FRC Season Cancelled Due to Spreading Pandemic

With the spread of covid-19 most public facilities have been closed and events such as the NBA season cancelled. On March 12, 2020 the Infinite Recharge season was suspended, due to the coronavirus pandemic (covid-19). The announcement is on their website with a Q & A on frequently asked questions. A big question that my team has been wondering is whether they will redo the season next year being that many teams were unable to compete?

Robot is climbing and ready for the finishing touches

We got all the code working and the mechanics of the robot figured out. The wiring was done in a hurry to get things working so we will have to re-route wires and clean them up before competition, but otherwise things are looking pretty good.

Driving Practice
Robot Climbing

We have started doing some driving practice and we even got the climbing mechanism working. According to the team mentor our robot this year is the “best robot we have build yet”. Not only is it the most robust robot, but there are multiple mechanisms, autonomous code, it generally works well, and it also looks really cool (we haven’t added stickers or LEDs yet, oh and clearly the bumpers). The color wheel is also working now. We never used the color sensor on our robot before, so it took a bit to get it working, but it works really well.

Color Wheel

CAD Drawings Help

This year we have started using SolidWorks to design our robot (previously only complex parts of the robot were designed). Our 3D designer has had a lot of work as the robot isn’t a set plan, but a constantly evolving chunk of metal.

Robot CAD Drawing

Not everything is shown on this CAD drawing, but it is a helpful representation of what the robot’s skeleton is, and lets us plan things accordingly.

Anyways, we are almost done a long week of building. We have met every day of the week after school for two to five hours, and tomorrow we will meet for seven hours! I’m sure that all this time we’ve spent will be well worth it though, as the robot is looking good, and very robust.

Build Day

We spent a bunch of the day building the robot. Last year our robot was smashed by another team, so we went for a more solid, protective design. The robot is heavier, but there is a shield around the entire robot.

Robot Cage

In order to test the robot code, the electrical system needed to be wired up. The drive train has been wired, and the rest is to come, but we are making huge advances.

Ball Loading System

Making Progress

The robot is starting to take shape. A large portion of the upper half of the robot is still made out of wood for prototyping purposes, but we plan to be driving the robot within the next week or so.

Ball Loading System

The robot is more complex than last years’ because we went for a robot that can fit under the trench which is 3 ft. ½ in. (~93 cm) tall according to the game manual. The robot is more compact but we are still going to be able to climb mostly due to our implementation of CAD which has greatly increased the precision and functionality of our robot.

The programming has also been going well, in theory. We have almost finished all of the cool features that we are putting in our robot this year (such as limelight auto targeting).

Climbing Mechanism Drawings

The reason that I said “in theory”, is because we haven’t actually tested the code yet because the electrical hasn’t been wired up yet. Next year we will probably make that a higher priority, but for now we will just have to wait and see (although if anything breaks it shouldn’t be too hard to fix).