2023 Charged Up

Week 6 has ended on a high note, and our team has been hard at work continuing the development of our 2023 robot. As our first competition at Hueneme Port Regional draws closer, our team needs all hands on deck in order to maximize our chances of success! The construction of our superstructure is underway. We are currently working on mounting our elevator and 4-bar arm, and the process is going very well. The elevator has already been mounted on the swerve drivetrain, and the 4-bar arm components are in the process of being machined. While the main construction of the robot is going on, our separate subteams are hard at work doing individual subteam tasks. With the robot beginning to be constructed, our programmers have been able to start testing their code. The programming team is currently working on the elevator code and they will soon be able to test it on the elevator. They are also working on starting the automatic charge station balance code, which would allow our robot to balance on the charge station in an instant using a button. The Intake code is complete and the 4-bar arm code has been merged to main. The Scouting team has been modifying our scouting app to make it more efficient and easier to use for [...]

Another week has gone by and our team has continued to make a lot of progress in each field of our robot construction. Week 5 has ended on a very positive note! Our programming team has been working on their code and preparing it to test on our robot. The Vision team has successfully created a working vision system on our classbot and are continuing to clean up the code. The Scouting team is currently working on the Team display and they have created a fully working Match Display. They are also working on a way to receive scouting data without the use of Wifi. Additionally, the Game Piece programming team has merged their code for the elevator and Four Bar subsystems into the main branch. They are continuing to work on revising code based on feedback on general code structure from our mentors and Programming Director. The Mechanical team has been working hard to fabricate parts for our robot. The Machining team has finished making the Battery Bellypan. The team has finished fabricating the rails and are currently working on the hexshafts and Gearbox mounting plates using the CNC router. Though the Machining team is waiting for the Aluminum Stock to arrive and is experiencing minor issues with the CNC router, they have finished machining most of [...]

After last week’s decision to use an angled elevator with a 4 bar arm, a layered intake, and an extending bar, a lot of progress was made across all subteams in their respective areas! With detailed and precise CADs, our angled elevator team opted for continuous rigging over cascade to keep the robot’s center of mass more balanced when extending. As for rigging, they chose to use dyneema rope because it’s strong and light. They decided to use hall effect sensors for the elevator’s position detection: analog sensors for magnet distance and digital sensors or limit switches for stopping. They worked on implementing an energy chain mount, bearing blocks, and mounting it to the drivetrain. They have also been able to finish their CAD and have started making drawing files, deciding that it would be wisest to first manufacture the carriage. Our four bar arm team switched from their original design idea of a linkage 4 bar to a virtual 4 bar. They have finished CADing and are now making drawing files for machinists. Our team has also been able to add all commercial off the shelf parts and mechanisms, such as hardstops, sprockets, fasteners, and etc. So far, our layered intake is successful in intaking cones, but we are still working on cube intake. The cube is [...]

Week 3 was a very decisive week for the whole team. We started off the week with design presentations of our prototypes. We narrowed down our options for our robot. We decided on 5 main designs: The Angled Elevator with 4 bar and layered intake, the Angled Elevator with 4 bar, RI3D grabber and extending wheels orienter, the 4 Bar Lead screw, (“Wheeled”) layered intake with a fixed bar orienter, the 971 Arm, RI3D grabber with extending wheels orienter, and the 971 arm with wheeled Intake and extending wheels orienter. With these designs, we did a team decision matrix where we split into five groups and scored each design based on a couple different criterias. The results of this are the designs with the RI3D Grabber were voted least. The 4 Bar Lead screw, (“Wheeled”) layered intake with a fixed bar orienter and the 971 arm with wheeled Intake and extending wheels orienter were pretty even in terms of votes. The Angled Elevator with 4 bar, layered intake was the clear winner. Our DVC voted and we ended up choosing the angled elevator with a 4 bar arm, a layered intake and a fixed bar orienter. On the mechanical side of the team, the machinists have been working on the belly pan and bumpers of the robot. The [...]

Week two was another successful week with progress across all of the team.  Our prototyping groups continued researching and testing different designs. We are prototyping a variety of designs that can be used to pick up the game pieces of the 2023 FRC Game Charged Up. Our groups consist of a 971 Arm, Extending wheels, Layered Intake with Fixed Bar, screw extender and elevator (Four Bar Arm), Ri3D Grabber, and a Rotate and Extend arm. Extending wheels is a design incorporating an orienter and linear slider and implements wheels to intake the object. The Layered Intake with Fixed Bar uses a bar to reorient the cone in a position that intakes the object with wheels in a layered design. The Ri3D Grabber is able to pick up fallen and vertical cones and cubes in certain angles and uses pneumatics to clasp onto the game piece. Meanwhile, the 971 Arm, Four Bar Arm, and Rotate and Extend arm are still in the progress of CADing. This week, the prototyping groups will present their design to the team so that we can decide the best way for our robot to hold and carry the game pieces. We are planning to determine different combinations of these prototypes and decide which designs work best with others. Moving over to the mechanical section [...]

After a successful last season, Iron Claw Robotics is charged up for the 2023 Charged Up build season! On Saturday, January 7th, the team kicked off the season with much anticipation. The 2023 game is a pick-and-place game with two game pieces, cubes, and cones that robots must deposit on poles and steps. The endgame is a balancing ramp, similar to Rebound Rumble, but somewhat more manageable due to the two pivot points. Top-down view of the control systems components on the belly pan After devising game strategies and brainstorming the capabilities of our robot, power outages cut our first week short across Los Gatos, with a fallen tree cutting off power to Los Gatos High School for three days. This severely altered our schedule, pushing back the finalization of the prototype designs. Once we came back to school, we finished brainstorming designs and selected seven subsystems to prototype over the course of the week. We broke up the subsystems into three categories: arms, orienters, and grabbers. We are working on creating CADs for each arm, and the orienters and grabbers have been laser cut and are being tested.  In terms of the drivetrain, the team selected to go with a swerve as we concluded it will give the team an edge in playing the Charged [...]