Past seasons
(2022-2023)
Season reflection
This season was the best we have performed ever. Winning one of our two qualifiers and making it all the way to state finals. This year we continued to improve our robot design process and teamwork. We spent hours custom-milling a steel drivetrain as well as buying new metal slides. Another area of our robot that saw major change was our claw design. We had about 4 different revisions to the claw before coming up with our final design. We also spent all summer going around and touring and asking local businesses asking for sponsorship. Post-season we were even invited to Flint Hills Resources by Eletrobotics after losing to them at state. Because ee helped them out with code before they headed off to Worlds.
Qualifiers Tournaments
This was our first tournament of the year on November 19, 2022. Here we scored a record of 3-3-0 in qualifying. We did rank very high in the tournament, but thankfully Purple Circuits realized we were pretty good. After that we were picked by them and proceed to win the Qualifier and move onto state.
Our second tournament was on January 14, 2024. We had a record of 3-2-1 in qualifying. We were picked by Cyberhawks and unfortunately lost in the Semi-Finals because of robot problems. But we were able to test the robot in a competitive environment run a bunch of programming and fix problems as a team.
State Tournament
At State this year we came and preformed very well. Throughout the day we were very consistent usually scoring in low 200's area. Proceed on to elimination matched we were 2nd alliance captain for the Nano division. Here we pick M-TECH Dark Matter and Gear Wizards and proceed to win the Nano division.
Going into final we felt pretty confident as we preformed well all day. In the finals our robot messed up during the Autonomous phase and missed all 5 of our cones bring our score down and losing the 1st match. Proceeding on we then lost the next match ending up not going to world, but coming farther than we ever had before.
(2021-2022)
Season reflection
This season was full of ups and downs, but by far, was our best season as a team. To go from practically being the worst in the state in our skystone year to being one of the top teams in Minnesota was something that really shocked the team. For the first time as a team, we made it to state and in our first appearance, we were 1st in quals. However, this success did not come overnight. One of the first roadblocks that we encountered was when, during the offseason, we built a chassis through hours of work only to realize that it would be rendered useless. A multitude of supply chain delays caused our field, and parts for our robot, among other things to be delayed which hampered our progress at the start of the year. After our second qualifier, we decided to completely rebuild our robot including the chassis and we were still assembling parts of it the week before the competition. However, the changes we did make enabled us to do very well at our second qualifier and at the state tournament.
State Tournament
When we competed at state, we were much better than we expected to be. Throughout the day, we were very consistent and only had one round where our score was lower than 200. In the last round of the qualifiers, we needed to score nearly 250 points to beat team 14188 Cyberhawks for the #1 spot in the quals, and we ended up doing just that and scored almost 285 points. We entered the elimination rounds and posted an MN FTC Freight Frenzy record of about 323 points with team 10273 Cat In The Hat Comes Back. However, we unfortunately only got to the nano division and lost to team 14188 the Cyberhawks.
Qualifiers Tournaments
In our first qualifier on November 20th, 2021, we were absolutely phenomenal compared to other seasons we have competed in. We signed up for a tournament that put us against some of the best teams in the area and we still came out in 3rd place in the preliminary rounds. We racked up 617 points in our 5 matches with 3 wins and 2 losses.
Because we were ranked as the number 3 team, we got chosen as an alliance captain for the elimination rounds. In the elimination rounds, we partnered with 2 other teams so that we could work our way from the semi-finals into the finals. We made it into the finals and lost the last match by a close 183 -189. Nonetheless, we ended up winning the Motivate Award, were Collins Aerospace Innovate Award Finalists, and were the Finalist Alliance Captain. In addition to all that, we also advance to the state tournament happening in February!
At our second qualifier on January 15th, we made some major improvements to our robot and we were able to maintain the top spot on the leaderboard for most of the day. In the second match of the day, we manage to get a score of 221 with our alliance partner. Towards the end of the qualifier matches, we managed to rack up a 170 point lead against the second place team in addition to having a 6-0-0 at the tournament. All of this put us in a good spot for the elimination rounds.
In alliance selection, we ended up being the captain of the 1st alliance and chose the Chaska Circuit Breakers and the Cyberhawks as our alliance partners. With all of us working together, we made it to the finals and won with a score of 232-100 putting a new state record on the board. Overall, we did very well at the Burnsville tournament, becoming Event Champions, winning the Collins Aerospace Innovate Award, and we were Control Award Finalists.
(2020-2021)
We didn't compete officially in the ultimate goal season, not because of covid, but because our Modern Robotics electronics system was no longer competition legal, and we didn't have the funds to get the new REV electronics system. We started the season about a month late because of some organizational issues, couldn't meet in person from December to mid-January, didn't have a real field, and needed to build our own, but despite this, we were able to make a better robot than either of our past seasons by march. We got a quicker start to building because we had designed a drivetrain in CAD before the season started, so we were able to build and program it in about two weeks. After the drivetrain was working, we prototyped the wobble goal mechanism, trying to make an arm and gripper that could grab the neck of it firmly and lift it over the wall. Then we couldn't meet in person anymore, so over that span of time we designed the intake and shooter in CAD. once we could go back to working on the actual bot, we built the shooter and it didn't work. in our first design, we geared up a 40:1 motor with a custom 1:33.75 gearbox using 3d printed gears, but this had way too much friction and the shooter wheel would just lock up and not be able to spin. Looking back, it seems so silly that we took a motor with a 40:1 gearbox and then attached around a 1:40 gearbox on that, undoing what the motor gearbox did. It makes way more sense to get rid of the motor gearbox and just attach the shooter wheel directly to the bare motor, and that's what we did. We were a little wary of doing it at first because it wasn't something we had ever done or seen done before, but we designed a 3d printed part to attach to the little motor pinion gear, and we got that wheel spinning at 6k rpm. We mounted the shooter to the chassis, confirmed it worked and then moved on to the intake, which was significantly harder. We made it out of 1/8 and 1/4 inch plywood, and all the parts interlock like a puzzle to form a sturdy curved surface for rings to slide on. After that was built, we made the transfer rollers out of zip ties screwed to axle hubs spaced along an axle. all three rollers were linked together with chains so they all ran off one motor and spun in sync. We had some issues with the tip of the ramp catching on the field tape and rings not passing through very smoothly that we never really fixed, but the intake and transfer worked well enough.
