Week 0 + Kickoff - Anticipation

Team rocking at the off-season event: Bloc Party hosted by FRC2910

Welcome back to yet another year of FRC - new game, new team members, even some new mentors for us! My how time flies, for me personally, this will be my 11th year mentoring, my 7th year writing about it, and my 2nd year with 7627 Bearcat Robotics from Monroe, Washington. Last season, this team lept up the pecking order among PNW teams, and I've heard through the grapevine that teams will be eager to see what we produce this year. Before we jump right into Kick-off and the new season, some quick housekeeping is in order to provide context and background into this team.

For some time in the summer, and a lot of time in the Fall, we had a few students staying involved, continuing to expand their skills, or learn new ones! We had two major projects we wanted to tackle to prepare for the new season - a t-shirt launcher, and a swerve chassis. (Much earlier in the year we wanted these to be the same robot, but the best laid plans of mice and mentors and all that...) The t-shirt launcher was perhaps the more interesting of the two - the premise was learning how to produce a flywheel mechanism, and for things like school football games, the school wanted a t-shirt launcher. Both? Both! Both. In an effort skip some rambling - first step was figuring out how to turn a t-shirt into a ball, then how do we make a mechanism to lob that ball (compression, feed rate, surface contact time, energy transfer, all the good stuff) ? Our lead designer found a very unique t-shirt fold that accomplished just that, then we uh... borrowed... some sketches and concepts from available CAD shared by 4911, and built a single flywheel t-shirt lobber. In general - the concept worked, but it needed a bit more iteration. We also got different t-shirts from the school than our test t-shirt, so compression was impacted, which affected our lob. Did we fail? Maybe? Kinda? Did we learn a lot, and hoped that this season would incorporate launching a game piece? Very much yes!

Testing and tuning our first flywheel launcher!

Our swerve bot was... well a chassis with swerve. A tool to learn as much as we could before the season, so we can hopefully hit the ground running with this tool in season. I feel like so many teams have gone through or read this story, so again I'll skip the details. The main crux - we got a small robot with SDS Mk4 modules running (thanks to a very generous mentor!) and learned quite a few lessons about setting up and running swerve. Due to our location in PNW and the level of support available, SDS modules will be our swerve of choice.

Look ma, swerve!

A final quick round-up of our shop and staff - we got a new toy and some new friends! Installed in the shop this year is a Tormach enclosed CNC mill which our head coach has been frantically learning to work with, both for his class and the robotics work. Alongside the new toy, we had support in the shop fixing and preparing our Glowforge and Wazer, in hopes that we can keep them running smoothly throughout the school year and build season. Lastly We've got some new friends joining us from other friendly area teams - a 2930 graduate will help mentor our design and build teams, and some 2910 software mentors have expressed an interest in helping us out on their off-days. (Major thanks, kudos, and welcomes all around!)

Now - here. we. go!

This past Saturday (January 6th for those keeping score at home) FIRST kicked off the 2024 FRC season by presenting the new game - Crescendo! (and there was much rejoicing.) Our kick-off day flowed very similar to last year - watch videos, read rules, identify robot actions, points tables, then start building potential strategies, all culminating in our robot action list (hopefully prioritized!). After watching the stream and seeing the game animation for the first time, my gut reaction was - poor human players. A single person responsible for earning coopertition ranks, and selecting if and when to turbocharge their alliance points scoring. After diving into the rules and point breakdowns some more, my mid-day gut reaction was - huh, this scoring is a bit more tricky for both tele-op scoring and endgame points. Well done 2021 teams and their game submissions! (Side bar for broader audience: this year's game is a smash-up of two game design concepts submitted by FRC teams from the 2021 season which was... unique... due to global pandemic things happening.)

I will still pretty much always call the first weekend of a new season the most important day(s) of the entire year. Each team has to work through their own process to break down the game, and then lay out the framework for the rest of their season, taking all their resources, goals, and abilities into consideration. Last year, Bearcats chased and achieved success, earning the teams first appearance at District Championships and competing effectively on that stage. Our goals this year build on that growth - wanting to play in eliminations at DCMP and potentially earn a spot at the next level of competition. (Ok, the kids also desperately want a blue banner after two red ribbons last year - my mentor mind loves the drive and ambition, but hates putting that as a goal with so many factors in play that are out of our control. <Future voice> "Hey team, we had a great year, built a robot that met all our requirements, played our strategy and reliability every match, played in elims at DCMP, but because we didn't earn a blue banner at any event I guess this season is just a total failure. Better luck next time.") Where was I? Right. Meeting goals. From our experience, our best tool to meet these goals is our schedule.

Most of the team reading rules and getting familiar with the new game.

Data is abundant, and only growing more-so every year. Hm, climbing contributes to an RP? Well let's look at the last 3 games that had similar climbs and find successful climb percentages from week 1 to CMP. Want a graph of scoring aperture with minor fluctuations to determine probabilities of scoring at a given distance to the target? I think the first graph of that appeared less than an hour after kick-off... It's really impressive to see every possible way teams approach breaking down the game and what data they create or utilize when evaluating priorities or needs versus wants. Bearcats... kinda skips a lot of that. (Maybe not entirely - it's amazing what information students may not realize they are incorporating into their gut checks and even calculated decisions...) For the most part, we aim to be a competent alliance partner. How do we think we can best support scoring points to win? Or add game pieces to the Melody? Or activate the Ensemble? We can guess, but we don't really know what our alliance partners can and will do so, let's build and focus on ourselves. If we continue to find success through growth, will this mindset and approach to the game change? Definitely. But that's future us's problem.

So, what did we look at and decide upon? Firstly we decided we like having lunch at noon, but we can also totally pivot and run out for pizza at 2pm if plans go awry. (Being able to pivot and adjust plans on the fly is a very important skill in FRC-land.) Well, similar to the list above - we feel it will be prudent to be able to score Notes, both for points and as contribution to the Melody. We believe we can manage this while also climbing, aiding in the Ensemble. (Our human player has skipped school for days now, just practicing throwing these Notes. I'm pretty sure he's got some trick shots...) As far as scoring Notes, we also looked at being able to supply Amp Notes so that we can turbocharge our alliance's points, and help with the Coopertition RP, further improving our chances to earn a Melody.

We don't need data to tell us that Kick-off pancakes are amazing!
Edit - this was right next to an open garage door, don't worry!

All this loosely sits on top of a foundation of guidelines - some from our own experiences, and some blatantly stolen from other teams: Reliability - drive 100% of every match. KISS - Keep it Simple Students (this might be different for each team, but with our goals leaning more toward competitiveness than exploration, we can go further with a simple robot that performs well). 1678's Golden Rules - shamelessly stolen from 1678. Schedule - Our priority 0 is always <awareness> of the schedule. (And I personally love week 1 events to help drive the schedule.) Does this mean extra hours and crunch and getting every possible last item done every day and week we planned to do it? Not at all. Does it mean making decisions and drawing lines in the sand (hopefully sooner than later?) - Yep! 

One final decision of the weekend was one of these lines in the sand - we're going swerve this year! We're using a square chassis this year! We're treating it pretty much like a COTS part! Here's the size we've chosen, here's the support rails, and this is our chassis, for better or worse. Making this decision may impact our highest available potential, but it allows us to move faster and meet our schedule goals. Everything is a trade-off.

These showed up at my house, not quite sure what to do with them...

QotW:

Student 1: "Mentors, do you have any input? Are we on the right track?"

Mentor 5: "We've already solved this in our heads, we're just waiting for you lot to catch up!"