2020 - Infinite Change

Major summer project - cleaning and re-organization!

It feels like it's been quite a long summer and fall, yet we still have so much we want to get finished before build season starts. At the end of last year, CyberKnights shared that we would be getting a new head coach. This summer, we were joined by Stephanie Morrison - new head coach of the CyberKnights, and immediately we started focusing on what changes we should make to become even more complete and competitive for the upcoming season.

New Faces

Our new head coach comes with more than a decade of experience - an FRC alum herself, she has recently been working with other powerhouse teams in the PNW - 1318, 1983, and most recently 5803. She and her husband Evan made a few appearances in some of our CyberKnight promotional and Chairman's material in years past. (They appeared in last years kick-off blog post as well!) Alongside Steph and Evan, we've gained some new mentors who will be helping us with mechanical systems, electrical controls, and finance!

As with every year, our student body has changed as well, new faces learning the ropes and looking up to their peers, and veteran faces, returning to take on new roles and responsibilities. First step for everyone is always learning everyone's names. ... It takes a while...

Summer Projects

This summer kicked off many different projects - a new test chassis, a new look for the lab, and the always familiar training. Every year our summer looks different, but this year probably takes the cake with regards to things we accomplished. I'm sure a lot of folks arms still hurt!

Lab Cleaning

Same space, new look.

New management, new look. One of the most obvious visible changes at the moment is our lab space! As a lot of the history and stories of past prototypes, parts, student lesson plans and more has moved away, we took time to clean up, re-arrange, and organize our shop. Overall I think it looks great! Our practice space is about the same - 1/3 of a field. We now have more table space on which to work. Our pit has a designated 10x10 space, so we can keep it up year-round and make season specific changes at any time. Our machine row has been de-cluttered (slightly... as best it can). Most importantly for a number of people though, is that we now have a drinking fountain.

How long with this will look like this...

The lab re-organization also allowed us to re-arrange our shared classroom and hallway space, freeing up a location closer to the workshop for our business team to operate. No more dual buildings! That had been driving me batty for the past several years. The only challenge now will be handling noise and distraction for the students designing in CAD and writing software. We all have a cleaner shared space to use, but it did come at the cost to our row of CAD desktops.

How many teeth ya got?

Overall, again, the space looks great. We threw out a lot of old broken tools. (I'm pretty sure we don't have a single motor with 'bad?' written on it anymore!) Our common parts, fasteners, gears, pulleys, belts, etc are organized and re-located for easier use during the season. The space is good, our next improvement will be in maintaining the space - how to keep the tables clean, tools put back where they belong, floor swept, and more. (If we crack this, I promise to let everyone know how!)

Robotics Workshops

This year we hosted our first ever workshops at the school! We had several teams join us for presentations and discussions on vision software, scouting, competitive improvement, mechanical design, and more! We are thankful for the teams who joined us, and are working to edit the videos to share out to the FRC community as a whole! (I will update and add links to this post once they are available. If I don't, then clearly the dog ate them. Always happens...)

Internally, we also hosted a workshop day that we called simply: 'How to CyberKnight'. Our mentors and veteran students led 15-20 minute 'speed-dating' style sessions to groups of 3-4 students describing all aspects of our team. We had talks on almost all aspects of our team, and FRC in general:

• Design
• Software
• Scouting/Strategy
• Sponsors
• Media
• Outreach
• Manufacturing
• FRC History and Overview
• Electrical
• Coaching the Mental Game
• Safety
• Business Plan
• Storefront

The day opened with a review of our CyberKnight handbook - requirements and expectations of students, leads, and mentors, travel team requirements, attendance requirements, and more. (Again, lot of things we wanted to get done before build season! I'll share the link to our handbook when its available!)

Unified Robotics Shout Out

I won't shout out all the other local and school demos, but one of my favorite fall outreach events is the Unified Robotics State Championship. This year was the 5th Championship, held at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, attended by 12 schools, and 36 teams. CyberKnights volunteered with field setup, running scores, queuing and more, while several CyberKnight mentors held prominent event roles such as head referee (yours truly!), judge advisor, and event coordinator, while CyberKnight students did the real work and helped the event run smoothly. Unified Robotics is an amazing example of what all middle and high school students are capable of. Partners and athletes both learn from each other, develop social and teamwork skills, and still compete at a high level.

This year, we had a special guest from Special Olympics Texas, as they prepare for running their own state championship. Internationally, Unified Robotics had garnered interest from parties in Dubai and Greece. All this started because one teenager had an idea, and asked the right people for help and support. You can change the world.

Swerve!

Robotic-ly speaking (Robotically? Robo-tickle-y? Robo-tick-ally? Robot tick ally! Yes Yess! spy on all the other teams and - I'm getting off-topic.) Robotic-ly speaking, yes I saved the best for last. We built a swerve drive chassis this fall, and learned a LOT about how to debug NEO's and Spark Max controllers. (Big smile-y face.)

Our veteran students and new coach have seen the growth of swerve opportunities and its competitive advantage in recent years. Now seemed like the right time to try it for ourselves - training new members in our design, manufacturing, and software process, and learning about the trade-offs we would see with a swerve drive-train.

Swerve-y. Also, we did clean up the wiring.

The core build was relatively smooth - we are very close with 2910 and ended up relying on their already available resources for swerve modules, assembly, and code. We built a Versaframe chassis on which to mount the modules following some great discussion about designing for strength and gusset sizing and manufacturing. The gussets and belly pan were all CAD'ed, CAM'ed, and cut in house on our router. We then immediately ran into a brick wall. (Not, literally...) While the chassis was finished decently early in the summer/fall off-season, we ran into software and electrical issues at every turn. By the end of our diagnosis, working with teams on Chief Delphi, Jack in the Bot, and emails to other teams who used NEO's and Spark's, we finally pointed the finger at our motor controllers, and swapped them out. Currently, our swerve chassis is running full CIM's and Talon SRX's for propulsion and steering, and driving.... roughly smooth.

Very recently (just before Christmas week), the team got together to take a look at the overall picture of our summer project - what did we learn? What parts worked well? What parts of our swerve experience would be high or low risk if we were to build a competition robot? (The motors were definitely high risk. Fortunately, looks like we have some new options coming out...) Our driver and strategy leads were impressed with the swerve, and are likely hoping to see us use this option in the next season (if it makes sense to do so).

The exit criteria - determining open risks of applying swerve to the 2020 season.

Ready As We'll Ever Be

And here we are now - as I write this, we are one week away from kick-off. I am ready and excited, and thinking we still have a lot to do to prepare. But we are never really ready for build season. We make the best of the data we have at the time to make the best decisions moving forward. We know roughly what we are capable of building. We try to manage our resources for a smooth, consistent build season. We steal ideas and concepts from other teams. (Er - borrow?) We have fun, make friends, and chase excellence. And we wear black. (and red.)

Good luck teams!

-B