NinjaFlex Belt intake system
Task: Design an intake with the NinjaFlex belt

So far we have made a few Intake assemblies including the belt intake and the Tetrix tread intake. However, as is Iron Reign tradition, we...
So far we have made a few Intake assemblies including the belt intake and the Tetrix tread intake. However, as is Iron Reign tradition, we...
This season of FTC has been quite difficult for most teams in Texas. As a state with high rates of COVID-19, It has been...
To begin, as you can see up above (a diagram that was generated on https://ftcchad.com/ ) our first auto path takes very little...
This year's game saw a significant boost to the importance of the control award, now being put above even the motivate and design awards in order of advancement. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze...
One of the centerpieces of any robot this year is going to be the disk launcher. It’s likely that most robots in the competition...
A new season, a new design challenge,...
Today...
Earlier in the summer, we learnt of an...
Today kicked off our first...
As we have explained in earlier posts, Iron Reign is currently involved in the process of creating a new version of...
Numerous code changes were made during the week before regionals, the most signicant of which were attempted two days before regionals, a costly mistake during competition. Firstly, three different paths were layed...
Since our gripper follows a design similar to a slap-band it needs a trigger to close it, for too...
We finished manufacturing our new base today, with very little difficulty, but a few flaws. The CAM was already designed so all...
Iron Reign is so excited to be advancing to the...
Alright kids, back to the usual grind now. As Iron Reign came back from regionals taking a lot away from it, we immediately...
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away there was a robot named TomBot. TomBot was a circle, a spinning circle with a turret...
Despite putting in lots of effort in order to pull off a working autonomous before regionals, small and subtle issues that surfaced only during testing at the...
Today Iron Reign competed at the North Texas Regional Championship...
Driving at regionals was unfortunately a learning opportunity for our drivers. In our first few matches, for some reason we couldn't get our robot...
Breaking our packing-the-night-before streak, we managed to start the night before....
Twas the night before regionals, and all through the house, every creature was stirring, especially the raccoons,...
In typical Iron Reign fashion we are making our side shields the night before regionals, as with many...
In order to increase the spice factor for TomBot, we need to custom machine our own side plates out of aluminum using our CNC. The design...
From analyzing the friction coefficient of a variety of different materials, to calculating torque for our various robot sub-assemblies, and creating an equation for our tower-stacking abilities in our autonomous, Iron Reign has seen several different series' of calculations this season. Since these...
A long, long time ago, - well, 4 years ago really - alumni members of Iron Reign converted an old...
The renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.” This, however, is not the...
A couple hours...
We reached out...
This saturday, we had the privilege to present our team's Control and Vision algorithms this year to the Dallas...
Today, we presented to Deloitte LLC's Bot Development Team in their...
With this year's game awarding 20 points to teams than can successfully locate Skystones during autonomous, a fast and reliable OpenCV Pipeline is necessary to succeed in robot game....
Over the course of the following week we have done much driver practice so we can improve our...
Since the qualifier at UME, we have been focusing on tuning controls to make driving smoother. Our first set of improvements was...
Before our last qualifier, we ran a couple material tests to find the friction coefficient of different materials. Now, since we've...
In a week, we will be giving a presentation...
Being around 2 weeks away from the North Texas Regional Championship, Iron Reign has made significant...
Previously this season, Iron Reign has reached out and presented to various companies and individuals...
Today we worked on the calibration sequence. This has been a problem for awhile now, as the robot has so many degrees...
It has officially been one week since the UME Prep Qualifier and we...
Last night we installed the new Snapdragon gripper, which means we needed to re-work the gripper code. We started out by getting the positions the servo would...
Last week, we prototyped a new gripper called the Snapdragon. Now it's time to give it more complexity. The Snapdragon...
We want to utilize our new CNC as best as we possibly can. Since we plan to CNC the second version...
As you could probably tell from our plethora of gripper articles, here at Iron Reign we have one too many grippers. And...
This Saturday, we had the privilege of being a vendor at the Annual DISD STEM Expo. While this...
During the STEM Expo, while also helping volunteer, we worked on auto. There were a series of cascading events that were planned and completed. The first...
DISD STEM Expo has been our busiest event this year. Many kids, ranging from elementary...
One of our biggest challenges this year was learning to adapt our robotics program to the large influx of new recruits. Last year, most of us...
A solid month or so after our first qualifier, Iron Reign walked through the doors to...
Today Iron Reign competed at our second qualifier at UME Preparatory Academy with TomBot which...
Just like with our gripper designs, we've also gone through a number of...
Just as Iron Reign was at the point of getting driver practice started and hunkering down to do autonomous, the turntable stopped working. The...
Today we worked on driving the robot with new presets. Over the weekend, our coders worked on new presets to speed up our cycling time....
Today we worked on driver optimizations, since Justin was here. We changed around the controls for the arm to be more like the drivetrain and the D-pad on controller 1, with...
Today we started testing out our new two controller setup. The goal is to have one driver control just the base, and have the other driver...
Next week, a week after...
