So, Who Are the 4911 CyberKnights, V2

The 2019 FRC 4911 CyberKnights (Well, most of them...)

I've seen a lot of questions on the internet recently, and I really just want to help people, so I'll use this space to answer a pretty common question I see:

So, who are the 4911 CyberKnights?

V2, extended directors cut edition.

(With commentary)

This year, we faced difficulty alongside many other FRC teams across the globe. (And specifically the northern continental Americas.) Blizzards, dumpster fires, waiting for CAD to finish. Throwing CAD away, starting again, then waiting for CAD to finish... again.... Another blizzard... (and robo-plague! How could I forget about robo-plague!) This season had it all. Probably the most proud moment for me though came at the end of build season when I was able to open the lab refrigerator, and was able to continue breathing normally.

(This post was supposed to be amusingly long, but for realsies, there's actually some good stuff (like, Woodie Flowers' Good Stuff,) in here. I am so proud of the team, I just can't help but talk about them, and I do honestly try to make stories relate-able, and contain lessons that other students and mentors might find useful. So, here follows an in-depth recollection of build season, and closes off with a jumble of random thoughts and stories that for one reason or another caught my attention. I do hope you had a great season, and we all look forward to seeing you next time!)

Competition Week 7

Six years of being at the furthest field from the pits...

Six years, six visits to the World Championship. (Or... World Championship South for the past few years...) Last year we raised the bar for ourselves. We had a high target to reach for, and not much time to finish any last minute planning, practice, or upgrades. But once again, we were going to Houston.

Competition Week 6

We had nice weather out here! For one day... Then it rained...

Rank 8 in PNW in terms of District Points. Yep, that seems right. Pretty happy with that. Prior to District Championships in Tacoma, we calculated the minimum district points needed would be around 125-130, and felt confident we could rank in the top 15, get picked up by a solid alliance, and be recognized with an award for either our robot or business model. In actuality, the  district points cutoff required for World's qualification was 142. Not to worry, we ranked slightly higher than 15th.

Tacoma was another great weekend of robots, friends, mistakes, and achievements. Our 4th consecutive weekend of competition (and coffee), and the outcomes qualifies us for World Championships in another week's time (in which we'll also have coffee).

Competition Week 5

Made some minor updates to the lab. Been waayy too long....

With our 2 district point-scoring events complete, and the 9 district events complete, we have now scraped up enough points to qualify for the PNW District Championships. (Ok, let's be real for a minute here. Last year we played in the Einstein finals, and this year we are scrambling for points to qualify for District Champs? Yeah, we had a long season with limited driving and tuning. It can happen. But for now, this is fine!) We made a few minor updates to the bot this weekend, and got it a lot more time driving under hard defense.

Competition Week 4

(Part of) the strategy collective

If our planned schedule holds, this past weekend was event 2 of our 5 events in 6 weeks of madness for 2019. The past weekend was the PNW Glacier Peak district event, historically one of the most competitive events in PNW, and 2019 was no different. Every match was a chance to gain experience, learn more about the game, and strut our robot stuff. Overall our week was roughly similar week to last week, with a few major differences in what we prepared. (And you know, showing up to competition with a working bot...)

Competition Week 3

Pit set up, robot ready to go! ... ish...

This was quite a busy week for us all. We started Monday and Tuesday completing our final robot preparations during our 6-hour access period, and ended the week with our first competition of 2019 at the Sundome Arena in Yakima. 

Competition Week 2

Bots sitting, ready to go

For me, this was a very busy week. I actually didn't make it into the lab at all with work constraints, and had to follow along through our Slack channels. This week was more competition prep: drive practice, software tuning, breaking and fixing things as often as possible. On top of this, we are rapidly approaching our first competition, and needed to plan out our unbag session. This week we had our students plan and prep everything they would need to successfully tackle the numerous tasks required during our 6 hour access window.

Competition Week 1

All the practice space

Wahoo! We have a fast robot. This week we got our practice robot fully up and running, we broke it a few more times, and we got more software and drive team cycles. All of this preparation will continue to ensure reliability and performance for our first competition in 2 weeks time. Realistically, with packing, unbag time, and travel, we have just over 1 week to continue our program and make the best of our slow season. Fortunately, though our season may have run slow, this robot is fast. Over 2 days of drive practice, we have been able to consistently beat our baseline scoring cycles by over 3 seconds.

Competition Week 0

Robot 1 chassis getting all our mechanism 2 and 3's

Bag day has come and gone. We haven't been able to touch our competition spec robot, but we have still been working the nights away. Our primary goal was to build up a complete, identical practice robot so that we can continue tuning and practicing. Once our practice bot is finished, we will run the thing into the ground and start learning and applying lessons from all of its failures and successes. This week is also the season of reveal videos as a large number of teams show off their full creations. Our students and mentors alike watch on, seeing how other teams faced the challenge thrown at them this year. Open engineering is spectacular in this regard - 4000 teams, 4000 robots, and though they may share common parts, chances are that each robot has at least one part unique to itself, and no two robots are exactly identical. Each team uses different strategic, manufacturing and/or assembly processes, and each result is different.

