And we’re back, its been a little bit so here are some updates that we have about our projects after kickoff, which was last Saturday. During kickoff, we had a really nice zoom meeting with many members of the team along with some members from rookie team 8604; we played some games too such as FRC Trivia Kahoot (Which I’m pretty sure was RIGGED but oh well).

On that note, we will be working closely with team 8604 of Minuteman Regional Vocational Technical High School in Lexington, MA for our co-founder, Dee Clark, now teaches there and helped to start up Minuteman’s own FRC team. 8604 will also be following us in their build season open publication so don’t hesitate to check their thread out below!

FRC 8604 2021 Team Startup & Build Thread

Hello All! I am very excited to announce the startup of a new rookie FRC Team at Minuteman Regional Vocational Technical High School in Lexington, MA. Chief Delphi, meet FRC 8604! About Minuteman Minuteman is a vocational school with students coming from over 12 different districts in the greater Boston area. Our school has 19 different career majors for students to choose from, including Engineering Technology, Robotics & Automation, Advanced Manufacturing & Welding, Carpentry, Automotive…

Keep in mind that the game design team would be working on general strategy in a normal year, but due to the COVID situation, strategy discussions regarding competitions has been put on hold along with climber arm/hook updates. Once in-person competitions resume, these updates will be added to the build blog.

Game Design:

1/13/2021 – The Game Design Challenge team discussed potential game pieces for our game, and have narrowed our list down to three options after a long discussion: footballs, boxes, and a combination of rings and balls. Our plan is to make a final decision this upcoming Sunday. In preparation for this decision and the upcoming week, students are thinking of potential implementations (ways to use the piece in a match) for each game piece. -Jonathan

1/17/2021 – The Game Design Challenge team has decided that the game piece will be boxes. For our next meeting, the team is thinking of potential implementations for the piece. -Jonathan

Expected Design Process Timeline:

• Wednesday Jan 13 – game piece decided
• Wednesday Jan 20 – game piece implementation decided, basic auto/end-game structure decided, assign ppl for theme
• Wednesday Jan 27 – field elements decided(game piece, climbing, other field structures), theme finalized
• Wednesday Feb 3 – Layout auto/tele-op/endgame and basic sketch of field, rough draft of description of field elements,
• Wednesday Feb 10 – game balance determined (points, penalties), Game overview draft written, expected robot actions written, description of game elements finalized, get someone to review game concept, supplementary information started, video assigned, logo assigned, assign ppl for CAD field
• Wednesday Feb 17 – all documentation finalized, video started, logo finalized, powerpoint presentation and speaking parts of interview started (decide presenters)
• Wednesday Feb 24 all documentation finalized, video finished, logo finished, powerpoint presentation and speaking parts of interview finished, field image finished, run through presentation , compile work for submission
• Sunday Feb 28 Run-through of presentation, work submitted
• Wednesday Mar 3 – celebrate our accomplishments

Awards Team:

1/13/2021 – The awards team worked out a timeline for submitting CA and WF nominations and made notes about what aspects of other teams’ CA submissions we liked and what to think about incorporating. We also did internal project management training this week. -Katie Bonner

Note: CA is for the Chairman’s Award and WF is for the Woodie Flowers Award

Mechanical/Shop work:

1/13/2021 – I worked with the mechanical team to mount our new gearbox onto the comp bot, we ran into an issue with the longer gearbox shafts not fitting into their bearings but we have a plan to fix them -Maddie

For the mechanical side of things, we decided to remove the climber due to the fact that there is no climbing in the skills challenge for this year. ( see disclaimer statement at top of document)

1/16/2021 – We took off material on gearbox plates on the mill and reassembled them, put on the new wheels and redid the drive chain, and put on the outer drive frame plates at the end of the day. -Shirish

Programming:

1/14/2021 – We met for the first time since kickoff and reviewed all of the tasks to work on this season. Some of the top priorities- the AutoNav challenge and Galactic Search Challenge are both very software dependent, so those are a focus. We need to work with the mechanical team to do robot bring-up once the competition bot is more functional, and do testing for the Interstellar Accuracy challenge to determine if we need more advanced control to shoot from all of the zones. We also upgraded the robot code to the 2021 version of WPILib, which doesn’t affect current functionality but might allow us to use some more advanced features in the future. – Jonah

1/14/2021 – We discussed our approach to the Galactic Search challenge, since there’s still some confusion about the rules. Our current plan is to create four motion profiles for each possible path, and use vision to select which one to run at the start by detecting power cells. We considered whether this was feasible using the Limelight, but the mounting angle isn’t right (among other difficulties). Right now, we plan to use a separate camera and do the vision processing on the RIO. – Jonah

1/15/2021 – We introduced the students to the basics of vision by having them experiment with using GRIP (a software package for creating vision pipelines). One of the things we tried was mimicking the type of processing we might need for the Galactic Search challenge – detecting the locations of three power cells in front of the robot (see example below). This was good practice, but the specifics of how everything will be positioned for the challenge are different. – Jonah

Keith C’s Updates:

1/15/2021 – For my late announcement of absence on Wednesday, I cleaned the bathrooms tonight as punishment.

1/17/2021 – I consolidated drill bits and hex keys to make complete sets and identify those missing for potential purchase. So fun!

I say that Keith deserves the MVP award this week (insert plastic trophy from eBay and clapping sound loop here).

Quote of the Dave:

“I’ve very tired.”

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