We want to know if we are using the best possible motor set on our turntable....
During drive-testing, one issue we noticed was that our robot was not as fast as could...
Modeling articulations is important for many reasons. The first of which is being able to effectively strategize. Having an idea of how the robot can...
As the design and build of the robot progresses, many components must be updated to be compatible with the current design. The logarithmic spiral, which was...
In order to maximize our robot performance, we need to be able to use motors and gears with the...
As we progressively make our robot more autonomous when it comes to repeated tasks, it's time to map these driver enhancements. Since...
It's the last day of the decade! With a new decade, comes new money, and similar to...
Today we assembled a second version of our bevel gear assembly for...
Today is the second to last day of 2019, and therefore the same of the decade. Thus, I want to spend it at robotics. Today...
Moving the foundation throughout a match is an important part of the overall gameplay of a...
We want to measure various constants of materials on our robot. These materials serve to improve the grip on our...
Since we have decided to move onto using 2 controllers, we can have more room for optimizations and shortcuts/...
Today was a long day, clocking in 10 hrs continuously. In those ten hours, I was able to make tremendous progress. Overall, we have 4 main areas of...
Here at Iron Reign, we're used to using off-the-shelf materials for our robot. For this season,...
On this minor update to our flat gripper design a dropper for the latest capstone was...
With the return of the king(Abhi - an alumni of our team) we were able to make some code changes, mainly...
Thank you to all the volunteers that gave up their Saturday to contribute to the FTC community in North Texas. Because...
On Saturday, December 15, Iron Reign hosted 31...
Tomorrow, December 14th, Iron Reign will be hosting the 2019 Townview Qualifier. 31 teams will be...
Getting back from the tournament, we were able to immediately start to think about what was the big problems and possible improvements to the articulations of...
So far, we have experimented with 3 capstone models. While we do not intend to use all 3 of these models, they allowed us to...
So our Allen qualifier was a success! Iron Reign won the Inspire Award, which we are so honored to have been given. We did a...
It’s officially been a week since our first qualifier at Allen. Although we succeeded in qualifying there’s still...
This version of our capstone is to be 3D modeled and printed as well as be as compact...
To determine all the materials we need for the new robot, we started a Bill of Materials. To...
The robot handle is a revolutionary piece of precision engineering, designed to allow the robot to lifted by a carbon-based...
This version of the finger gripper is going to be mostly custom made to make it as simple and as...
Iron Reign (team 6832), The School of Science and Engineering and the Dallas ISD STEM Department are happy to announce that we are hosting our...
Fresh off our first qualifier at the Allen STEAM Center, we decided to begin...
Prior to updating the model, the model purely consisted of the chassis and the primitive turntable. Since then, both the turntable and chassis have been updated to...
From what we learned at the Allen Qualifier the gripper needs some major improvements before it...
After the recent competition, we realized that a good way to increase precision would be to add, of...
Recently, Iron Reign received a request for advice on how we run our outreach events from FTC Team 6964...
After the qualifier, along with articulation plans, we had a long list of bugs in the code that needed to be sorted out. Most of them were a direct...
While using our untested code and inexperienced drivers at the Allen STEAM Center this weekend, we encountered many...
Moving on from the Allen qualifier, there are a couple issues we need to fix. Aside from the usual wear and tear a robot experiences in...
This weekend, SEM sent four teams to the first qualifying tournament of the FIRST Tech Challenge 2019-2020 season. Iron Reign (6832) was a finalist in robot game and won the top award (Inspire) and has advanced...
Right off of a subpar performance at the Woodrow Wilson Scrimmage, Iron Reign walked on...
Today was our first qualifier at the Allen STEAM Center and we were able to...
Twas the night before competition and the...
This article may seem a bit rushed, but that's because it is - for good reason. Tonight is the night...
Iron Reign has seen several iterations of several subsystems over this past build season....
To code TomBot, we decided to use the codebase from Frankendroid, as its...
Today we focused on getting the arm and linear slide ready to be powered up. Our first task was to move down one of...
This Saturday Iron Reign attended a scrimmage at Woodrow High School....
This weekend Iron Reign attended the Woodrow Wilson Scrimmage....
Since last season, we have conducted a significant amount of experimentation on our elbow and slide mechanism. We are using a similar design because...
Today, Iron...
On our robot we have a turntable in order to increase the degree of precision at which we can maneuver skystones. We have one...
Today we worked on creating a 3d model for a CNC cut part to mount the turntable to the chassis. Since...
This season, we experimented with 9 gripper models - both for our robot in three days project and for our competition bot. While we do...
As our 8th gripper design we are trying out a compact design known as the 3-fingered gripper. This was 3-D modeled before being...
During today’s meeting, we were able to complete the mounting of the pinion motor assembly to the turntable. This included drilling out holes and routing out a...
As our 8th gripper design we modeled a stub gripper, inspired by 7129’s Ri30H. Several of our previous grippers were designed with the intention of...
Over the past month we have used the control hub our...
