Offseason Robot Development

My contribution on the various offseason projects were more spread out and minimal in terms of hands-on work. Rather, I tried to teach people how to contribute to these robots by introducing them to things like electrical concepts, etc.

Drum Bot

Define

• • This robot is based off of many of the "dumper" designs that we saw in season, ones that have a shooter that is multiple balls wide and enables very high BPS.

  • This is one of the two prominent archetypes of robots this year: turret or drum. For practice, we will be building a drum

Implementation

My primary contribution is on the intake testing. I helped assemble the intake, including the roller hubs onto the polycarb tubes. One of the challenges faced was tolerancing - due to various printing issues, a bunch of roller hubs were printed too small to fit hex shaft. I learned to use the broach to fix this, but it was deemed inefficient to do on all the hubs. Regardless, we were able to collect data from multiple set screws and compressions to determine our final intake compression.

Pick and Place Bot

Define

• • This is a robot that is intended to be used as practice for pick and place games. It will include common mechanisms, like an elevator and end effector

  • It will use the older drivebase from past seasons and should be easily manuverable for testing in the first part of the actual season.

Implementation

I assisted in the electrical work of this robot. I assisted Arden in placing all of the components on the robot, as well as wire management. Through this, he learned how to use the ferrule and crimp tools, as well as the general robot control structure.

Due to difficulty in sourcing the swerve modules, a lot of these modules were hodgepodged together from older parts in a bin. We were able to create 4 complete swerve modules. However, one of the modules ended up being a different version - it utilized #8/32 screws instead of the standard #10/32. This posed significant difficulty as we did not have enough screws long enough. Additionaly, we used falcons for the drive motors, and nearly ran out of pinions for the falcon spline. Despite this, all of the modules were fully assembled and verified. Next steps are to code the swerve modules.

Main Season Debugging/Improvements

One of the biggest issues faced were issues with the CANbus on this robot intermittently connecting and disconnecting. This was resolved by moving the turret encoder and motor onto an individual loop. We're still not sure why this was causing disconnects, but we suspect the higher communication rate of CAN FD was causing issues with the CANcoder and maybe its soldering job. After all of this was completed, the robot was working and ready to bring to offseasons

The next project on the main season robot will be to assemble the intake on.