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| This is totally how it works. Every time. |
Post-Unveiling
Thanks all for joining! I heard a lot of comments from attendees that they enjoyed the night, seeing 8 robots in the flesh, and 5 additional teams sharing CAD and their own teaser videos. Our stream had 70 unique viewers, and over 200 guests in-person. That's crazy! In the tail-end of build season, gathering the attention of almost 300 people for a few hours to look at and poke robots. It was a great night, thank you if you joined the stream and hope you enjoyed it as much as us!
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| Following the stage presentations, the 8 robots were set out on display for everyone to see! |
There's two specific things about Unveiling that I enjoy. The first is more, real-world skills development. Take a few of the most introverted high school engineering nerds (said endearingly), and throw them on a stage in front of some hundred people. Normally, not a pretty sight. Here though, the speakers are energetic, excited, talking about parts of the robot they built, their favorite parts, interesting details, or secret insider information. One of our lead students let slip that "We use software to control the robot." Whelp, secret's out I guess.
The second thing about Unveiling that's fantastic is - here's 8 robots, on the ground before you, 2 weeks before the first competition. You can see, touch, and visualize each part that's on each bot, see how it works, how it moves, how it's powered, and more. Pictures and videos online are great - but for those hands-on learners out there, nothing beats having the robot in front of you.
Speaking of robots...
We needed a short break. While we found some issues and had a lot of work to do, we successfully stayed away from the lab on Sunday, and got back to work on Monday. In my downtime, I went for a hike.
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| Breath of fresh air, and what a view. Always good to have a rest day. |
Lovely. Anyway - speaking of robots -
CyberKnights 2020 Robot
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| Definitely not doing updates... literally minutes before Unveiling. We're far more professional than that! |
Our student lead hasn't given the name, but he jokingly said Celery, so, for the time being, let me tell you about Celery! It's green, very fibrous... kidding. (The next day...) And now I have to re-write this whole section, because apparently he did make up his mind, and the robot is called "Deadeye". Lame. Celery is so much cooler. I mean think about it, neither of my eyes are dead. I wouldn't want the robots Limelight eye to die... Celery is full of water and nutrients. Good things! Good stuff! Should have just kept Celery... Whatever ugh. Let me tell you about our robot - UnlivingOptic. Er - sorry - Deadeye!
Our robot for the 2020 FRC season is a low bot with a high shot. At reveal time, we have the finished mechanisms for core game cycles - intake, index, shoot, and are hard at work finishing up some design and manufacturing our climber and Wheel of Fortune devices. Overall, we wanted a robot that, after some drive practice and tuning would be capable of solo Energizing the Shield Generator, and contributing to the Shield Generator Switch. Here's a breakdown of the current systems, and plans for what's still to come! Here too, is a short teaser video, with a full reveal to come later in the season.
Our base is a pretty familiar looking swerve, using the 2910 Mk2 modules and Falcon motors for steering and propulsion. A few firsts for us this year - first swerve, first tube chassis, first time using non-CIM drive. It's been a wild ride, and yet our software has been on fire with their ability to ramp-up and control the robot. (Not literally on fire, that would not be fine.)
Intake
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| Shiny, overly-complex intake. |
Eh, our intake. Well. Good principle, good prototype, and... once the current final version was manufactured... it worked! For a few seconds - and then the motors started smoking. Sorta back to the drawing board. We're likely going to spin up something super quick and dirty to give to software and drive team while we iron out the issues presented by the first metal version of the intake.
Anyway - what we revealed certainly looked cool. A full-width roller bar at the front, powered by a Redline motor off some bevel gears and printed pulleys, all that jazz. In front of the main bar, we plan to have a poly-carb "beater bar" designed to take the hits, as the intake reaches outside the frame perimeter. Behind and above the main bar, we had a series of 6 rollers, perpendicular to the main bar, to center the balls as they came in. The full system used belts and gears - really the whole collector drivetrain is (was?) powered by two Redline motors. The only intake part not powered by the Redlines is the... uh... donger. I like dog-tail. So, against the semantics of all the designers, I'm going to call it the dog-tail here! :-D The dog-tail manages the transition between the center of the intake and the indexer. The dog-tail itself has a wheel powered by the indexer belt system - subject to change to a bag motor if software control becomes an issue. The intake design should have allowed us to process balls up to a 4-wide arrangement, and serialize them all into the indexer with some squishing, but no jamming!
Why all the complexity? We had proto-typed some vectored intake wheels, big, small, bought, printed, etc. and they worked, but we felt that were a bit slow, and inconsistent with serializing. Hence, the more complicated intake. Of course, more complicated means more issues, and having it arrive so late, means less time to iterate before out first competition. But hey, we're CyberKnights. (Just like 195!)
Indexer
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| CyberKnight robots always look better with red bumpers... (Well, West Coast CyberKnights anyway...) |
The indexer (magazine was another term used, not bad!) comprises the bulk of the robot. It's where we store 5 balls internal to the robot. Our indexer uses 2 sets of belt-driven, inter-connected rollers, powered by two Falcons. The rollers sit above and below the balls - spaced such that there are always 3 points of contact on each ball as it moves through the system. Software uses 2 beam breaks to identify when we have a ball prepared, and automatically rotates the indexer roller-chain such that each ball inside should translate one position forward. It's taking some tuning, but looking great!
Once full, the system can then run at 100% speed toward the shooter, emptying the indexer in less than a second. Another goal for the full intake-index-shoot system was to have the ability to pass one ball through each component in less than 2 seconds. (Getting those final buzzer shots before we climb.)
Shooter
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| Shooting blind with our dead eyes! |
We have a fixed position, fixed hood, single flywheel shooter at the top end of the indexer. Powered by two Falcons, the flywheel is two 4" black, WestCoast Products solid roller wheels (with some added mass). Our targeting system uses the Limelight to detect angle and distance, and can adjust the flywheel speed accordingly. For those following along other threads on Chief Delphi, we too were hit by the master-follow stutter of the Falcons, and have set up to run dual master control. With the current tuning, we are about 40% accurate in the Inner Port, 90% accurate in the Outer Port, and can shoot anywhere between 10 and 40 feet to the target. With 2" of compression, our shooter also has a party trick of spewing yellow fuzz when shooting! Going to look great against the silver (or black if we build a second, anodized bot)!
Coming Soon
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| The full, complete, definitely going to change a bit, robot. |
Next up are our climber and Wheel of Fortune (WoF) mechanisms. It's almost one system, as the WoF (and LimeLight!) mount to the climber super structure. The WoF currently plans to use a pneumatic actuator to move from stored to working height and back. It uses a belt with zip-ties at set intervals to interact with the Control Panel stand-offs, allowing us greater control when rotating to a fixed color position. It will mount between the climber posts, and stow below the shooter exit. Naturally, we're using one of the standard color sensors to monitor rotations and position of the wheel.
Our climber is a 4-stage telescoping box tube elevator. It uses springs to lift to height, deploys a pair of tethered hooks, and has a pneumatic brake to hold it in position (up or down). The tethers are tied into a winch, using one-way power-takeoff from our indexer (2 Falcons) to lift the robot to height. Our goal with weight distribution and winch position is that our "climb" position has us falling out and away from the opposing teams Rendezvous Zone, hopefully preventing end-game penalties.
And... that's it? It certainly takes a lot to get here (and we're not even done yet!). Good luck teams in these final weeks!
CyberKnight Mentors, leading by example, gracefully and with kindness.
Mentor - Do you know how to use the manual mill? We need to make a lot of shafts. And by we, I mean you. Come here I'll show you.
-B
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