Although the FIRST Competition Season was cancelled, we had a lot of fun building the robot. We took a lot of photos along the way and compiled them into a Google photo album.
Team Iron Claw is extremely saddened to announce that we will not be attending any official FRC competitions this season since all FIRST events from here on out have been officially cancelled due to COVID-19 concerns. An official statement from FIRST reads: It is with deep disappointment that I share an update on the immediate suspension of the current FIRST season and the cancellation of both Championship events. Thank you to our sponsors and everyone who supported us this season.
Unfortunately, we have learned that both competitions we were planning to attend, San Francisco Regional (March 19-22) and Silicon Valley Regional (April 1-4), have been indefinitely postponed as a precaution to the spread of COVID-19. Postponing suggests that it will be held in the future, but FIRST has not given out any additional information. We have worked extremely hard on our robot, and there is a possibility that we will participate in a different regional. We'll be providing updates as the situation unfolds.
While we did not meet as often as we wish we could, students got together over our February break for a few days and got as much done as possible! Thus, here is our brief blog post. Our mechanical team has been working very hard to put together the rest of our mechanisms. Our intake, indexer, and shooter have now been successfully mounted. Our climb is assembled but we plan to test it on one of our older robots before attaching it to our current one. Our programmers have started rigorous work on our code and we hope to do more work on the sensors we plan to mount. That being said, we have a few finishing touches to do on our electrical board. Our entire superstructure is able to be flipped up, giving our team easy access to the bellypan where all of our components are. That being said, we have begun connecting the motors on our superstructure to our electrical board below. Since the wires must be longer to compensate for the flip up, we are held up because we have run out of wires. Nevertheless, we are excited to hand over a complete robot to our programmers soon, as we intend to finish by March 6. We wish everyone else a productive eighth week! [...]
Continuing our blog post from last week, we have more to say on the programming aspect of our team. Separate from the robot itself, some members have worked on Autodesk Synthesis in hopes of simulating our robot on a CAD model of the field without having our physical robot up and running. While they were able to generate the field, Synthesis proved to be difficult to work with and we hope to make more advancements soon. Additionally, we have begun work on our scouting app for this season and it will be similar to the one we used last year. In regards to the robot itself, our programmers have tested our color sensor on our rotating indexer (see previous blog posts for more details on this mechanism). The sensor was able to detect yellow and blue through the polycarb used on the mechanism and could determine if each spot was empty or contained a ball. Students were also able to view how many balls were stored and the data could be viewed on a shuffleboard. Our mechanical teams made progress as well. Machining is complete! This was also thanks to the machinists who did the CAM for all of our CNC parts and the students who worked on our shopbot. Now, all of our parts are organized and have [...]
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 [...]
To begin, our primary focus during the week was our CAD finalization and tuning of our drivetrain. We considered our overall packaging and how each of our mechanisms would fit together. We had to account for the amount of space we had available on our drivetrain, while keeping the accessibility of the electrical board in mind. We settled on a large billet to attach all of our mechanisms to, which would be capable of flipping out in order to service electrical components. From there, we had to decide how we wanted to climb and where it would be on the robot. We designed a telescoping arm with two strings in order to hook our robot onto the bar and lift ourselves with a winch. We tried to limit how much space it took on the robot to account for the size of our indexer and intake. We finished up the drivetrain assembly, checked our electrical board, and then finished installing pneumatic components. Afterwards, some of our mechanical team and programming team began drivetrain testing. We discovered an issue with spacing in our gearboxes, but it was soon resolved and testing continued. As we begin week four, we hope to begin machining the parts for our final mechanisms and begin assembly on the superstructures of our robot. [...]
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 [...]
We had a great start to the 2020 build season. On kickoff, some of our members headed to Pioneer High to watch the stream and get our kit of parts. Once we got the entire team at our classroom, we went over the release video and game pieces before hanging out and eating some food. After, students had some time to read the game manual before jumping right into strategy discussion. Compared to last year’s game, Deep Space, Infinite Recharge seemed more daunting, since there seemed to be more complexity in regards to the overall game concept. This year, there are three stages in a match. Each stage, teams have to meet prerequisites before being able to start the next stage. Because of this emphasis on the game pieces and the importance of the endgame (another climb), we had to consider many different options in regards to general strategy and what kinds of mechanisms we wanted to design. We spent the first two days focusing and deciding on strategy rather than design. Once we came to a decision with the votes of our DVC (Design Voting Council), we were able to move onto design brainstorming. We settled on prioritizing the designing of a climb and a shooter for the game pieces. While a majority of our team came [...]