As we get ready for kickoff, we’re excited to share our plans for the season and how we’re making changes to our build strategy to make the most of our time!
Alpha Robot
One major change we’re making this year is that we’re trying out an alpha bot approach for the first time. This is a prototyping robot built early in the season that is designed to test gamepiece interaction and handling.
The first goal of the alpha bot is to have a moving platform for prototypes, especially for intaking pieces at speed. In years past, pushing the game piece into the intake wasn’t a representative test. In prior seasons, our software team struggled to get enough time with the robot. Thus, we came up with the secondary goal of making the alpha bot drivebase identical to our final bot in terms of electrical and mechanical hardware for swerve. This will allow our programmers to begin working on autonomous pathing and testing from day 1, while the rest of the robot is being built.
CAD Release: Drivebase + Electronics
With this approach change in mind, we’ve already started preliminary CAD work on our drivebase for the season already: Onshape Link 32.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve developed a solid foundation to hit the ground running for next year’s game with a few key assumptions to guide our design. We’re planning for:
- A relatively flat field (terrainless)
- Fast driving is necessary (we are using MK4i L3+ Krakens)
- Heavy impacts likely
This is what we came up with:
Our drivebase is a compact 26”x26” brainpan-style frame using Kraken X60 MK4i L3+ swerve modules. Generally, we go with a smaller drivebase because we like to make our robots compact and durable without breaking the weight budget. We have thought quite a bit about electronics placement, and are almost finished with our final layout. Wiring pass-throughs, bolt locations, and pocketing remain on the to-do list. In addition to the structure of our drivebase, we have designed TPU cases for sensitive components (e.g. Rio, Pigeon, CANivore) as well as custom dust covers to protect our swerve gearboxes.
Detailed version below:
The drivebase we created is a brainpan style 26”x26” frame, with Kraken X60 drive and steer for MK4i L3+. Our CAD team spent some good time making sure the electronics layout would be easy to work on, with smart electronics placement, and cable management for all our wiring. We have made many 3D printed models for our electronics, to provide secure mounting for sensitive components like the Rio, CANivore, and Pigeon 2.0. TPU cases for all of these should hopefully both mitigate shock loads from bumper-to-bumper collisions as well as securely hold the electronics upside down, fastened to our brainpan.
In addition to the 3DP cases we have made for securely mounting electronics, we also looked to adopt dust covers for our swerve drive gearboxes. Last year, plenty of teams used dust covers like these to keep grease in and carpet dust (and occasionally some loose wires) out of their gears. Of the publically available cad models, we couldn’t find any that mounted Kraken x60’s facing inwards that worked for the L3+ ratio for MK4i so we made some. The top dust cap and camera mounts are slightly modified versions of 8033’s configurable MK4i:
We’ve also made a case for the Orange Pi 5:
This is a modified version of Redux Robotics’ case for the Orange Pi 5 which was tweaked to accommodate either a Pololu or Zinc-V buckbooster, to be assembled with plastic tapping screws instead of M3 hardware.
On kickoff day, we will decide if what we have created so far works for the REEFSCAPE challenge. If not, this was a great exercise to help us think about wire pathing and electronics layout. If we choose correctly, we have saved ourselves a week of CAD time. We’re confident this preparation will set us on the right course for our REEFSCAPE voyage.
We wish you all a great kickoff tomorrow. Good luck to everyone!