Week 1: A New Beginning

Kickoff Weekend

Every year, a new FIRST Robotics Competition game is introduced to 3000+ high school and similar aged teams across the globe. This kickoff will lay down the ground rules for scoring points, robot restrictions (usually around size and reach), and how events will operate. They don't give any information on what or how to build - teams have to figure that out for themselves!

Here is the game animation the teams saw this past Saturday: (Jan 7th, 2023)

From myself and Kayla, one other thing that's new this year is a trading of colors! New year, new team! We're now mentoring the orange and black Bearcat Robotics of Monroe High School!

This year's blog posts come as an adaptation of weekly blog posts written for a team sponsor (by me, of course. I should really just write here and point the company to this blog... room to grow for next year?) Some content will be altered to be more FRC-focused, to help teams better understand our journey. 

Let's dive in!

Week 1

Week one (really weekend one) is all about setting goals and expectations. Once the game is unveiled, the rulebook is released that shows how points are scored, specific actions that benefit alliances, and of course robot <stuff> that's not allowed. (Some of the "not allowed" can mean your robot is not legal to play, or if you perform an action during a match, you'll get penalized points.)

Goals come in two flavours: What are our team goals for the season, and what are our robot goals for match strategy. Team goals will feed into our robot goals, calendar, design, can even impact how we mentors interact and involve ourselves in the design and build of the robot. Robot goals are how we will measure our success in understanding and playing the game.

2023 Team focused goals

Team goals for this year include improving the team and robot organization and strategy, improving awareness within the school, and earning a spot at the District Championship!

2023 Robot focused goals, and an excerpt from the Power Pyramid!

Our robot priorities are specific to this year's game. Driving reliably and consistently is super important! We plan to follow that up with scoring low as quickly as possible, setting up reliable autonomous routines, then looking to be effective at scoring high for as many points as possible!

We achieved all this goal and prioritization just on kickoff weekend!

Through the week we started prototyping concepts for our game piece intake. One tricky thing this year is how different the two game pieces are, but we are hoping to find one mechanism that can grab both, effectively.

Referencing Robot in 3 Days, and Open Alliance threads, we created early CAD mocks

Prototypes that can mimic movement are really helpful!

Physical prototype, we rolled the chair (with the cone game piece) into the rollers to simulate the movement of a robot acquiring the cone. It worked really well!

Early CAD to understand full dimensions

Elsewhere in CAD, another student started looking at the geometry needed to score in the middle and high positions.

Kit chassis already paying off!

For speed, our plan this year is to buy as many existing components as we can. FIRST offers a "kit chassis" - the base structure and wheels that everything can attach to. After one week we have a rolling chassis, and zero design effort was needed to create it, leaving our design team free to work on game-specific mechanisms!

I want to add a bit more information here. Using the kit chassis was probably the <best> thing for our season. (I can say that, now that our season is done :-D) Even before kickoff weekend, we made the decision to use the kit chassis. Our goals were to build simple, reliable robots, and build foundational knowledge to improve the team's competitive-ness. Before this year, we talked, and look at last years robot. Last year this team used swerve, and had many stories about it not driving straight, acting weird in auto, and having other electrical and operational issues. Above the deck, last year's robot had a simple pick up and dump mechanism that scored in the lower hub only. Watching matches and comparing to other robots... it was not the most competitive mechanism out there.

Our resources for this year were a (lovingly stated) 2 design and 1.5 software students. I asked how we wanted to spend our resources - investing time and energy figuring out all the swerve issues from last year? Or using known, reliable components, so that we can spend our engineering effort on the scoring mechanism? I think the outcome of that conversation went really well! On kick-off weekend we wrote on the whiteboard "be a good lazy engineer" - if something already exists, let's use it!

Parts!

Love the smell of fresh wire in the morning!

The most important tool we used...

It's been only week 1, and we've re-used so many resources. Above we had the excerpt from the Power Pyramid, we copied an ordering document to get a head start on buying supplies, and we also stole a build season calendar. Probably the most important tool in the arsenal - the calendar kept everything moving forward in roughly the same direction. It helped create daily task lists, and set achievable, mini goals for every week of build season. Did we meet them all? Definitely not! Did it help anyway? You betcha.

Week 1 flew by, and fortunately, with the improved organization and weekly goals, we are right on track! See you again after next week!