August 2024 Workshop Series

Master Robotics Through Hardware Engineering Optimization!

Workshop series
5 days 9am-4pm
August 26-30th 2024
At Esquimalt High School. (Thank-you to their school admin and mentors for hosting)
https://maps.app.goo.gl/EUb1Pzh4FTpUvWoy9

Registrants will be sent detailed entry instructions since the school will still be closed.
Cost is FREE!!!

Elevate your skills in robotics and engineering with our immersive 5-day in-person workshop series! Delve into advanced topics including:

• Engineering Tradeoffs & Simple Modelling for Design Selection

• Mechanical Design Optimization

• Electronics-Sensor Integration Strategies

• Selecting the Right Sensors for Tasks

• Unlock the secrets of simple machines, motor torque and power, and sensor selection.

This hardware skill building series is intended for students or mentors with at least 1 season experience with  FTC or FRC competitions already. It will not be specific to any one hardware system, and specific knowledge in any one area is not required, but examples will be targeted with references to these competitions. No programming skill required.

This event happened in the past, Sign up is no longer available.

5 Days covering everything critical to using simple machines, sensors, and actuators effectively in robot designs.
Expect to build Bridges, Towers, or small cars and machines with glue and popsicle sticks as you improve your design knowledge and skills.

Day 1: 

• Introductions

• The Engineering Design Process: Why it is so important and how to use it effectively

• How to use simple models for quick evaluation in the design process. Physics models and mechanical models.

• Constraints and Trade-offs: Time spent really identifying these will really benefit your design.

• Ingenuity: the opposite of intuition. Don't rule out options with "it won't work", at least until you use some form of modelling to justify that thought.

• Each of these topics will be followed by some fast and fun design problems and some examples from prior FIRST seasons. Any remaining time in the day will be some fun group work focused on possible designs to realistic problems.

Day 2:

Building on the design process by focusing on some mechanical basics that will influence design creation and selection including:

• Basics of shear and tension/compression

• What is stiffness? Torsion and bending

• Materials selection and limitations: for prototyping or for production

• Making things stick: The mechanics of fasteners, glues, tape, and friction

• Putting a damper on things: why bigger and stronger don't solve vibration issues.

• Again, practical exercises and examples will be integrated into each of these topics so students can really understand these important topics and make better robots!

Day 3:

Simple Machines; tools for converting energy, power and force! They may be simple, but they are essential to good robotic design. A more thorough understanding of the 6 simple machines and their derivative devices such as gears, cams, and linkages. 

• Conservation of energy and guaranteed losses (simple mention of entropy).

• Short period spend on wedges, screws, and inclined planes including how a cam or an over-center mechanism acts like a variable wedge.

• the important less intuitive parts of wheels and axels, including rolling resistance on the foam mats, traction, and some more robot-specific variants like Mecanum 

• Levers!! so simple, but so often misunderstood. Really focusing on minimizing losses and choosing the right fulcrum. Several exercises with levers will be essential to this lesson.

• Pulleys!! How to best use them in FTC and FRC robots.

Day 4 

Time to move! How to get energy into motion and how to make it more efficient.

• Motors, Servos, Linear Actuators

• Balances, Springs, and elastics: Storing energy to make your robot more powerful, and more efficient.

• Most of this day will be spent doing group activities and experimenting with simple mechanisms that connect the math to reality.

• There will be some analysis of previous years' robots to look for places where designs could be improved, or were done exceptionally well.

Day 5

Getting a sense of what you can sense, and how to sense it.

• Going through a variety of FTC and FRC common sensors, covering some cool and ingenuitive uses of them, and how to make the best use of them, given where they produce errors, false readings, or delays.

• Trying some sensors and displaying the results on the projector with some pre-made programs.

• looking at some common mechanisms to see sensors that are in use in normal life, and ones that are often used in robotics competitions.

• A brief intro to the types of software integration and filtering that can be used, and also what cannot be improved with software alone.

Registration has closed