Results:Finalists, Impact award, Deans list semi-finalistThis Weekend Spectrum competed at the Waco District Event. We would first like to thank our alliance partners: 6672 Fusion Core and 5503 Smithville Tigertrons as well as congratulate the winning alliance of 624, 2881, and 8088.Spectrum went 12-6 overall at the event, finished ranked 5th, and was invited by the 3 seed of 6672 to join their alliance. After inviting 5503 to join this alliance, we played through the top bracket upsetting the #2 and #1 seed alliances and falling against the 5th alliance in an extremely close tiebreaker finals match.On top of having a successful event with the robot, we also were honored to receive the FIRST Impact Award and one of our team members was selected to move on to compete to be a Dean’s List Finalist at our District Championship.Failures and Fixes:Failure: Carriage derailment: our carriage twisted in place. This was a problem we saw once on our practice robot, we had already replaced the thin wall rev max tube with a thicker wall max tube and added 1/16” spacers behind our WCP bearing blocks but that wasn’t enough to prevent it from happening during the event.Fix: We cut some extra extrusion we brought and made the carriage 9” tall, 3” taller than it was before. We were able to perform this fix between matches. This wasn’t a planned upgrade but a solution we developed at the event. Because of our continuous elevator, the fix didn’t require any adjustments to our… [Read More]
X-Ray updateX-Ray has been fully assembled, wired, and can drive. We are very happy with how it looks.It did have some issues yesterday.Its intake was very wobbly at first when compared to practice bot. This is an issue because when the intake retracted, the inside roller's pulley could hit the four-bar arms, pushing the belt off. We never had this issue with practice bot, but it happened immediately with comp. We switched out X-Ray’s chains and sprockets with practice bot's, which helped a bit.X-Ray also did not intake ground cones for some reason. We solved this by making the intake rollers run while retracting intake, and making the elevator bob up for a moment while retracting as well. Switching its lower roller with the practice bot’s also helped, for some reason.Autonomous3 cube and balance sequence. [Read More]
Video LinkFloating Intake Rubber VideosSetup and ExplanationVideo of floating the rubber on to the polycarb tube. [Read More]
Our practice robot is coming together quickly. We had cut and powder coated all the rails. We are powder coating practice parts for two reasons, one we started competing with our practice robot more at off-seasons so it’s nice for it to look good, and it lets us choose the best coated parts for our competition robot. Our competition robot should be assembled pretty quickly behind this one, we already have all the rails cut and powder coated and the swerve modules assembled. Progress will begin on getting the Four Bar components mounted on to practice robot, and then we will need to manufacture our V1 competition intake and launcher.Launcher ProgressChanged all intake/launcher motors to Falcons, still running open loop and manual aiming. More test videos where it misses are in the gallery [Read More]
* *Exceptions apply, see terms of service for detailsLauncherWe did more testing on our launcher by replacing the launcher motor with a 12:18 gearbox with a Falcon 500. We also switched the 2” silicone rollers for 3” compliant wheels. Here are 2 videos about how that went:Practice bot swerveWe have been refurbishing out 2022 Comp bot swerve modules for our practice bot this year. It’s a really slow process and takes around 3 hours per module. 2 are done, and the rest will be done through the week. This is what our drivetrain for the practice bot looks like right now. [Read More]
IntakeWe experimented more with the intake these past two days. We have added a second roller to the bottom to better guide both the cone and cube into the correct position for transporting across the field. This lets us pull the nose cone up more and stops the cone from diving down and being held in an incorrect position for scoring. Other experiments can be seen in the photo gallery including a hard wooden floor that helped guide the nose but reduced the floor cone intake abilities.Practice BotPractice and Competition bot; drive and elevator MAXtube rails were powder coated. We started assembling the practice bot elevator. [Read More]
Intake TestingWe had some of our best intake tests today. One of the key points in an interactive design cycle is when you begin to understand what can be removed not just what can be added to allow the system to keep working but to make it simpler and more robust. Yesterday Alpha’s intake had 3” compliant wheels on the top roller and launcher. Today we swapped those for 2” polycarb and silicone rubber (these are the hood rollers from our 2022 practice robot).This test setup worked very well and allows us to build the intake lighter, simpler, and make it less expensive. This is just today’s version of the intake, we expect it will change many times over the season and probably before next week but it’s at a good progress point.The current intake canIntake cubes from the floor in the full down position.Intake tipped-over cones from the floor when the nose is slightly pointed at the intake and the flange is inside the width of the intake. We estimate we have around 150 degrees of intake range on the cone. With training, we believe this should be good enough for our pilot to use this as an efficient loading option from the loading zone.Intake standing cones if the intake/four bar are set to the correct height. The current intake is pretty height sensitive to standing cones. We need to be within in about a ¾” height window for it to intake well. This should be good enough for us… [Read More]
Drive over the cable bump videoDrive up the charge station videoMore can be seen on our Photo Gallery Week 2 and Week 3 [Read More]
