CRUSH

We will now be posting updates on our new 2025 Build Thread

12/27 Update

PROTOTYPING TRAINING

We rebuilt the last prototype and made a few mods to do some more testing with it. We had our 2 students in charge of these meetings (myself and @dhrishKarangula ) rebuild the prototype while other students worked on the new challenge we made for them. We tested with the back roller being a 1.25” diameter polycarb roller with no grip, with the roller wrapped in cat tongue tape, with the back roller being all 1.625” compliant wheels, and with different back roller heights from the floor and distances from the front roller. The front roller was 6 35A 3” diameter hubbed compliant wheels for all of the configs that were spaced with 1.625" compliant wheels next to them.

pvc floor intake with bottom polycarb no grip roller:

Test #1:

Test #2:

Test #3:

pvc floor intake with cat-tongue taped bottom shaft roller:

Test #1:

Test #2:

Test #3 (bottom roller farther back than test 1 and 2):

Test #4 (bottom roller farther back than test 1 and 2) knocked into the pvc then spun rollers:

Test #5 (bottom roller farther back than test 1 and 2) knocked into the pvc with rollers already spinning:

pvc floor intake with bottom shaft wheels:

Test #1:

Test #2 knocked into pvc with rollers already spinning:

Test #3 knocked into the pvc then spun rollers:

Our other group of students were tasked with making an intake to pick up the same piece of pvc but feeding it from a single substation/source type area instead

pvc substation intake

One of the main things we saw from this was that we needed some kind of roller in the back to block the pvc from just shooting out of the mechanism, so we made the pvc claw intake

pvc claw intake

Test #1 (35A 3” diameter compliant wheels on top 1.625” compliant wheels on bottom) slightly angled pvc:

Test #2 (1.625” compliant wheels on top 35A 3” diameter compliant wheels on bottom) perpendicular pvc:

Test #3 (moved 1.625” wheels closer together which helped a lot with perpendicular pickups as well):

TLDR

• pvc is not as bad as we thought (none of us on 4322 think this will be the game piece but we won’t be upset if it is)

12/24 Update

We had another student working session with 1 student to further dismantle toast for like an hour.

BUILD

• Removed the rio, pdh, breaker, ethernet switch (corners of the rio shroud were pretty scuffed)

• Removed 2 swerve modules (like we said before, the driverails were kinda deformed. Also noticed that the plastic tube plug sleeve was cracked, so we will not be reusing that for 2025)

• Removed even more motors (want to run all kraken swerve for 2025)

• Current toast status:

2025 UPGRADES

This offseason, we realized we really needed to line our battery pan with something to help absorb shock. We got some foam rubber sheets that we want to line our battery pan with. We will likely be using ca glue or target control tape to hold it down better since the adhesive it comes with does not feel like it will last.

Another thing we will be using for 2025 for our wiring is noise dampening velvet tape. We used this on toast instead of the grommets for the crossrail and it held up really well in protecting our wires and sticking to the tube.

TLDR

• Took apart even more of toast

12/23 Update

We had a quick (like 30 minute) student working session with 1 student to work on taking apart more of the hardware on toast

ELECTRICAL

As toast is being unwired, all wires are inspected for damage so we can make sure we either throw them away or fix them for future use and so we can figure out where we went wrong with our routes to make sure we don’t do it again for our next robot. It is really important that we do this because in 2023 we had a lot of damaged wires come off of the robot due to them getting crammed going through a tube (squished against tube edges). So far, all the wires have come out undamaged.

• Unwiring
  • MPMs
  • PDH (all except CAN and low current. We are leaving those in for now since they are hard to get back in)
  • More motors
  • More encoders
  • More of the CANbus
  • Rio
  • CANivore
  • 3 orange pis
  • RPM
  • Radio

BUILD

As we are removing parts, we are sorting through to see what stuff we want to keep and what we want to toss. We are keeping parts like gears, pulleys, etc and throwing most of the 3dp custom parts we likely won’t use in the future. Like we mentioned previously, we likely are not going to disassemble all of toast, so the intake is about as disassembled as we are planning on making it for now (might steal the tube plugs and the gears/pulleys but we will see how far we get before the season starts).

• Removed some parts
  • Radio
  • 2 MPMs
  • CANivore
  • 4 krakens
  • 1 falcon
  • “IT’S GETTING TOASTY” cover
  • Pinions attached to removed motors
  • Covers

FRCDESIGN

As we mentioned before, we are using frcdesign.org to train all our students on design. The learning course stage 2 is a requirement for all students on the team (students can skip the cad sections though if they are not interested in that). We have been having issues getting students to actually do the training and understand the material (only like 2 of our 20 kids other than the ones in charge of keeping us on schedule with the training are actually doing it). We had issues with students skimming through the material and not actually understanding the training and taking time to ask questions.

To account for the skimming through material and lack of understanding how to apply knowledge to our designs we created some worksheets for the sections of stage 2 (they are subject to edits since we just threw them together and we are open to changes if anyone has any ideas)

Here is the shooter worksheet:

To avoid cheating on the last question, we made a google sheet where students will claim what team/year they want to research.

We have an example doc that we are sharing to our students so they understand what we are looking for. The example doc uses mechanisms from the robot we made this off-season (toast) since we want students to pick something new to look at. The example only provides 1 response to the questions to allow students to come up with more of their own (we felt that putting all 2-3 on the example was too much). Student’s docs will be shared and all questions will be answered in our design chat so we all learn from each other. We are also leaving the last response more open to mechanisms not in stage 2 (UTB, continuous elevator, etc) since the whole point is that students do some research and learn.

Since we said all our students need to complete the design portions of stage 2, we made it a team requirement for attending meetings during 2025 (including attending kickoff). We are hoping this will serve as a wake up call to our students that they need to start on frcdesign and be following our deadlines.

TLDR

• Unwired more of toast
• Added worksheets to our frcdesign

And if it were like Cones in 2023 and you could pick them up for auto I would imagine you would be able to choose the orientation… ultimately we have no rules for this game piece so we are both limited and unlimited in what we can do with it. Limited in that we have no context and unlimited in that we have no restrictions.