Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Day 60: Week 9 Recap (Comp Week 2)

 

Day 56, 57: Katy Event Recap for Photon 8515

 


Results: 


Gracious Professionalism Award


This weekend, Photon competed at the Katy District Event. To begin, we would like to thank our alliance captain the 9478 Robo-Colts, and our other alliance member the 9121 Mavericks. We would also like to congratulate the winning alliance of 118, 8576, 7616. 


Photon went 7-8-0 overall at this event, and finished ranked 18th before being invited by 9478 to join their alliance. After inviting 9121 to our alliance, we fell to the lower bracket after playing against the 2nd alliance. After that we won against the 6th alliance in the lower bracket and then fell to the 1st alliance. 


In addition to this, we were honored to be awarded the Gracious Professionalism Award and look forward to competing in the Houston District Event.



Failures and Fixes:


Failure: The intake that Photon has is the exact same version of the 3847’s intake, but the way that we move the note from the intake to the indexer and launcher is different. We have an extra 2x1 added to the inner frame where the note rides up against. This caused different problems that weren’t seen on the 3847 robot due to the note having to be more vertical to contact the index rollers. During the later qualification matches on Friday, we had a couple of issues that required us to fix the intake in different ways after each match. 


1st incident: We believe the intake roller became unbolted due to not checking them after every match to see if they were tightened which caused them to fall off at the end of the match after having issues with it during the match. 

2nd incident: During this match, we had trouble with the intake jamming and not fully intaking. We found out after the match that the hot glue that held the hub to the roller became detached. 

The glue holding hub to roller snapped, so we put a bolt to re-secure them together

3rd incident: Pulley got worn down thanks to the intake jamming

4th incident: Then the belt got worn down too because we didn’t replace it when we changed the pulley



Fix: To make sure this doesn’t happen in the future, we will be replacing the belt along with the pulley when the pulley is worn down or breaks. For our roller, to prevent the hot glue from getting dislodged, we put another screw into the roller to make sure this doesn’t happen. 


Failure: We have several autons, but we have one specifically which is designed to collect and shoot 4 notes into the speaker. During this auton in one of our matches, however, two notes got jammed in our intake which caused us to get a penalty. For the rest of the match, no matter how many times we tried, we were unable to eject the notes, therefore we weren’t able to score and collect any more notes during the whole match. One of the notes got stuck above our top roller while the other one got stuck below the first one (shown in the picture below).


Fix: To (hopefully) prevent this from happening in future matches, we are planning on installing a plate that is on the Spectrum 3847 robot. This plate will be mounted above the top roller to stop the note from getting stuck above the roller, and giving it a more direct path into the feeder. 



Controls update:


For Katy, we knew that we wanted to try and use our 4-note auton. The first time we ran it in Quals, we were only able to get 2 out of the 4 notes because we bumped into one of our alliance members. This being said,  our auton most likely would have worked if they lined up a little bit closer to the driver station. Then we had another chance to run our auton, but were only able to get 3 out of 4 notes because the robot didn’t move far enough to be able to intake the 4th note. We then tried running our 4-note auton again, but only got 1 out of 4 notes in the speaker because we had trouble with our intake and the note didn’t shoot out of the feeder. We were then able to run the auton for a fourth time but the note was preloaded too high and the robot didn’t get aligned with the speaker, causing it to shoot over. During Playoffs, we also ran our 4-note auton, however had a lot of trouble intaking and feeding the note. 


Planned Improvements:


  • Add some plates above the intake that hold the note in place when the arm is up to prevent the note from slipping out

  • Add wedges so only one note can enter horizontally in intake

  • Add a button where we can lock on the angle for each chain on the stage

  • Podium shot

  • Button to lock on directions for amp and subwoofer

  • Add shaft so if we get one hook for climb it will slide over and other one will catch

  • Visual feedback of a note through leds

  • Get the 4 note auto working


And just a fun fact: For the third year in a row at Photon’s first event, we won Gracious Professionalism! 


Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Day 53: Week 8 Design Recap

 

https://photos.smugmug.com/2024-FRC/Build-Season/Week-8-2024/i-KKsHPRt/0/DjWcdjrCjPCv5vx5rZvhV6kvc57PcFcnHWrc3vLHN/1920/PXL_20240227_223637506.TS-1920.mp4



Day 51 & 52: New AmpTrap Concept

We have been playing around with various ways to improve our trap mechanism while still letting us amp quickly. The new mechanism is basically a powered cape.


