.  The 2020 FRC game, Rapid React, consists of two main components: depositing cargo (oversized tennis balls) into the high or low “hub” and climbing the rungs in the hangar (similar to a set of monkey bars). And as mentioned, human players can score by throwing cargo into the hub during the autonomous period. Compared to 2019 and 2020, this year’s game is significantly simpler, allowing us to hopefully spend more time refining mechanisms and testing our programs.  Over the next few days, we split into smaller groups to discuss game strategy and potential robot designs before reconvening and deciding on the general direction we want to take: prioritizing consistency and reliability over complexity. On Friday, we once again split into smaller teams to begin prototyping the designs we agreed on, work on the electrical board, and program basic drive code. We are a little behind schedule, but by next Friday, all designs should be [...]