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So… ok to be fair we were kind of busy

Yeah, I know. I SAID I would be posting more. Yep, that didn’t go as planned. But then again, the “plan” got thrown out a while ago and ended us up where I never thought we would go this year.

Ok, before you say “you don’t have any faith in your team”, let me explain.

At the time of this writing, it is my 19th year as a mentor in FIRST. In that time, my teams have been to finals twice but never won. Some robots have been better than others, and some of the best still lost out in the playoffs, sometimes without even being picked to be in the playoffs. So going into competition this year, I think it was understandable that I was far from expecting what happened. Admittedly, the 2024 is one of the best robots I have been a part of making and the 2024 team is one of the best I have had the privilege of mentoring, but still I never thought it would go the way it did.

We had the usual problems, making things fit, redesigning quickly, abandoning ideas for new ones, then abandoning them for even newer ideas. It was a miracle we got it done before the week 1 event we ended up attending. The usual first regional problems arose, lack of practice, lack of tuning, sensor calibrating between matches. Our first few matches were dreadful, but by the end we had worked out most of the problems and were doing pretty good. We weren’t picked, but understandable with such a poor showing at the beginning. No big deal, this is why we do two regionals whenever possible. We went home and fixed what was broken and further refined and tuned the robot.

Then came LA Regional. From the first practice matches, we could already tell this was not going to be a repeat of our first regional. The robot could score at range, run a much better autonomous, and climb every time. When something broke, we replaced it, when it didn’t behave, we recoded it. All through the competition, the attitude in the pit was very different. No mad scrambles to make it work, now it was routine maintenance and wondering when our next match is. This is a rare state for us, no panic building, just ready for more. Of course a couple major breakdowns happened on the field, mostly due to loose or broken wires. We still ran, but it shut down our shooter. Others were getting their hopes up but I had been down that path of disappointment too many times, and I kept my expectations low. So many good robots had gone this way, I expected to, as usual, walk away from alliance selection to have a leisurely lunch and then start packing.

Until… lunch got a whole lot shorter.

I couldn’t believe when “980” was called by the first seed alliance! The top team at the regional wanted us to come help them win. I was in shock, and apparently so was the rest of the team because there wasn’t a sound from anyone for a good 5 seconds. After coming out of the shocked silence and more than the appropriate amount of screaming, the entire pit crew ra- I mean walked very carefully back to the pits and our robot to begin maintenance again. Immediately, we were in trouble. One of our swerve pods was down. No time to fix, we put on a spare that had been taken off earlier and was not in top shape itself. They almost had to call in a backup but we got it working just in time.

We won that first match, but we weren’t that much help. We took a super hard hit which knocked loose the radio line (we think) disabling us for half the match. We came back on line with enough time to do the endgame climb, but it didn’t work either. After, we found that one of the climbers was bent with no time to repair. The radio wire was replaced along with several other commonly disabling electrical connectors (complete with hot gluing them down that did not sit well with everything my electrical engineering background stood for…) Our driver was given instructions to avoid hits like that again, and to remember that this robot is about speed and evasion, not direct confrontations. He was up to the challenge executing spins as he crossed the field preventing any robot from getting a solid hit on any side and spinning past any defender rolling off them like a wheel. He kept the robot away from attacks and began scoring as fast as he could get across field. We ended up getting one of the highest scores in the regional right before going into finals, not having lost a single playoff match.

Once we got to finals, we knew the team facing us would be tough. They played a lot of defense and drew a lot of fouls from their opponents in the process. Our alliance decided to change tactics. Our shooter was good, but our aiming system was slow so shots took longer than needed. But we were also fast, hard to defend, and has an excellent game piece collector. Rather than shoot what we grabbed, we would shuttle pieces across field to the other two teams so they could use their faster shooters to get even more in and minimize the defense that could be played against them. They could be shooting our piece while we were already running back for another, making our alliance and even quicker scorer than before. Even after winning the first finals match, in the back of my head I couldn’t believe what was happening. I still couldn’t believe when we won the second, finishing on top, winning a regional, something that in 19 years I had never been part of. I didn’t even move right away, I just sat there in the stands with my jaw dropped in disbelief.

So, yeah. We won a regional. My first ever, and the first for the team since 2008. Sorry I wasn’t updating this all throughout the robotics season, but it was for a good cause. Now we have to work out how to get the team to the championships. Those are good problems to have.

