Resources
Please rely on us to help spread FIRST and STEM in your local community. We are happy to help.
CAD Sharing
We have decided to help the community by sharing parts that were very useful to us. The first two are our.
Odometery wheels using the REV through-bore encoders with 2" Andymark mecanum wheels.
Pulley adaptor for GoBuilda mecanum wheels for HTD 5mm / 9mm wide belts and fix axle.
Designs are shared using the MIT Open-Source liscence. You are welcome to modify them as you see fit for your robot. Every parts were revised multiple times and used in at least one FTC season.
You will find our designs in fusion 360 and STL format here (link).
Example of CAD model shared.
Shields delivered to a local hopital.
We use our machine shop to provide desperately needed PPE (personal protective equipment), which is in short supply in our community, since we live in one of the epicenters of the pandemic. We are making and delivering re-usable face shields to local hospitals and other first-line workers including food pantries, food delivery volunteers, and home health aides. We chose a model, the Prusa Face Shield, which is NIH approved for PPE, and are 3D printed with PETG filament, which resists high temperature for heat sterilizing, and also can be disinfected with sanitizer or alcohol. We've also improved on the design, providing additional protection, by extending the shields by an additional 12% to better utilize the form factor of material available in the US. We plan on an initial delivery of 1000 shields.
Learn more about our effort here (link).
Laptop Refursbishing
We have partnered with “La Joie de Vivre” orphanage in Arcahaie. A volunteer told us that the situation is so dire that many orphans have living relatives who cannot care for them until they become of working age, at which point they are often reclaimed by their families to help making a living for the family. The orphanage provides for and educates 24 kids, and teaches many more in the neighborhood by offering free lunches. Presently, they have no computers.
We are sending to Haiti laptops loaded with French and English books as well as educational software. Because of the lack of power and expensive gas (2 days at minimum wage pays for 1 gallon), generators are sparingly used. A significant expense of ours is refurbishing the laptop batteries so that the laptops may still be used when the generators are off.
Since our initial effort, we have donated laptops to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as well as local schools to support at-need-students for remote learning.
How can you help
You can donate your old laptops, as we are identifying more schools that would benefit from our program. Contact us (ftcrobocracy@gmail.com). We follow industry standard to wipe out clean all donated laptops.
Orphanage for which we delivered 6 laptops loaded with educational and STEM software.
Gear ratio plot (gear ratio vs. weight vs. distance).
We have developed an interactive physics simulation that calculates the optimal gear reduction to minimize travel time of given distances. This calculator accounts for motor torque curves, robot mass, rotational inertia, friction, battery characteristics, among other factors. It outputs an easily readable graph demonstrating the trade-off between gear reduction and travel time for several distances. The calculator is accessible on Github (link) for the source code, and through MyBinder (link) for an in-browser interface. It was created using Python in Jupyter Notebook.
As an FTC team we always strive to push the competition to the next level. We have spent over a year developing our very own swerve drive to be a viable FTC drive base. After so much time and effort spent in development, we have developed the very first fully 3D printable swerve drive viable for FTC. Finally we have gotten this competition tested design to a stage of completion. Therefore, we are releasing this design for the benefit of the FTC community.
Open Source Chassi using Swerve Drive.
FTC Print Swerve Drive Closeup.
We provide here, everything you need to make your very own PRINT swerve drive base. This innovative swerve drive is entirely built out of 3D printed parts, and other COTS components. It uses high quality gears for unprecedented reliability. We use a novel “Tower” design where the drive motor is directly mounted on top of the drive to deliver the compact footprint needed for FTC robots. To our knowledge, this is the first 3D printable, nearly-indestructible integrated swerve drive, optimized for FTC use.
UPDATE: It has been brought to our attention that the necessary 1/2" thunderhex flanged bearings are currently unavailable. You can instead use the equivalent radial bearings (1/2" thunderhex radial bearings) with the Tube Body Radial Bearings.stl part.
Full building instructions, 3d printable files and everything else you need to make your very own PRINT Swerve. (link)
If you decide to build a PRINT Swerve, or are inspired by our model to design your own, please let us know how it goes in the comments below, and share pictures of your progress! We love to see what you come up with. Share with us your feedback and your improvements! We are more than happy to offer our advice and expertise to aid you in building our swerve model or designing your own. Please send us an email at ftcrobocracy@gmail.com and we'll do our best to respond as quickly as possible.
Throughout the FTC community there is a major gap in understanding how the different lifts work, cascade and continuous. The main consensus that other teams have found is that one must have one motor on a continuous lift and two motors on a cascade. This is not very informative so we decided to investigate further into this problem. Also, if we are able to create the forces acting on the lift we could find out the most optimal setup for the lift regarding the gear ratio and motor.
Details here.
Cascading Lifts.
LEGO Mindstorms Robot.
Using LEGO Mindstorms robotics as a hook to entice children to start a journey in practicing STEM and teamwork. For kids age 9-14.
Details here.
Amazingly, there doesn't appear to be a single authoritative site to learn Java for free. We have summrized three useful options below, one of which, the second one (MIT Class) we have direct experience, although it does require some prior programming knowledge. The third option, the UDEMY class, is probably best for folks that are used to videos presenting material and integrated web assignments. If you happen to learn of sites or other online resources as good or better than the ones listed here, do not hesitate to let us know at ftcrobocracy@gmail.com
Details here.
