Katie Guo

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 [...]

Since last week, prototyping has been finalized along with the CAD of our superstructures. We are now moving onto finalizing as much of the entire robot CAD as we can. We had issues involving the general packaging of all of our components, but a few tweaks to some positioning has solved these conflicts. Since the CAD process is pretty much complete, our CAD team has continued making part drawings for our manual machinists to make using either a mill or a lathe. To maximize our efficiency and hone in on the most crucial parts to machine, we created a parts-to-machine list that sorts all of our manual parts by subsystem. We also kept to our organization system, ensuring no duplicate or lost parts. On top of our leaps in machining progress, we are excited to begin some of our assembly! While we have not finished the parts on our parts-to-machine list, we have given as much as we could to our assembly team in hopes that we will be able to test mechanisms separate from the entire robot.  Our programmers have done a lot of work this week as well. We have tested our shooter and worked on adjusting motors and speeds. In regards to autonomous, we have compiled a list of tasks we hope to do during [...]

Week three was centered around prototyping, much like week two. To begin, we had two main indexing prototypes. One was shaped like a C, dubbed the reverse scorpion. Balls travel along a belt before being brought to a shooter. In the photo, our single flywheel shooter is pictured.  The second indexing design was a rotating magazine of game pieces. Students were inspired by videos from other teams, one of which this prototype was directly inspired by. A rotating base brings balls to a spinning wheel in order to get the balls to eject into the shooter.  By the end of the week, our DVC (Design Voting Council) decided on furthering the rotating indexing mechanism rather than the C indexer. The reasoning behind this was the issue with height. Since we had already decided on a shorter robot, the C indexer posed a disadvantage in regards to height, even though both designs were comparable in their vertical footprints. Students thought that the rotating indexer could be more easily shortened, while shortening the C indexer would affect the compression of the balls. The C indexer prototype was also shown to struggle with manipulating five balls, while the rotating indexer did not have the same issue.  The laser cutter is still at work! Since we are in [...]

This week, we continued with prototyping by splitting into three main groups: indexing, shooter, and intake. For indexing, or ball manipulation inside the robot, we decided to CAD and prototype the c-index as well as a spiraling prototype. Furthermore, the shooter group prototyped a single-flywheel shooter, and they are making great progress on improving the precision and accuracy of it. They have started calculating the optimal angle and velocity at which to shoot the ball in regards to the outer port. The shooter group will also be prototyping a double flywheel shooter to see how it compares to the single flywheel. The intake group was also hard at work exploring different variations of a rolly grabber. Although we haven’t finished all the prototypes and finalized our design, we made some excellent progress this week and we hope to decide on a design next week. In addition, we finished assembling the chassis of our robot, the foundation for all of our mechanisms. We decided on a smaller size robot this year, being 26”by 30”, compared to last years’ 30” by 30” chassis. We believe that this smaller design will be beneficial during matches due to the fact that we can fit under the Control Panel. We decided to make a shorter, smaller robot because we [...]