Day 43, 44, 45, 46

Apparently the robot belongs to Cormac. Wait, is that elevator supposed to be in the bag?

11:59pm Eastern Time on Tuesday February 19th, our robot made its way into a giant plastic bag. Our 6 weeks to design and manufacture a competition robot for the 2019 FRC Game Destination: Deep Space, has come to a close. Our final days shared in difficult times and decisions, long nights/mornings, and a renewed excitement as we finally saw our complete robot shakedown and full-systems checks. We already have the next versions of many mechanisms and gearboxes imagined, CAD'ed and even cut. Our main goal for our first competition is reliability. Second will be adding speed, lightness, and functionality. We have a long season in front of us, with 3 district meets, then potential qualification for district championships and the Houston World Championship.

Day 40, 41, 42

Bumpers are a large eye-catching part of the robot. Have to make sure they look good!

The Line in the Sand:

"What we have on Sunday is what we put into the bag. On Monday, software gets the robot, and mechanical doesn't get to touch it again until competition." Head coach dictated the final few days of our season. We need to throw everything together and put <something> into software's hands. This coming weekend will decide a number of things. One, just what will software end up with? Two, is this the fire that can adhere 30 teenagers to a fixed deadline? Three, can I really keep coming up with random thoughts and opinions to spew into a blog for 4 more days?

It's Friday night before Bag-n-Tag. We have assemblies started for our cargo shooter and floor intake. We have parts cut for our climber. We have 5 machines running as often as we have drawings and CAM files, and when we finished construction of our elevator... we found a bind issue that naturally set us back a few hours with tweaks and tuning and re-cutting. The scariest part of this type of crunch, is that we don't know, what we don't know.

Day 36, 37, 38, 39

3/16" rivet stems make great chain stops. Just like that scene from James Bond GoldenEye.

Build Update: SLLLLOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWWW. But making progress. Parts getting cut. Parts getting assembled. Our CAD reviews are mostly complete at this point in time, so now the bottleneck is purely machining, preparing, finding the mistake, re-machining, re-preparing, assembling, and mounting. Software has been exceedingly patient this year. One step forward we are making is mounting the Limelight in the (current) final position on our rolling practice chassis so they can continue getting the drive and camera vision code tuned. So where are we now? We have a practice chassis with part of one subsystem complete and mounted (and the electrical board clamped on) and we have a competition robot with bumpers (wooo!) one complete subsystem assembled and mounted, and a full electrical board properly secured and mounted. I really hope next year we read back on posts like these and chuckle at ourselves...

Day 33, 34, 35

Snow outside the lab

It snowed again. It's apparently the new cool thing for Seattle to do. That being said, since it already rains a lot here, most parents and kids have AWD or 4WD vehicles, so after some settling, we have a core group of folks working once again. Our deadline has been set for Saturday. Parts that must be manufactured. Parts that must be assembled. Parts that must be mounted on the robot. These are the days in the season where, if it isn't done, we will be here until it is done. Days like these can catch us up a day, or lag us behind yet again.

Day 30, 31, 32

This would have been a nothing storm for New Hampshire...

As I write this tonight, we are now under the 2 week mark. 14 calendar days until we put a competition robot (competition piece of sheetmetal?) into a giant bag. We have starting manufacturing our second chassis, and are still finding little details we want/need to address before some mechanism parts hit the the cutting edge of a flute or endmill.

Day 27, 28, 29

As CAD reviews push to close and our current final versions are prepared, we get into the fun game of parts ordering! Step one of parts ordering: check the lab. Found it? Great! Didn't find it? Did you check the other tote over there? Did you check the refrigerator? Great! Still no luck? Then we'll have to order it. We use a single, color coded spreadsheet to identify what parts, part numbers, quantities, priories, subsystems and more are ordered, shipped, or arrived. Our robots are comprised of so many parts, this one spreadsheet helps with a small part of that overall tracking.

I also gave some students an introduction (or refresher) crash course on FRC pneumatics. My 15 productive minutes for the day are done. (Ugh, and I left my frisbee at home today...)

Day 24, 25, 26

There are a lot of common events that FRC teams will go through over the course of build season. The general schedule teams see is: Hype! Intense Focus! Great Ideas! Some Building! and then... the waiting. And some more waiting. And then OH-MY-GOODNESS-ALL-THE-PARTS-ARE-HERE-AND-THE-MACHINES-ARE-RUNNING-AND-HOW-ARE-WE-EVER-GOING-TO-BUILD-THIS-THING, and then the drive team and software kick into high gear while everyone else... waits... Right now, we are still in the waiting phase. As we machine all our parts in house, we have a few very nervous students and mentors who are looking at the flood of parts that will soon be let loose upon them.

