Infinite Recharge Build Blog

September 12th, 2019

Amazing teaser!!! Water game confirmed?!?!?! Water can create power, right?

Kickoff 2020!!!

Its finally here, kickoff 2020. We are so excited for this year, coming of our first trip to Worlds with our most advanced version of swerve to date ready for this season and biggest strategy/scouting team we've had in years we're hoping to have one of the best seasons. Today we analyzed how we thought the game was going to be played and designed our robot around that. We also started identifying the subsystems we would have for this years robot. We started mocking up designs for a flywheel and had a working model by the end of the day. We started testing power cells intake ideas by testing the common mechanum wheel intake from last year and more. And we started research for our climber. On the software and electrical side of things we decided on the sensors we will potentially use throughout the season and decided on roles for the season. On the strategy side of things we decided on what is most important in the game in terms of scoring this year and devised an auton and basic game play strategy. We also tried to determined how to incorporate defense into this years game. Overall Kickoff was a great success and we hope to accomplish more as the season continues. Come back next week for a build season Week 1 blog and to see this years game video click the link below. Also don't forget to check out our YouTube channel BEARBOTICS2358 for video on the progress of our robot.

Throughout the past 2 weeks we have finished our frame and Mark II swerve modules. This year our frame is made of square aluminum tubing. Last year we designed our robot out of sheet metal to reduce weight but took a lot of wear and tear through out the season since the sheet metal is not too strong. The Mark II swerve modules are new swerve modules which are designed to hold neo motors verses the Mark I's which had Cim motors. We faced many issues throughout week 1 with a couple manufacturing problems we ran into but we persevered and got them done by the end of the week. On the electrical side of things week 1 was not much with nothing to wire. We discussed and mapped out a wiring diagram for this year based on the sensors and motor we wanted and were allowed to use and took inventory . This year for 2nd year in a row we have decided to not use pneumatics. Throughout week 2 we started to CAD our boards which we are going to mount electronics onto and cases for feathers and and camera's. We also assisted software team in testing swerve modules by creating a table top RoboRio set up using terminals to easily switch out swerves. We also set up our robot from last year so vision could do some testing. Throughout the last 2 weeks we've accomplished many task in software as well. Software was also involved with discussion on sensors and motors. Throughout the past 2 weeks we have been doing parallel development with our own vision system and the limelight system. This is our first year we are trying out the limelights, our first impression are that they are really easy to use. Our home made vision system hit some walls in terms of development last year and we only had remote viewing. This year we got the new pi 4 and are seeing much improvement with our vision system. Right now our vision system and lime light are able to detect the target around 25 feet away. Our homemade system has been able to detect the target at a max distance of 29 feet. During week 2 we were able to test and modify code with the new swerve modules and test to see how the spark max's work. We have also gotten a start on identifying how to create our autonomous routes. Finally strategy has made some serious headway with analyzing and making final conclusions. We found, like most teams, that running cycles of power cells is more efficient than spinning the wheel of fortune due to the fact it's a one time scoring method and that if we are running cycles of 5 balls towards the outer goal we also have around a 20%-40% chance of making some of the shots into the inner goal. We have worked on drawing up basic autonomous routes we should preform and analyzing the type of bots that will be appearing this year to get a sense of how other teams are going about the game.