Week 4 - Manufacturing

Everyone hard at work, chasing the Week 4 goals.

Cold has turned into wet and cold here in the PNW. Fortunately the shop is nice and warm! With the conclusion of week 4, we are halfway through our build season - 4 weeks from now, we will be a competition. Let's unearth our Week 4 - grab your shovel and let's dig in!

Our calendar has a few notes for Week 4, but really they all roll into the main target: Minimum Viable Product robot. At the end of 4 weeks, we want to have <something> together that can perform actions per our first and second robot priorities. It doesn't have to be (and likely is not) final. It can have parts made with wood, duct tape, bubble gum - please don't use bubble gum - it just has to exist. And we're behind, based on our schedule. We're making great progress with our CAD and starting to assemble manufactured parts, but we don't have any pieces on the robot yet. After 3 weeks, the scoreboard now says Bearcats 3 - Schedule 1.

Mentor Musings:

When should we push, and when should we pull? FRC can be rough sometimes - there is a lot to do in a short amount of time. Adding FRC on top of regular schoolwork, family commitments, jobs, social activities is rather insane on the face of things. Regular meeting times can vary wildly among teams - 10 hours a week up to 40 (or 60, 70, 80... if it’s week 7 and the robot still isn't finished...). Generally speaking, <more> can happen if you provide <more> time, but where is the line?

Obligatory "Robot blog hiking photo".
One step at a time can take you to the top!

It's kinda weird, but there are trade offs here too! This is likely a multi-dimensional puzzle, but for ease of conversation, I'll focus on a spectrum of healthy determination and grit, to unhealthy burnout. Each student (and mentor) will have different levels of commitment, and <just> beyond that, their grit level. Get into good grit, and the rewards feel awesome - that one extra night of CAD, that one evening where we finished that final task for the week - hopefully it shows up Sunday afternoon on the carpet. Hopefully it can be an effective lesson of just how far we can push ourselves or others. Continuing to extend past grit is where you find burnout - and this is where I've seen the most mistakes creep in. Six extra hours at the shop are useless if you make a mistake and need to start the task over. The balancing act is practicing and learning when it's ok to push, but more especially when you need to pull back and take a deserved rest.

There's a lot of inspirational quotes out there for pushing yourself into that good determined zone - here's a few of my favourites:

• If you want something you've never had, you've got to do something you've never done.

• The difference between 'try' and 'triumph' is a little 'umph'.

• Those last 5 push-ups are where the good stuff really happens.

For me, once I've done those last 5 push-ups though, I Like this quote from a yoga instructor:

• I am enough.

Electrical:

What did electrical do this week? Honestly, not much. Our shiny new 2025 batteries arrived, and we put leads on them. Otherwise, they are keeping busy for the good of the team, helping with some late prototypes, crafting more sponsor emails - continuing to be engaged during our meeting times.

Mechanical:

How about mechanical? Also, well, honestly not much. Unless you include manufacturing lots of parts. 3D Printing lots of parts. Laser cutting lots of parts. Bandsawing lots of parts. Assembling lots of parts. It appears the CAD slump is over. But, yeah, not too much.

The fit and finish we achieved in 2023...

We have enough parts manufactured and enough ordered parts arrived that we're able to start building! With assembling, we're also now seeing the fruits of our CNC labors. Most of the parts are simply fitting together, no match-drilling or filing required! Though we also have found one part that we have to remake. Lessons in organization and detailed note-taking have been learned!

Turned up our manufacturing to 11!
(Ok, we're still like, 5, or 6. But it's better than a 3!)

Design:

Through the week, the Design team converted the last few space claims and krayola CAD into more detailed parts and assemblies. The highlight of the week was a very productive full design review with some other mentor friends from a different FRC team. We got a lot of great feedback about mechanisms and design, structure, CAD tips and tricks, and strategic design. After the review we deleted the whole robot and started over! Kidding, though we did make a few quite significant pivots (hehe, pivot. Ah that's funny - inside story.) which led to a long Saturday CAD-a-thon.

