We competed at the 2024 Oregon FTC State Competition on March 10, 2024. We. participated in 5 qualification matches and were ranked 20th out of 24 teams. We then participated in the semi-final elimination rounds after being picked as an alliance partner. It was alot of fun and we had a blast this season! Congrats to all the teams who made it to State and competed! We will update this post with videos and pictures of the matches as soon as we get them. For now we will link an interactive 3D-model of our final robot design. We would like to thank our Coaches, Parents, and Community for supporting us as a team and cheering us on. We can't wait for next year!

Hello! It's been a while! Guess what? We qualified for state! We have made many new improvements to our robot. However, we won't explain them here. You can take a look at our new engineering notebook we published here for the details on our final build. Thank you for following our journey and we will let you know how we do at state!

Building:

As a team, we have decided to make the move from the scissor lift onto a linear slide instead. We did this since we have found the scissor lift to be very unreliable. We are using the GoBilda Viper Slide as our base as it is very reliable and uses bearings, unlike the Rev linear slide kit. Tanner and Ryan have been hard at work on this. Ryan has also been working on our new lifting mechanism for Endgame and Sen and Gus have been working on our new drone launcher! (Both Coming Soon!)

Coding:

Reese has been still hard at work developing the autonomous! Our final camera object training has been done and it works well! We are just working on finishing the rest of the bot so we can finish the autonomous fully. Also, Reese has automated our linear slide which makes it work with only the click of a button!

Other Things:

Nothing to report at this time.

Building:

Tanner has been hard at work last month making sure the automatic intake system works well and is reliable. It now can intake pixels very well with little to no issue. Ryan has made the scissor lift functional by adding some new 3D-printed spools to the axle that powers it.

Coding:

Reese has taken a break from developing odometry for the moment as he has developed custom Tensorflow object detection. This allows the robot to see the team prop that Sen has made and make decisions on what to do based on where it is on the field. The new autonomous will be powered by PID encoder control for the time being.

Other Things:

Gus has made our first YouTube video of the season! It's very impressive and shows the progress of our robot! (It's available to watch under the pictures) Sen has become our scouting person on the team. Giving us competitive strategies and techniques on and off the field!

We also completed our first meet of the season! We got a high score of around 60 points! We are fairing very well against the competition. Even if we have a push bot... (See photos)

Building:

Ryan, Tanner, and Gus have been hard at work building the robot. They decided to change the chassis to a more classic one from previous years using the Tetrix channel parts. This is for extra space inside of the robot. This also means we are using vertically mounted GoBilda Yellow Jacket motors to power our drive train. These also help with space in the robot. In the background, Gus has been working on a Drone Shooter, and Ryan has been working on a way of liftitng the robot off the ground in End Game. This is also coming soon.

Coding:

Reese has started to work on developing some Odometry code with one of our coaches Theo. There is not much to show for this right now but this will make for a very powerful autonomous and more. For any wondering they are using the FTC RoadRunner library to develop.

Other Things:

Sen has developed our team prop. That being a very cool 3D-printed Cat! (3D model is to the side) She has also gotten some practice driving the robot. We compete on November 16, 2023, in our league Zero Meet. We are looking forward to seeing how she does!

Building:

Ryan and Tanner felt that the robot needed more space inside. To do this we want to mount the motors inside of the channel using GoBilda bevel gears and mounting the motors on the inside of the channel. To do so we have removed our current drive train and will give more info next week on the progress of this as well as a 3D model. We also have built another identical scissor lift as shown in the photos! This is for extra stability. This meant we needed to move our REV Control Hub as shown in the photos.

Coding:

Not much has gone on in the coding department this week. However, we did finally receive our FTC Centerstage field this week which did come with the required April Tags for this season. Reese hopes to get the camera detection going in full swing next week!

Other Things:

Sen and Gus as well as other members from other teams have been building our FTC Centerstage field! This is great since hopefully next week we can start working on testing our robot!

Sen has also been nominated by the team to be the driver of the robot in the competition. We are all excited about what new techniques and strategies she will show this season!

Building:

For the past two weeks, we have been looking into lifting mechanisms. After looking through the options like linear slides and arms we ultimately decided on a scissor lift. This is due to it's ability to be quick and able to stay under 11.5 inches which is the height of the stage door. Tanner and Ryan designed and built it while Gus modeled it in Fusion 360. It still needs some work but they are making good progress. A 3D Model and some photos are available to view.

Coding:

We have big goals in the coding department this year, however, we have been a bit setback due to the new FTC Robot Controller App update that being V9.0. This software version dropped support for Vuforia. Our camera detection software relied on Vuforia so Reese had to rewrite some of it for it to be compatible. Thankfully we were able to survive this year's update and should be good to go for the rest of the year. We also have published our code to GitHub this year. This is part of our outreach to the FTC community so others can see and or learn from it, aswell as give us feedback on what could be better. You can view that here. 

Other Things:

Sen has been studying the game manual. This has helped the rest of the team in big ways by helping figure out what is legal and what is not. Our team has been hard at work and not many other things at this current time have happened yet.

We have the first version of our robot chassis built. This is a belt-driven mecanum drive train. It even has space for an intake system! We got this at the end of last season and are excited to start using it!

(Also new this year! You can now view interactive 3D models of our robot!)