FRC 238 Bits and Bytes: Build Season Weeks 4 & 5

2019 FRC 238 Bits and Bytes:

Build Season Week 4 & 5

We’ve been working diligently on robot building and award writing, so our efforts have been focused on those tasks due to our tight schedule recently. Therefore, this newsletters describes what has been going on the past two weeks.

Technical Division

CAD

The past two weeks, our CAD team has been hard at work finalizing drawings of the robot and designing our intake. We have also been making travelers, which are step-by-step instructions for building the parts, and printing them out for our Mechanical subteam to start machining.

We are well on our way to finishing the travelers and drawings for the elevator. The intake is nearing design completion. This year, we decided to do a four bar lifting mechanism which is also being finalized this week. The goal is to keep the machines running and making parts.

We are learning a new CAD system this year. While it is helpful, it slows down the CAD process. One positive part of this new system is that we can work on CAD wherever there is internet connection. This allows us to continue working even when we are not at meetings.

Mechanical

Over the past two weeks, we have been on constructing parts for both the practice and competition robots. The Mechanical and Electrical subteams have been busy getting the drive train for the practice robot up and running. Our team has also been manufacturing parts for the elevators and will start working on the intake system soon. Assembly of our competition robot will also begin shortly as we have received powder-coated parts for the drive train. Additionally, we cut out hex shafts to the required size and deburred them.

Currently there isn’t much that requires improvement in our fabrication process, but that status could change throughout the course of the season. We have a system that allows us to check on fabricated pieces each step of the way to ensure they are being completed correctly.

We plan to continue building up our robot as efficiently as possible as Stop Build Day is approaching fast.

Electrical

We started on our electrical board these past two weeks, attaching basic components like the power distribution panel, voltage regulator modulator, and pneumatic control modulator. These parts are necessary to making our robot functional. Next, we mounted on the Talon SRX, which controls the motors. Once that was done, we started wiring for power from the power distribution panel to the rest of the components.

In the next week, we plan to continue working on our competition electrical board and collaborating with Software to make our electrical contract. This document is a reference of which components are wired each other. This provides a reference so all members of Electrical and Software can know and easily maintain the robot.

We hope to make our electrical board easy to repair, neat, and more accessible than in past years.

Software

The Software subteam has been working on coding positions for the elevator and angles on the wrist. This lets the robot use the elevator to reach level three on the rocket, and the wrist to pick up cargo and panels.

In the near future we plan to tune the robot and coding and verify wireless access, so the robot can run without any wires which is important for a competition robot.

Community Division

Chairman's Award

In week four, we worked on including stories from alumni, inserting statistics from outreach events, and making sure we had an eloquent submission that accurately represented our team’s dedication to the community. The deadline for Chairman’s was during week five and our Chairman’s team submitted February 6, one day before the deadline. We are all very proud of our submission.

FTC State Championship

Even though we are hard at work with build season, we still volunteer and interact with the community. On February 1st, a few students assisted with set-up for the FTC NH State Championship. The following day at the competition, we helped the Southside robotics team by assisting them with Java and tuning their robot to help pickup cubes and spheres. Also, we helped them with autonomous mode. A group of 238 students demonstrated our 2017 robot to the FTC students at this event. We talked to them about being on a FRC team and about the robot.

Cleaning Safety Glasses

During build season, we volunteered at FIRST Headquarters to clean safety glasses. The glasses needed to be cleaned in preparation for the upcoming competition season where they get sent out to all FRC events. We divided into two groups, one for sorting glasses and one for cleaning them. Once the glasses were sorted, the sorting group helped clean the glasses.