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One week out from the Central Valley Regional in Fresno and our team is hard at work putting the finishing touches and final improvements on our robot. After experiencing issues with our bumpers due to heavy impacts, we redesigned our bumpers and billet piece to be much more durable. We also completed production of spares for our shooter, intake, and arm so we can easily swap out parts if needed at competitions. In addition, we fine-tuned our auto paths making a clear selection of working paths, most notably our 5-piece auto, which was a tremendous success this past week. The strategy team looked over matches of high-ranking teams that we will be competing with at CVR and studied their auto paths to improve our own. In addition to efficient autos, the auto team is also making complementary auto paths with other teams (1-3 piece auto), which could be helpful in getting the right alliance members for alliance selection. Significant contributions have also been made to vision. In addition to new camera mounting positions and redesigned camera mounts themselves, we have been working on speaker and amp alignment to increase cycle times.  Having efficient cycle times is important for our success, so our drive team has been practicing hard. They have also been working on avoiding and playing defense, [...]

By attending Silicon Valley Regional last week, our team was given the opportunity to observe and learn from other teams early in the season. After a busy week at competition, our team had a thoughtful debrief to focus on what went well during SVR, as well as how we could improve our robot. In preparation for Central Valley Regional, the strategy team will be deciding the next goals to focus on for robot actions, hardware, and software, keeping in mind our functional requirements. Over the next two weeks, these respective subteams will implement these tasks in order to maximize the abilities of our robot for competition. This week, our machining team has manufactured new spare parts for Vivace. On top of machining, the rest of the mechanical subteam has been hard at work assembling the modular spare parts for Vivace. These subsystems include the intake, shooter, and rotating arm. For the intake, we are working on redesigning the plates, as well as updating the billet piece for durability. Additionally, we also plan on redesigning the bumpers to increase robustness for the intake and mounting the assembled spares onto our off season swerve, Phil. During SVR, we learned that our bumpers were shifting upon impact, caving into the billet piece causing the piece to take damage. In order to [...]

After last week’s success, we have progressed further on our prototypes, succeeding on many fronts. As a recap for week 1, our DVC (Decision Voting Council), decided on a series of mechanisms that we would prototype and test the geometry for before we decide on our full robot design. Those prototypes are:  Fliptake: an intake consisting of two rollers on a pivot, allowing it to flip and outtake a note into another subsystem. Continuous Intake: an intake that brings the note over the bumper into an indexer. 95-Style Shooter: a shooter design where the shooter wheels are vertical and coaxial on 2 axles that vertically compress the note to fire it. Elevator: a one or two-stage climbing mechanism that may also place a note in the trap on the final robot. Flywheel Shooter: a shooter that has two shooter wheels that are horizontally mounted which compress and fire a note. Big Arm: a climbing mechanism that has an arm that winches down onto the chain to climb up. The prototyping groups are making great progress, they are now focused on collecting data to validate their designs against the functional requirements of the robot. For our intakes, the Fliptake and the Continuous Intake, we have discussed many options and ultimately decided to put each through second and third rounds [...]