…

And I PROMISE I will keep all of you updated about how champs goes. Maybe I will even have time to tell you about our preparations. Will do my best

-Alex
Co-Lead Mentor Team 980 Thunderbots

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No seriously, we do still exist!

So for any of you who follow our blog… Wow! You must really like us because we kind of dropped off the planet for a while. Don’t worry, we will do better from now on.

Meanwhile let me catch you all up from… seriously it was JULY since we posted last??? I had to look it up! Ok so to start off, we did NOT do any off season competitions. It turns out that somehow we missed the deadline for signing up and didn’t know it. We still did our Build Season 2.0 as a practice but the results did not get to compete. And that result? A WORKING SWERVE DRIVE!!!! Well… it WAS working until one of the gears slipped off and jammed a swerve pod. So it hasn’t ACTUALLY worked since August when we had to take them apart to fix them. And what was the sage advice from the manufacturer as to how to keep the gear from slipping off? “Put some glue on it…” Yeah… that’s what we got. And we did it too, as well as built a better drive base while we were at it. So it is ready to test right now, except… well we have been kind of busy as of late. Let me tell you about it. Don’t worry, I’ll be quick. You’re probably already thinking this is too long but hey, this is 4 months of catch up here. So…

In September we rebuilt the swerve Drive base and called it PS2 (Prototype Swervebot 2 not the popular game console) along with learned a new CAD program and prototyped a bunch of telescoping arms.
In October we took our robot to scare- I mean help families choose just the right pumpkin at the Gain FCU pumpkin Patch. We also participated at the Engineering Expo 2023 with team 589 and California State Senator Anthony Portantino to show the community exactly what robotics is all about.
In November we opened our workshop doors and invited the Burbank community and businesses to come meet us and see what we do. (There may have been some time off to eat large amounts of turkey in there too)
And in December we hosted the brand new FIRST Lego League Regional Competition in Burbank! Something we intend to do annually. Then, just this last weekend, our robot was working again, with a bunch of team 980 Santa helpers, helping to collect toys for the Spark of Love Toy Drive put on by the Burbank Fire Department.

Like I said, it’s been a busy 4 months. This week, preseason ends with our traditional family pot luck. I’ll tell you all about that next week along with some thoughts about the past season and the new season coming up way too fast.

So see, we really were here all along, and all the excitement that you missed is nothing compared to what is to come. Stay tuned!

-Alex
Co-Lead mentor

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New website, new projects, new job on the team

If this is your first time here, Welcome! If you have been here before, welcome back! There have been a lot of changes going on in Team 980. Our build space is being completely reorganized and new projects are being worked on. However I will let our team captain handle all of that in her next post because this is about our new (-ish) website and lead mentors.

Let’s start with the website. Underneath it is the same one we have had for years (hacks and all…). But the 980 web design team has been busy changing its look and content to bring it up to date with everything we have been doing and to make important information easier for people to find. It’s not fancy, no animation, no cutesy cartoon mascots, no background pics with text scrolling over them. But all of that just isn’t us. It’s the content that matters. So make sure you catch up on the blogs, check out the team history section, read up on all of our past robots (ok there’s only 1 past robot up there right now but more will come, just keep an eye out in announcements on the main page), mainly look around and see what we have done. We hope you like it.

The other thing is new jobs. The lead mentor position recently opened up and it took 2 mentors to take on a massive job like that. So welcome to your new roles Robin and Alex, Co-Lead mentors of Team 980.
-Team 980 Web Design Team

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There are no words to describe how much we will miss you!

I originally met David Brinza and David Toyne around 2010 when my son visited Team 980 with his Webelos Scout den. I was impressed at how they took the time to talk to the 10-year-olds, answer their questions, and encourage them to pursue their interests in robotics and STEM. My son was doing FIRST LEGO League, so seeing the high school robotics team was pretty inspiring. And I was pretty impressed with them, myself – JPL! Universal Studios! These guys were heavy hitters! Little did I know then how much they would influence the course of our lives!

