Inspiring The Future
Today marks the end of our first week of the new season! In these seven(-ish) days since kickoff, we have made good progress on fabricating field elements, in addition to conceptualizing a robot based on our criterion. We have also been prototyping and testing scoring mechanisms to see which would be best for competition use. All in all, we were able to get a lot done this week; hopefully, with enough sleep and coffee, we can keep it up :D.
Saturday, Jan 4 introduces the 2020 FRC Game: Infinite Recharge to the entire FRC community via Webcast of the event in New Hampshire found here:
https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc/kickoff
Here’s a link to pre-kickoff game information:
https://info.firstinspires.org/infinite-recharge
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Several Team 980 members will attend the local Kickoff event at High Tech High – LA early Saturday morning (7:00 am). We will view the webcast live and retrieve our Kit-of-Parts
Our Kickoff event is in the Team 980 Robotics Lab from 10 am until 4 pm this Sat. Jan. 4.
We will commence weekday evening meetings (Mon-Thur, 5 pm – 8:30 pm) on Mon. Jan 6, along with Saturday meetings (10 am – 4 pm).
Team 980 events are published in our Google calendar:
Team 980 Calendar
Robin Dorfman, Team 980’s Outreach/Business mentor, was selected as the Woodie Flowers Finalist Award winner at the Aerospace Valley Regional on April 6, 2019. Robin was selected by a FIRST committee of prior Woodie Flowers Award winners based on a essay submitted by Team 980 students. The essay cited Robin’s passion in having our students spread the mission of FIRST across “Thunder Valley” – the footprint of Team 980 across the northern Los Angeles area. She worked with students to develop and showcase effective Chairman’s, Engineering Inspiration and Entrepreneurship award presentations at Regional Events. Robin joins three other mentors in receiving Woodie Flowers Finalist Awards: Alex Davis (2018), David Toyne (2016) and lead mentor David Brinza (2013).
Our mechanical design team presented SolidWorks renderings of the entire robot, including motion studies which show we can stow and reach the top cargo opening with our 3-jointed arm. Design details for the worm-gear drives (shoulder, elbow, wrist) were illustrated, with fabrication approach discussed. The end effector design was also presented and is rather mature. We intend to build our first test model this week. Our drive assembly and chassis is already in fabrication, with the layout of electronics in the available space in work. Controls walked through our velocity-control and possible autonomous modes – great progress there!
We talked about ruggedness, simplicity and mass of the robot, particularly for the arm assembly. We plan to drive the robot hard (right up to the end game, where we’ll fly unto level 2). We have some concepts for mounting the mast of the arm to the robot chassis which will absorb energy and would like students to brainstorm their own concepts early this week.
We’re on the right path to build a good robot – let’s keep up the pace and start testing our competition robot in two weeks!
– David Brinza, Lead Mentor
The team made great progress the past few days! Arm concept has matured, drivetrain/chassis is in fabrication, controls team has velocity-control working, and field elements are nearly complete. (just need to finish hab and make a cargo ship port)
– David Brinza, Lead Mentor
After a very long weekend, the controls team has successfully implemented velocity control! We first discussed the theory behind PID-based velocity control before prototyping our algorithm. Then, we spent most of the day on Monday implementing and tuning our new PID system, remapping the joystick’s velocity curve, enabling and tuning the system for high gear, tweaking our arcade drive control system, and encapsulating the entire system in an easy-to-configure class.
It was a very long meeting!
– Luke, Head of Controls
Over the past week, the Chairman’s Team has chosen the theme for the essay, “Thunder Valley!!!” We’ve started drafting the Chairman’s Essay and have refined our Executive Summary questions almost to perfection. Work for the Chairman’s video has also begun and we hope to refine the script and start thinking about filming in the coming weeks! Overall, progress has been steady and we will continue to work on writing the essay so we are finished well before the deadline and have plenty of time to revise and edit!
– Ethan, Head of Business and Outreach
Entering week two, those of us in Fabrication set our eyes on two goals: finishing some field elements and creating parts for the competition robot.
We finalized the full rocket build and added vision tape and hook and loop fastener. Soon after, the drive team stress-tested it quite rigorously with some crash tests as the driver began learning the new control system with the practice robot. Additionally, we made several of the parts for the competition robot drive train as soon as Design gave us the prints, and we assembled the frame with those pieces. We expect to be putting wheels, belts, and gearboxes on the frame before week three is over, and hopefully getting a testing arm done to put on our practice robot.
– Mateo, Head of Fabrication
In week 3, the Design team finalized the arm drive mechanism and began tweaking the old end effector design to make a new one, velcro surface will be integrated into the roller mechanism using encoders and velcro surface on certain parts of the roller. At this point we have a lot of our specific design concepts pinned down.
– Robert, Design Team
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