Amp Score

https://photos.smugmug.com/2024-FRC/Build-Season/Week-8-2024/i-XkCPqsc/0/5sCZbx8wH7Qqv7zfL5wjrwrnffg7LfCkMS3DNcd7/1920/Amp%20with%20roller%20cape-1920.mp4


Trap Score

https://photos.smugmug.com/2024-FRC/Build-Season/Week-8-2024/i-LPPJjQr/0/Zwbw33SVRJfQsLMcrDRvtS52JhD2RdmCXfgMJXjm/1920/IMG_3902-1920.mp4


This works pretty well and we’ll make a better version this week.


Day 50: Photon Does Things and Intake Reliability Upgrade

 Photon Update

Today we got software set up on Photon to amp, climb and subwoofer. We realized that the original gearing on the arm was too low and that the arm would not be able to support the robot enough to stay up on the chain for 5 seconds. To solve this, we changed the gearing and we were able to stay up after being disabled. 


We have plans to get a podium shot and a limelight mounted on the robot before our second district event. 

https://photos.smugmug.com/2024-FRC/Build-Season/Week-7-2024/i-wc3JK7c/0/FKnfNsKMKfstVHRWgWDK38H588mzRBWfgWwBGw82K/1920/PXL_20240225_030045217-1920.mp4


https://photos.smugmug.com/2024-FRC/Build-Season/Week-7-2024/i-C34WCvf/0/FdqHX7cXK3vBfgVRw4tmfKNrXDcQSP9nWSGxm43bb/1920/PXL_20240224_231355237-1920.mp4


Intake Updates:


After breaking our Intake yesterday and much discussion, we decided to re-inforce it with 0.090” aluminum and raise the leading edge to avoid it hitting the bottom of the truss.

Day 47, 48, & 49: Driver Practice & Photon Update

Full Field Driver Practice

Today we visited our friends at Pearadox #5414 and did some driver practice on their full sized field. Here is a clip from driver practice. 

https://photos.smugmug.com/2024-FRC/Build-Season/Week-7-2024/i-3SfDfFM/0/FBpvd3cnxgTt6bSDcGBjB5tSmRrmrf4CsR4LrHn7c/1920/amp%20and%20two-1920.mp4


Unedited full footage can be found in our photo gallery. We were able to consistently run two amp cycles, one speaker, and then another speaker within ten seconds of the first one (within amplification time.) We don’t yet have Apriltag aiming, so we were only subwoofer-ing during these countdowns. Cycles will get faster with auto aim to both amp and speaker.


Failures

  1. Ramp from intake scraped off, caused by scraping the thin rectangle of aluminum of the real stage, when rotating to shoot a podium shot. We did not put it back on the robot.

  1. Intake plate broke and the launcher pivot was able to pop out on one side. Caused by hitting the same truss as before. It was a pretty medium strength hit. The broken intake could still intake/eject, but it was scary because the lower roller could also get sucked under the robot.

https://photos.smugmug.com/2024-FRC/Build-Season/Week-7-2024/i-fHCz9qW/0/DX2mjrDK3V5FXqztH3mG7QJd8jsMhLcgSQ37swVwS/1920/IMG_9850-1920.mp4


  1. Pearadox has a real stage! Unfortunately, our trap attempts were unsuccessful. Climbing was good, but the amp/trap mechanism needs modification to ensure the belt doesn’t skip, and that the note stays in contact with two rollers at all times. Otherwise, it looks promising.

  1. Intaking multiple game pieces at once. It was easy to intake multiple game pieces at once at a source with lots of notes around. Intaking multiple notes could damage the notes and get them stuck inside the robot. We don’t yet have a camera facing the intake, so we just had to guess and check.




Photon Update

Photon is getting ready for our first event in five days! We are trying to get the robot ready to practice at Pearadox this weekend on Sunday which we will probably be running the wooden launcher plates to make sure it will work for the Katy District event we will be competing at. 


We got our robot running to test our launcher shots and see if we could actually amp well. Our launcher angle was too low, so we need to make changes to make sure our angle is higher to make subwoofer shots in our default position. 


We still need to design the climber which will be attached to our arm which will also help get our launch angle higher because it’ll hit our hardstop first. We’re almost done making both bumpers to be ready for our event soon. 

https://photos.smugmug.com/2024-FRC/Build-Season/Week-7-2024/i-HpghVCm/0/CGP7fSfLGXm4PBvBhrM3m3x4N4GBp6GBLhpBHDnhc/1920/PXL_20240224_004937170-1920.mp4