Archive 2017 and Before

What an incredibly exciting finish to our season! Team 980 was just one win away from qualifying for the FIRST World Championship!

Team 980 struggled with a few technical problems and challenging alliance pairings in the qualification matches but managed to finish with a 5 – 5 record. We played well with strong alliance partners and scored consistently in autonomous mode. Our driving and defense was also crisp. Those factors, along with a history of being a dependable partner, resulted in Team 980 being selected by #1 alliance: Team 330 BeachBots and Team 973 Greybots.

Our alliance breezed through the quarterfinals and semifinals without a loss. We lost the first finals match in a very close game 157-165. We came back strong to win the second match, 181-126, but fell short in the final match of the day 146-236. Still, we end our official season on a very high note and should be proud of our accomplishments.

Team 980 made a good showing at the Inland Empire Regional on March 1 – 2. We finished #17 out of 40 teams, were selected for eliminations, where we played with the #5 alliance in quarterfinals!

Our ball pick-up was very effective and the drive system worked well with higher speed gearing installed at the event. We competed in 15 matches this weekend! We completed assembly of the catapult and executed test firings on the practice field. We need to make some adjustments to launch balls accurately and reliably, so we removed the assembly from the robot to finish it in the next two weeks. We worked hard and accomplished a lot at our first event this season!

Team 980 wrapped up (literally!) our build season last night, putting our 2014 robot in the bag:

Before sealing the bag, we ran some tests with the robot and did a “fit-check” of our catapult mechanism on the competition robot. Here’s a photo of the robot before removing the catapult hardware:

We will continue to work on the catapult and deliver it to competition as part of our withholding allowance. The catapult is designed to attach to the robot very easily, so we should be competition-ready on inspection day for the Inland Empire Regional (Feb 28 – Mar 2)

Go Team 980!!

Here’s a CAD rendering of the mechanical design of FRC Team 980’s 2014 robot:

The catapult is driven by two sets of compression springs housed in the green tubes. A van door motor drives the catapult winch, which is engaged/released by an idler gear driven by a pneumatic piston. The ball pick-up roller is shown in red (design inspired by Team 16’s 2008 robot). The electronics, battery and pneumatics (not shown) are housed in a “belly pan” mounted to the chassis frame below the ball. The robot has a very low center-of-gravity and has plenty of weight margin (and provisions for mounting ballast below the chassis frame).

Team 980 is working hard to meet the 2014 Aerial Assist challenge!

We’ve made a prototype of our ball pick-up mechanism. Here’s a short video clip of it in action:

We are now meeting every weekday to get back on schedule. We had to slip our design review a few days to mature our ball shooter concept.

Here’s our updated build schedule:

We’ve got 3 weeks to get our robot ready for the “pre-bag” scrimmage – it’s “CRUNCH TIME!!”