Week 3 - Ordering

A common scene:
Laptop connected to robot,
Everyone staring.

Finally the passage of time seems to be back to normal; Week 3 felt like a standard, full-length week. And yet Week 3 is also over. Some things are starting to get built, other things getting bought. Details are getting ironed out by design and software. So grab your swim fins, and let's dive in!

Thinking about our calendar (it's really big and visible in the classroom), our Week 3 goals are mostly complete. The big tricky one was - we wanted to have a full wood mockup of our number 1 and 2 priority subsystems on the robot so that software could really get into testing and tuning the controls. Building a big lifting system from wood would have been counterproductive to all the time we spent making forward progress elsewhere, so we didn't finish that item on the list.

Our other goals for the week are finalizing CAD details such that we can start manufacturing parts, ordering all the parts we don't have in stock and/or can't make in-house, (gears and pulleys and belts - oh my!), and continuing to work on our software controls. This period of the season is always pretty special - the digital items on the computer are starting to look like an actual robot, and soon will take on a physical form. With our chassis consisting of four metal tubes connecting modules, a wood plank, and piles of wire and sensors and other stuff, even this will look radically different once parts start getting prepared.

Mentor Musings:

Every build season we have a tendency to always feel behind; always want to be a little further along. If we had prepared better, if we had more supplies in the shop, if we were all super smart, we could be as far along as that one team in Open Alliance. Is that really the best measuring tool? Open Alliance is a fantastic resource - both for the sharing teams, and the consuming teams.

Open Alliance CAD FRC6328

OA might/may/should/probably have a strong catch-22 about it: The teams that produce the most involved, insightful, and informative blogs are generally those teams who have the resources for training, supplies on hand, tools or sponsors to get parts made quickly. They perform the most prototyping and testing because they have the resources to do so. Their CAD looks further along because they have multiple experienced students and mentors. They're able to build quickly because they already have three elevator kits in stock, or a wide selection of belts and pulleys, or a practice chassis put together in pre-season that they're able to use for a rolling test bed.

Open Alliance CAD FRC4481

So we're starting Week 4 and our CAD still isn't done, and we don't have a wood/plastic/metal alpha-spec robot running around while a second robot is getting built, and for the resources (and schedule) of our team, this is fine. (Second time I've said that this season!) The best robots we are seeing in OA are inspiration, helping guide or validate some of our design choices. And we are still on track for our team and our schedule.

Open Alliance Robot FRC111

Software:

For the first time this season, the robot has left the building. Well, left the shop and headed into the main school building. We have a space where we can tape out about half an FRC field and run the robot through its paces. To start, we're running ssslllooowww as all the electronics are still held on by velcro, zip ties, hopes, and dreams. But we are running our planned autonomous paths. In week 3! With Swerve! Our brand new learnings this year now involve getting vision processing from our onboard camera to adjust and correct deviations in our path. Expectedly, that's not quite working yet.

Does the robot see the paper? Or the Student..?

Design:

Our full robot CAD quickly got full, then slowly got more refined over the week. While we hyper-focused on getting our primary mechanisms together, we also knew we needed additional mechanisms for our lower priority items like climbing and handling the Algae game piece. We created very simple shapes and volumes in CAD as space claims - providing visual cues for how large mechanisms and game pieces are, and where they fit and move on the robot.

Our goal of simplicity involves designing simple mechanisms, but also ensuring the mechanisms don't cause interference and require additional programming to prevent self-destruction. Sequenced operations look cool, but take time during build season that we hope to use for drive practice and tuning autonomous actions.

Electrical:

This week electrical really started crackin' on. We got some brand new, more powerful motors. Called Krakens. Our electrical team wired up our new motors and added two of them to our software testbed for, well, testing.

Manufacturing:

Our build team started with a quiet week, and ended with our first completed robot part! All our test pieces on the baby mill and baby CNC taught us a lot (including how to manage some oddities when we have to re-zero longer parts that we have to flip to operate on both ends). As the design team finishes more of their work, even more parts should be available to manufacture in the next week.

We are finally in the swing of the Tormach CNC though! For the past two years, we have relied on the accuracy of students with center punches and hand drills. The very first part created this year was... well cut on a chop saw - but the hole patterns were all performed by a machine. This should translate into quicker and easier assembly of all the parts, as there will be fewer errors and deviations to correct. Imagine that, all the holes simply lining up and you put a bolt or rivet into them... It's like magic.

My favorite part of this image is the
printed part drawing, right on the machine.

Week 3 Wisdom: Ordering

The best orders are the orders you don't have to make.

Wait - Make sure you pay extra for shipping - gotta go fast!

Actually - Try to order as little as possible and use your machines and tools as often as you can.

Rather -  This is a learning opportunity, let the students manage orders and see how much this stuff costs.

Instead - OnShape and other software have tools to help track the Bill of Materials, use that to tell us what to order.

A lot can be said about ordering parts, stock, and other supplies. It's probably going to be different for every team, perhaps differing between seasons as knowledge, funding, sponsors, etc change. It's very likely that at some point in the season, most teams will have to order parts. Once again this "wisdom" section will probably be random blabbering about what I'm familiar with, and likely act as a casual reminder to those who've been doing this for a lot longer than me.

As some base context: we are a team that needs to watch the budget. We have a few highly communicative mentors who manage ordering for the team, tracked in a shared Google Sheet. We try to order a few things pre-season speculatively, but we can't quite afford things such as specific mechanism kits, or even second robot parts. Most pre-season speculative stuff is chassis stuff - metal tubes, Swerve Drive Specialties modules (name-dropping in the blog, can we get sponsorship now? :-D ), and core electronics. Stuff we know we're going to need.

In season, we're super appreciative of all the vouchers and codes that FIRST sponsors provide. AndyMark, Rev, AutomationDirect and more all offer some large or small dollar amount off of orders. As we look to make purchases in season, we will frequently cross-shop among the different suppliers that offer like-parts to see where we have credit or not. We also look at shipping location because, well, we will need whatever part we end up ordering, likely soon! FIRST Choice was actually very kind to us this year with a brand new Kraken and some squishy wheels. To sum up - FIRST provides a number of resources to help your wallet - you may as well make the most of it! Most vouchers are valid well beyond the build season too!

Organization and ordering go pretty well hand-in-hand. Starting with shop organization - it's good to know where your own stuff is! We recently organized a number of bins, and when designing some belt and pulley systems, we cracked open the bin and were able to design for belts we had on hand - no ordering needed! For parts we do need - both to order and to manufacture - we try to maintain a Bill of Materials - everything in the CAD as an organized list. Some items then get put onto our Purchasing Google Sheet. The purchasing sheet then links to the actual product web page, lists if the part was ordered, by whom, what subsystem it belongs to, and whether it arrived. In the past, each subsystem lead has been given their own bin for their subsystem, and maintains ownership of the parts and spares through build and competition season, until we re-organize all the bins in preparation for the next season.

We didn't have to order these 3D printed parts.

Quote of the week:

Student: "You should play Slay the Spire! And Outer Wilds!"

Mentor: "You should design a robot!"