Day 20, 21, 22, 23

We are coming to 3 weeks complete of build season and, like many other teams, are looking at our progress saying 'we could be a bit further along...'. (Well, I say this everyday, and will probably keep saying it for the next however many days...) Last year we aggressively cut our schedule with the idea that our time spent in the lab would be more productive, and adding some time away from the lab would keep everyone (students and mentors!) better rested. While we are not working 7 days a week, we have added back some time, with the goal of playing catch-up and getting as close to our original schedule as we can.

Day 18, 19

This post provided by the plausible peak of practicality. The permanent partner profoundly piping past plants and planets. The paradigm protocol: P. Now that we've paid the piper, lets play!

Day 14, 15, 16, 17

First cuts are made! A task that every CyberKnight will learn and participate in every year is the joy of deburr-ing and edge filing. The robot is actually, physically, starting to take shape.

Day 11, 12, 13

On this day last year, we had a wired rolling chassis. This year, we don't.

Guess which team from whom I stole that picture. :-D

Day 8, 9, 10

Day 10 already, almost 1/4 through the season. I hope you're all working hard and making progress! There are certain days when we leave the lab we'll look at the students, the other mentors, give a solid head nod and say, "Yep. That was a good day." We won't talk about the other days.

Day 5, 6, 7

FRC is a process that takes time. We focus on the schedule and try to bend time to our will. It works for a team that has appeared on Einstein 6 times in a row, why not try it ourselves?

Day 3, 4

With our first weekend out of the way, we start to get into the nitty gritty of the season. We'll dream up concepts, analyze and understand them, and the best ideas will eventually wind their way through CAD, metal, and end up on a robot.

Day 1, 2

The most important days of build season have now come and gone. I hope they were used wisely!

This past Saturday, the new game, FIRST Destination: Deep Space, was revealed to teams across the globe. Saturday and Sunday are all about learning the new game, the rules, the points, and building your teams baseline strategy. On these days, we analyze what we want the robot to do and what tasks we will complete to score points. We think about point cycles, point ceilings, qualifying points, ranking points, district points, and more. The important part of these discussions are answering the 'what' question, not the 'how' question.

Port: "Off"-Season

It's been a while, and many things have happened over the past number of months. For better or for worse, the team members never seemed to turn off. Time was spent practicing CAD, learning about machining, spreading FIRST and STEM to our community, visiting our FIRST family across the globe, and tackling three off-season competitions.
The late summer has also been a somewhat interesting time for the team - summer training, off-season competitions, local outreach programs, lab cleaning, and international travel all occurred during a time when our head coach was mostly unavailable. The strength of our leadership students and mentors helped pull the team through a period of tough communication, without dropping any plans or events. I'm most impressed that none of this commitment was forced (outside of drive team practice, more on that later), and yet this year we saw the highest attendance for summer training. So far, I think the growth in knowledge and attitude really shows. PNW 2019 - you've been warned. We're hungry. And we like super hot spicy wings. -Er- Thai food.

Port: Fun In the Sun

Summer is here! We're finally, hopefully, all rested and recovered from the past season of build and competition. With our inspiration set and goals written, our summer training is in full swing. Our new team leadership has been meeting about the direction of the team, recruiting new members, and driving our summer events. Secretly, mentors have also been having a great time, meeting up with other PNW mentors at a potluck hosted by FIRSTWA, and keeping up with our alum and their internships, college graduations and jobs (don't tell the kids though, they aren't supposed to know that old people do fun things).

Port: The Drive to 2019

"So what are you guys going to do tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow we start the 2019 season."

A parent and I were chatting while tearing down the tables and chairs from our end-of-year banquet. In reality, we have already had a few meetings that looked forward to 2019 - retrospectives on what went well and where to improve from 2018, suggestions for recruiting, summer outreach and training, and general housekeeping. Or, literal house-keeping.

Port: Looking Back on Houston

So who are the 4911 CyberKnights?

I wanted to take some time and introduce the 4911 CyberKnights, a 5th year FRC team from Seattle, Washington.

Hello, World

The Start

We all have to start somewhere. Here's an intro.

Just like a team getting a new shop, my writings, musings, postings, and general random thoughts have a new string of 1's and 0's to hide behind. My clever plan is to port all of my existing posts from the CyberKnights website blog to here, and hope nobody notices. The why is actually simple - the team uses the blog space for student creation, sharing updates with families and sponsors, and giving our writing team students a sandbox in which to exercise their creativity. My purpose for writing is much simpler and much less organized: I saw JVN start posting, and decided to copy him.