Monthly Archives: March 2025

             Returning from the SAC regional, the team made notes to get ready for the next competition, the East Bay Regional (EBR).              The team met for a competition debrief in the beginning, which included discussion of competition performance, robot improvements, and logistical improvements for the next competition. We realized that driver practice and tuning auto routines would be the main focus of weeks 4 and 5.              Another meeting on Friday, the team began fixing a few minor flaws in each subsystem. Per the competition debrief, we decided to replace a MaxComposite plate for aluminum on the outtake. Along with the outtake, the team had agreed upon improvements to the intake, gearing the first roller faster to allow the driver to intake coral at higher speeds, and adding a larger wheel to the center roller to better vector the coral in its horizontal orientation.              The team additionally worked on improving the energy chain on the elevator, as it had previously caught on the hard stop, which prevents the outtake from fully stowing. Furthermore, the software team has been working on speeding up all the movements of the elevator and wrist, as well as tuning the vision alignment [...]

On Monday, the team made significant progress in assembling key parts of the robot. With our new designs coming together, we focused on refining vision alignment by retesting the angle and direction of the camera for auto on the old robot, ensuring it properly detected AprilTags for more precise movement. Meanwhile, our driver continued practicing, further improving his skills to maximize our robot’s performance on the field. The control systems team worked on crimping the e-chain. Additionally, we finished assembling our third elevator of the season. We also had many students in the classroom building spare subsystems for Vantage and disassembling subsystems from the older iteration for spare parts. They labeled them and packed them into our pit and trailer. At the end of the day, we finished wiring and tested the new coral and algae scoring mechanism on our field, running a few cycles to check for reliability. We also worked on organizing the pit, making sure everything had a designated spot to make setup easier at competition. We checked our packing list multiple times to ensure we had all necessary tools and backup parts. Once everything was prepared, we loaded up our trailer and sent it off to the competition. We also posted our robot teaser, which was exciting to finally share after all the work that [...]

Preparing for Sacramento, we've upgraded our robot and strategy based on Pinnacles insights. Here's our progress. After lots of hard work over the past week preparing for and attending Pinnacles Regional, we gathered together on Wednesday to debrief about our performance at the competition. During our time together, we split up into three groups in order to evaluate the aspects of our performance - the pit team, strategy team, and scouting team. For the pit, everyone agreed that our indexer was our weakest subsystem due to the 50% jam rate, even though we got lucky and it performed closer to a 95% rate at Pinnacles, we wanted to learn from our mistakes and continuously improve the robot. We also rewatched all our matches from Pinnacles, and compared our scouting data and saw that our outtake was outtaking the coral much faster than we needed at the angel of our outtake, so we redesigned it with the help of the strategy team and our driver Arman who did a phmonel job at Pinnacles. Lastly, the scouting team has undergone many big decisions and renovations as well, such as an automatically selected ‘Leave’ and an alert to remind scouters to click from auto to teleop, this is allowing us to improve the accuracy of our data. We are also trying to [...]

Leading up to the event, our team was in full-on work mode, focusing on three key areas: refining our autonomous routines, perfecting our coral scoring, and ensuring our climb was rock-solid. Our programming team worked tirelessly to get our auto consistently hitting Level 4 during practice, while the mechanical and design teams collaborated with the drive team to fine-tune our climb along with the different communicative elements of our PS5 controller. Friday was all about practice matches. Our auto performed somewhat consistently, hitting Level 4 and giving us a strong head start in every game. Even though our vision system wasn’t fully operational, our driver delivered an outstanding performance on the field. And our climb is currently 8th in the world. Thanks James! (Our human player was the main designer behind it). It worked flawlessly every match, securing crucial endgame points. Seeing all our hard work pay off was an incredible feeling. Saturday: Quals and Quick Fixes Saturday’s qualification matches brought intense competition. We noticed an issue with our coral intake and outtake system—corals would sometimes slip or drop during the switch from auto to teleop. We also noticed that the angle on outtake wasn’t working well for L4, messing with our auto and teleop cycles. Fortunately, our new scouting app and video reviews helped us quickly identify the [...]

             This week, as we near the end of our build season, we had to commit to get our robot done in time and done well. We started the week with a friendly visit from two great teams: Quixilver and Goldstrikers. We discussed robot design with them, figuring out which methods worked for the other teams.   We also had a lot of improvements to make on our own robot. Our robot was a little overweight, so we needed to figure out how to add some weight reduction. We changed our plates to be thinner and gave the belly pan some grates. This resulted in a mad sprint to machine and assemble our robot, which means we now have three competition drive trains! An Alpha bot, Beta bot, and our final robot, named Vantage!              We began to remake the robot, with the overweight one being used for driver practice as the new one continues to get built. This helped our weight problem tremendously, and we should be underweight now.             Furthermore, we had a lot of subsystem changes. For our outtake, we shortened the bottom plate and then bent it so the coral would be deposited from the indexer more smoothly.       [...]