Today we finished assembling the round chassis for our circle robot, TomBot. The most important system we added was the omni wheels to...
With our first qualifier being less than a month away, Iron Reign embarked on an ambitious project to create...
In order to spin the turntable on TomBot we need to use a motor with a specific gear to make it spin and...
Taking part in the annual Hedrick Scrimmage, we got to test our Robot In 24 Hours, FrankenDroid. Specifically, since...
We've decided to design a suspension for our circular chassis for one reason. Under the neutral bridge, there is a 15mm lip...
Tonight, the night before the scrimmage, We worked on making the depositing of the stone and parking of the robot more reliable. Or as reliable as possible, as we are planning to use...
This...
We didn't do too well in teleop driving at the Hedrick Scrimmage, with our max stone deposit being...
With the Hedrick Middle School scrimmage being a day away, the robot needs to be in drive testing phase. So, we started...
Last year was a very successful season for Iron Reign, financially speaking. We earned around $11,000 in...
As seen in the last post, the skeleton of the auto was done. Tonight...
As most people in the FIRST community know by now, Dr. Woodie Flowers passed away on October 11th. As a team...
Today we made some progress on our round robot. We moved the rev rails and big wheels on the Bigwheel chassis to...
To kick off our autonomous programming, Iron Reign created our first version autonomous path plan. We begin, like all...
...
We've been trying to get our start on autonomous...
Today we worked on the calibration of FrankenDriod's TPM. This is used to accurately and precisely move during...
DISD students have been blessed with a long weekend, which we plan to take full advantage of as our first...
Here is us testing the gripper we designed to pick up the blocks in this years SkyStone challenge. This gripper combines the Pivoting Accelerated User-Friendly...
Today, we presented to Mr...
This summer, our team reached out to three congressional...
Tonight, I worked on fixing the Iron Star robot from last year, since its a viable option for replacement of...
We decided on using a turntable on the robot to allow for maximum articulation...
Just like last year, this year has been pretty successful recruitment-wise. We have had 24 total signups, up from -5 last year. In addition to our...
A challenge we face this year is running into other robots. Last year, it was possible to easily get around other robots; however,...
Last season, we designed a ninjaflex gripper for Icarus, our World championship robot. This season, we are...
After the end of the two day robot build, we had come up with two main gripper designs. One...
This meeting we made substantial progress on designs...
Today we were able to drive test our "robot in 2 days" robot. We used our robot from the previous...
Today we started preparing for the first meeting with the new recruits. Some of the...
During the making of our Ri2D we prototyped and...
Since the reveal was released yesterday, Iron Reign embarked on a project to build a...
As the Ri2D bot nears completion, the need for TeleOp code becomes apparent to actually make it move....
While there are many different solutions and gripper designs, one of the most common is the parallel gripper. The purpose of a parallel gripper is to grip objects,...
During our time participating in the robot in 2 days challenge, rookie...
The rack-and-pinion gripper system is one of the 4 gripper systems we built this weekend...
This season Iron Reign decided...
The first idea we came up with for gripper designs during our Robot in 2 Days...
During the 2 day robot challenge, one of the gripper designs that we built on the first day...
A couple hours ago, Iron Reign attended the reveal for the 2019-2020 FTC game - SKYSTONE. Since we intend to...
Today Iron Reign attended the FTC 2019-2020 season kickoff event at Williams High School. Team members and prospective...
Today we held an interest meeting at our campus - Townview Magnet Center. Over 30 people of varying grade...
Big Wheel, Iron Reign’s first iteration of our Worlds competition robot Icarus, had been sitting outside in the tent for months and we needed parts...
Tonight we set out to organize our thoughts and projects...
In two weeks, Iron Reign is planning on building a robot in 2 days, based on the 2019-2020 Skystone Reveal Video. We've never really...
One of the biggest challenges we will face this upcoming season is the fact that 6 of our members graduated just a month ago....
This past year at the world championship, the founder of...
Iron Reign was given...
Iron Reign was given the opportunity by our school, The School...
Iron Reign went to the Frontiers of Flight Museum again with the DPRG...
During the Discovery Faire Icarus' Superman wheel broke as the gears were skipping, rendering most robot articulations useless. For reference, Icarus was our robot...
On July 13th Iron Reign attended...
I(Jose) fixed the battery box and charged the robot phones and batteries so that we could charge Icarus before next Saturday....
Although most teams go for a traditional chassis, a different type may be needed for next season as speculations suggest...
Today kicked off our first...
Today kicked off our first meeting for the new Skystone...
Ready and prepared, our two man team came to compete at the Annual Dallas Personal Robotics Group's RoboRama.
The...
Tomorrow Iron Reign is to send out a team of two people to compete at the annual Dallas Personal Robotics Group (DPRG) RoboRama as well...
This Saturday was the Discover Summer Fair organized...
Today was the last of the 2019 FTC World Championship and...
We won 292-280. With the elbow motors fixed we were ready for...
We lost 340-280. We had a flawless auto this time and followed...
Our presentation went...
E-Mail: ironreignrobotics@gmail.com