Tuesday, April 13, 2021

Gamma Ray 2021: Week 2

Awards

Spectrum was recognized as one of the FIRST in Texas District Chairman’s Award teams. We had one of our students from 3847 and one of our students from 8515 advance to the District Champions Dean’s List round.

Congratulations to all the teams


Subsystem Updates


OnShape Feature Scripts

Here are some of the feature scripts we have been using on this robot to help us generate parts faster.
Laser Joint

  • Creates the finger joints that we often use with laser cut parts

  • Video

T-Slot Joint

Advanced Gear

  • Creates Spur, Helix, and Double Helix gears

Shaped Flange

  • Allows you to make a flange from a sketch profile, and can also offset the flange easily so you can make “Bend Outside” parts nicely.

Monday, April 5, 2021

Gamma Ray 2021: Build Blog

With the bulk of the FRC at Home challenge work completed, we have begun work on designing a new robot for 2021 off-season events: Gamma Ray 2021. It is still in the early stages of its design, but we wanted to allow people to follow its progress.

  1. In the fall of 2020, we decided to register a 2nd FRC team at our schools, Photon FRC#8515. This team will be the "Development Team" for Spectrum. The general plan is new students will be on Photon but will also be members of Spectrum at the same time. 
  2. The plan is for this new robot to compete under the banner of Photon at The Texas Cup event.
  3. We have been kicking around the ideas for this robot since March 2020, but the actual CAD didn't get started until last week. We didn't build or modify our 2020 robot for the skills challenges; we just used it as is.
  4. Spectrum has switched from Solidworks to OnShape, so it will be easier for anyone to view the robot's progress.
  5. Most of the build blog updates for this will be the design slides our team uses to organize our thoughts and keep everyone updated. The full design slide set will be uploaded to our photo gallery.
  6. One of the major goals of this robot was to design and build a full swerve robot before the 2022 season. If you haven't heard, there will likely be a lot of new swerve teams in 2022.






- Spectrum