Design changes required re-testing some prototypes!

At the weekend's conclusion we are still behind, but we have a much more clear path ahead of us. It's the end of Week 4, we were struggling to fit a coral mechanism around an algae mechanism, and the algae mechanism was still a rough space claim, rather than a fully-defined out design. Manipulating algae is the lowest priority on our list. And now we are cutting it. We get all this time back now, rather than struggling and attempting to squeeze in the time later - or worse, cutting it later.

Software:

This week the Software team continued testing vision processing in our autonomous paths, and mapped driver/operator controls to controller buttons. One nicety of this field is the quadrant identity - a single path can be mirrored and/or inverted, providing us with 2 possible starting positions for each Alliance color. Having multiple starting positions should allow us to be a good alliance partner with a variety of teammates.

Using the space we have available to us.

Week 4 Wisdom: Manufacturing

Eventually we'll do a Weekly Wisdom on software, which I actually pretend to know. But before we get there, this week I get to pretend to know about manufacturing! There's two types: additive and subtractive! That's all the facts I know about manufacturing!*

Now to make up the rest of this segment. Similar to what was mentioned with CAD a few weeks ago - know your tools! Routers, mills, lasers, lathes, and printers all perform certain jobs very well, but can also ruin tools and materials if not used correctly. I'm not going to go making specific recommendations about what are the best tools or which tool works best on which part, cause I will be 100% wrong. But I will say that there are a few things to really pay attention to when using these machines.

Critical Dimensions - so called because they're well, critical. If the designer has an 85-tooth belt between two 24-tooth pulleys, you can bet that the bearing center-to-center distance is kinda important. I suppose this goes back to designers rather than manufacturers, but, especially with less precise equipment, focusing on the critical dimensions will ensure the parts still perform as expected. Fortunately, there has been increasing availability of pre-drilled tubing, and pre-fabricated gussets and other join plates.

Standardizing hardware can help with efficient manufacturing. We use all 3/16" rivets, and try to use 10-32 hardware whenever possible. This means we have a lot of common tools - if we break one, we likely have spares, but also we generally have fewer tool changes, as all the holes are the same size. (Makes packing for competition a little easier too!)

Starting with an open and clean work area.
(It actually stayed pretty clean through 2 days of build!)

Once again, organization. It probably goes without saying at this point, but I do like the sound of my own clicking keyboard, so I'm going to spell it out anyway. A bill of materials (BOM) will list all the parts on the robot, including the subset of all parts to be manufactured. Being able to track the state (and location!) of all the pieces that have been manufactured, which have not been manufactured, what stock material is available, all helps the overall efficiency of the shop. In the past, we've used a whiteboard with each machine, student/mentor name, part list and expected run-time - a full schedule of the day for each person on each machine. We've taped and labeled our parts - knowing which subsystem they belong to, right and left sides, number and quantity, so we can better coral-ate a part to a line in the BOM.

Lastly, have a backup plan for manufacturing. Things break at inconvenient times, you may not have a given material on hand, or CAD took way too long, and while you can manufacture, you simply can't produce every piece in the remaining time. We've found that reaching out to nearby FRC teams has been super helpful for things like finding stock, and sometimes finding space on a router table. Sponsors can be extremely helpful for manufacturing support. Something we are looking into for this year and robot are some of the external suppliers - Fabworks and SendCutSend. We've heard good things, and they are commonly referenced in a number of Open Alliance posts. If we use them (and I remember), I'll provide a review later in the season.

*So Kayla proof-read this once again, walked over to my desk and asked "What about forging?" So, maybe there are three types of manufacturing? I now want to forge a part for this years robot.

Quote of the week:

"That's why we get paid the big bucks."

"You're getting paid to do this?"

"We get paid in tacos."

"When we see you at DCMP I will buy you a taco. Just one, for you all to split."

-B