No notebook, but there's a folder of everything we did: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19MtMu5kvwaEf87C8b7_dS4fiGviRiR?usp=sharing
(2019-2020)
This season was a big improvement in robot reliability and durability. We decided on using a claw that would expand outwards between the studs on the stones to grip them very early on in the season and built the rest of the robot around that. Our drivetrain was a major improvement over last year's because we mounted the mecanum wheels directly to the motors, eliminating the issues we had in rover ruckus with gears skipping and axles bending because they were cantilevered on 4.7mm d shaft. We designed and printed the gripper very early on in the season, and also got our foundation grippers working quickly. The three stage linear drawer slide lift ,however, was difficult. We had to learn about stringing and things like that, and then we settled on a design that used steel 12 inch telescoping slides with pullies that were attached directly to the slides using M3 bolts passing through holes drilled into the slides. There was some delay getting the slides, and once we had them we screwed all six of them together and carefully drilled the 3mm holes for the pulleys, using a 3D printed jig because the holes were so close to the edge of the metal. The pulleys were 3mm ID bearings with 3d printed v-grooves press fit onto the outer race, and the winches to pull the string were stacked plates of 1/8 inch laser cut wood. After mounting the slides to the chassis with 1/4 inch wood, we mounted the gripper to the top of the lift. the gripper had to extend past the wheels to grab stones, but our chassis was already 18 inches long, so we needed a way to stow the gripper inside the bot and then deploy it in teleop. The gripper was mounted to the lift on a pivot and would be folded back inside the bot before the match began, and a rotating arm inside the bot that we called the gripper flipper would push the gripper outside the bot. We used some string to limit its maximum rotation so it would be parallel to the ground when deployed. Our first tournament that year was our worst ever; the electronics simply refused to work even though they were working the night before, and we were constantly getting disconnect errors. After that happened, we completely redid all our electronics, trying to maximize cable bend radius, and checked every module to make sure it worked reliably. Before our next competition, we tested different materials for the gripper, as the stones were sometimes falling out. We ended up using a layer of hot glue to add grip, and this held the stones firmly most of the time. At our next competition, we did much better as our bot actually worked reliably, and we were picked to be on an alliance in elimination matches.
Engineering notebook: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JRCJhNue5BBJb-FrUBPQ3fVowTWB-wcaV8OEVhUp-IY/edit?usp=sharing
(2018-2019)
This was our rookie year, and everything was new; we had to learn how use the control system, how to program, and how to build. We started by building a push bot using instructions and used that as the base of our robot for the rest of the season. we spent about the first month of the season building the push bot and learning how to set up the electronics, program, and troubleshoot issues with it. Along the way, we had come up with some ideas for scoring minerals; some of them were a gripper on a pivoting arm, a gripper that could hold two minerals on a linear slide, and a horizontal intake. We built a gripper that grabbed minerals with two plates actuated by two servos while making the push bot, but it wasn't strong enough to hold them. We made a prototype out of cardboard for an intake that used rubber bands spanned between two rotating disks to suck in minerals, and this worked astonishingly well. We attached this to the end of the push bot arm on a joint actuated by a servo so that it could change the angle to intake in the crater and dump into the lander. We realized two issues: the singular servo wasn't strong enough to hold the intake in its position, and the arm wasn't long enough to reach up to the lander. We fixed the first issue pretty easily by adding another servo so we got the torque of two, but being unable to reach the lander was a much tougher problem. We couldn't make the arm longer because it would be over 18 inches if we did, so we would have to make an extending arm. we were trying to make a linear extension with tetrix, but that wasn't working well so tried another approach. We made a long box out of plywood, and a tetrix channel fit inside and could slide in and out. This was mounted to the arm and the intake was mounted to the sliding channel, and then it needed a pulley system to raise. We were going to put the winch on the arm itself so the length of the string would be the same no matter the rotation of the arm, but that didn't work out because it was tricky to fit. So the winch was mounted to the chassis below the point of rotation of the arm, and it pulled string over a pulley fixed to the end of the wood tube, and the string was tied to the bottom of the channel that slides. We had lots of problems with the string breaking because there was so much friction in the system, and we tried different types of string, settling on high strength fishing line. At our first competition, there were a lot of reliability issues; the geartrain that powered the pivoting of the arm would skip, and so there were many matches where the arm would fall down and we couldn't raise it back up again. Our intake was still made of cardboard at the time, so it was very beat up by the end of the day. between that competition and the next, we changed our drivetrain to mecanum, remade the intake out of wood, and made a hanging mechanism. our second tournament was better than the first, although there were still issues with the arm, they weren't as bad, and we actually managed to hang a few times.
Engineering notebook (not very well done; missing lots of information) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ulHdAqdbAC4p7BiGOftD0pc22a7BzdeLeuxH14tZkAk/edit?usp=sharing
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