Toyne and Andrew
Flash forward to January 2013. My son has now aged out of his FLL team and is ready to join “the big team.” To say he was the proverbial “deer in the headlights” would be an understatement. It’s a big step to join a FIRST Robotics Competition team. But Brinza and Toyne had been mentoring Team 980 for a decade by that time, so they knew how to take a motivated rookie and turn him into an engineer. The photo is from my son’s first competition in March 2013 in which he’s working on the robot in the Team 980 pits with David Toyne, listening and watching as Toyne shows him something. It’s such a perfect Mentor/Student image, and one that was repeated so many times over the 2 decades that Brinza and Toyne were Lead and Design Mentors for Team 980. Two skilled, dedicated, caring individuals who inspired so many young engineers to pursue their ambitions.
Andrew winning Dean’s List with the mentors that guided him there. 2017

Thanks to David Brinza, I’ve now been a mentor on Team 980 since 2015. FIRST has become a huge part of my life – mentoring, volunteering and advocating. I’m not an engineer, so this isn’t anything that I ever thought I could do, but just as Brinza and Toyne encouraged so many young engineers, they also encouraged me as a mentor. And the skills that I’ve developed as an FRC mentor I use in all aspects of my life.

Which brings us to June 2023. David Brinza has retired from a 35 year career at NASA/JPL and is relocating out of the area. David Toyne is overseeing an amazing green technology project in Africa. While they remain mentors for Team 980, they will no longer be with us in person on a daily basis, and it falls to me and my co-lead mentor, Alex, to continue the tradition of inspiring the future at Team 980.

I can’t fully express my gratitude for all that Brinza and Toyne brought to Team 980, except to compare my “deer in the headlights” son to the confident, capable Team Captain that he became 5 years later. I speak for the whole team when I say, “Thank you.”
-Robin, Co-Lead Mentor of Team 980

From left to right: Fab Mentor Fred, Business and Outreach Mentor Robin, Controls Menotr Alex, Lead Mentor David Brinza, Design Mentor David Toyne

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Is it already week 2?

Welcome back to the Team 980 blog and thank you for choosing us for all your robotics bloggy needs! We are a little late on getting this one out and that is my fault, grades were due… Since we had a lot of updates from the different subteams and we are already late, we will post them all together in this post.  In the future when grades are not due, each big update will get its own day and only small updates would be posted together like this. So buckle up, pull on the yellow strap (Disneyland reference), and hold on while we go around the buildspace and see what everyone was doing this last week.

– Alex Davis, Chronically late blog and controls mentor

Fabrication

As Week One of build season comes to a close, the Fabrication area of Team 980 ThunderBots is excited to report our accomplishments. We have completed three of our five desired field elements, the Hatch Loading Station and Hab Levels 2 & 3, to assist in prototyping and in creating autonomous code.  Fabrication also prepared the mechanical elements of our practice robot by scrapping the driving base of an older robot, and handed it over to Controls to wire up.

The team has also semi-decided on a articulating arm to pick up and deliver both game pieces so a couple of us were tasked with finding the gear reductions we would need for our arm’s joints. We settled on ratios that would give us high torque but still let us move fast, so changing loads will not affect our cycles.  Here’s to another good week!

– Mateo, Head of Fabrication

Business and Outreach

This week the Business and Outreach team created a timeline for when the various award materials must be completed such as the chairman’s essay, the executive summary, judge presentation booklets, and pit decor. We also discussed acquiring new members for the sub-team to ensure we have enough people to give an exemplary chairman’s presentation.  For week two we plan to begin brainstorming ideas for the theme of our chairman’s essay as well as outline what information we want to include. Additionally, we will begin brainstorming themes for the chairman’s video.

– Ethan, Head of Business and Outreach

Design

After kickoff and the game reveal our design team immediately jumped into action.  We began developing various concepts for this year’s robot and looking at very basic prototypes. At the start of the week, all four Team 980 subteams came together to work on basic designs, each focusing on a certain aspect of the new game.  By deliberating between all of our members, we were able to develop objectives for our robot and a game strategy. As we progressed throughout the week, the design team individually developed more advanced concepts as well as started the 3D assembly of this year’s drivetrain.

On Saturday we once again convened with the team and continued work on the concepts that the design team were able to expand upon. The entire team continued to focus on refining some of the early concepts of game piece pick-up and articulation. Longtime design team member Sea developed a small scale prototype of an articulating arm, while another group led by Robert worked with our fabrication team to make a full-size prototype of a cargo pickup mechanism. Dhruv, Robert and I continued to work in CAD on the frame and drivetrain assemblies.  As we go onto week 2 of the build season we are going to start preliminary designs of the arm and game piece manipulators, as well as develop more concepts for a method of mounting the habitat platforms.

– Sean, Head of Design

Controls

After investigating the changes to the 2019 Control System, the Controls team has been wiring and configuring a practice drive base “borrowed” from the 2017 robot.  As a training exercise, we had all the new controls team members lead robot system board rebuild including both electronics and pneumatics. On Saturday, we successfully got it driving!

– Luke, Head of Controls