Introducing MXP 2: Electric Boogaloo

As we have explained in earlier posts, Iron Reign is currently involved in the process of creating a new version of...

Task: Assess Code Changes During The Week Before Regionals

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...

Task: CAD, 3D print and test new, better, and more aesthetically pleasing gripper triggers

Since our gripper follows a design similar to a slap-band it needs a trigger to close it, for too...

Task: CNC a new robot base

We finished manufacturing our new base today, with very little difficulty, but a few flaws. The CAM was already designed so all...

Task: Reflect on what went right and wrong at the regionals tournament

Iron Reign is so excited to be advancing to the...

Task: Get back to work after Regionals

Alright kids, back to the usual grind now. As Iron Reign came back from regionals taking a lot away from it, we immediately...

Introducing...The Revenge of TomBot!

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...

Task: Reflect On Code Changes And Choices Made During The Wylie East Regional Qualifier

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...

Task: Compete in Qualification and Finals matches

Today Iron Reign competed at the North Texas Regional Championship...

Task: Drive at Regionals

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...

Task: Compete at the North Texas Regional Tournament

Preparation

Breaking our packing-the-night-before streak, we managed to start the night before....

Task: Fix our autonomous path the night before regionals.

Twas the night before regionals, and all through the house, every creature was stirring, especially the raccoons,...

Task: Mill the spicy side shields for the competition tomorrow

In typical Iron Reign fashion we are making our side shields the night before regionals, as with many...

Task: Design and CAD/CAM some spicy side shields

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...

Task: Create a poster encompassing all of our calculations from this season

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...

Task: Put the budgetary and technical plans for the second MXP in motion

A long, long time ago, - well, 4 years ago really - alumni members of Iron Reign converted an old...

Task: Model and CNC a new build plate for TomBot

The renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.” This, however, is not the...

Task: Use feedback from our presentation at DPRG and get ready for regionals

A couple hours...

Task: Present to the Dallas Personal Robotics Group about robot vision and Iron Reign

We reached out...

Task: Present Control And Vision To DPRG And Gather Feedback

This saturday, we had the privilege to present our team's Control and Vision algorithms this year to the Dallas...

Task: Meet with Deloitte's Bot-Development Team to discuss

Today, we presented to Deloitte LLC's Bot Development Team in their...

Task: Develop An OpenCV GRIP Pipeline To Detect Skystones

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....

Task: Summarize the driver practice done throughout the week

Over the course of the following week we have done much driver practice so we can improve our...

Task: Improve Robot Driving

Since the qualifier at UME, we have been focusing on tuning controls to make driving smoother. Our first set of improvements was...

Task: Calculate the friction coefficient of various off-the-shelf materials

Before our last qualifier, we ran a couple material tests to find the friction coefficient of different materials. Now, since we've...

Task: Create a presentation for the Dallas Personal Robotics Group Meeeting Next Week

In a week, we will be giving a presentation...

Task: Update the list of parts for TomBot for regionals

Being around 2 weeks away from the North Texas Regional Championship, Iron Reign has made significant...

Task: Reach out to companies and their branches in the local Dallas area

Previously this season, Iron Reign has reached out and presented to various companies and individuals...

Task: Create a calibration sequence to find a starting position for autonomous

Today we worked on the calibration sequence. This has been a problem for awhile now, as the robot has so many degrees...

Task: Analyze what went wrong at the UME Prep Qualifier

It has officially been one week since the UME Prep Qualifier and we...

Task: Code the new Snapdragon gripper

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...

Task: Improve the precision of the Snapdragon.

Last week, we prototyped a new gripper called the Snapdragon. Now it's time to give it more complexity. The Snapdragon...

Task: CAD an engineering notebook binder that is to be custom made

We want to utilize our new CNC as best as we possibly can. Since we plan to CNC the second version...

Task: Begin our 10th gripper design

As you could probably tell from our plethora of gripper articles, here at Iron Reign we have one too many grippers. And...

Task: Use Vuforia To Detect Skystones And Tune Ticks Per Meter

This Saturday, we had the privilege of being a vendor at the Annual DISD STEM Expo. While this...

Task: Improve autonomous and tune IMU

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...

Task: Operate an exhibit at the DISD STEM Expo

DISD STEM Expo has been our busiest event this year. Many kids, ranging from elementary...

Task: Expand the Iron Reign Robotics Team

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...

Task: Compete at the UME Preparatory Academy Qualifier

A solid month or so after our first qualifier, Iron Reign walked through the doors to...

Task: Compete in Qualification and Finals matches

Today Iron Reign competed at our second qualifier at UME Preparatory Academy with TomBot which...

Task: Create a morph chart to analyze all our 3-finger gripper versions so far in this season.

Just like with our gripper designs, we've also gone through a number of...

Task: Figure out why the turntable isn't turning

Just as Iron Reign was at the point of getting driver practice started and hunkering down to do autonomous, the turntable stopped working. The...

Task: Practice driving with new code

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....

Task: Improve driver optimizations

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...

Task: Practice driving with two drivers

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...

Task: Plan for the DISD STEM Expo

Next week, a week after...

Task: Analyze torque at the turn-table and how it affects our choice of motor sets

We want to know if we are using the best possible motor set on our turntable....

Task: Calculate torque at the drive-train and analyze our choice of motors

During drive-testing, one issue we noticed was that our robot was not as fast as could...

Task: Model TomBot's Articulations in Fusion360

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...

Task: Update the Logarithmic Spiral

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...

Task: Design an equation to model the torque at the elbow linearly

In order to maximize our robot performance, we need to be able to use motors and gears with the...

Task: Map out the new control scheme

As we progressively make our robot more autonomous when it comes to repeated tasks, it's time to map these driver enhancements. Since...

Task: Detail the FIRST in Texas Grants and understand how it will improve our business plan

It's the last day of the decade! With a new decade, comes new money, and similar to...

Task: Assemble the bevel gears to the turntable to fit a rev motor

Today we assembled a second version of our bevel gear assembly for...

Task: Gripper swivel, extendToTowerHeight, and retractFromTowerHeight. Oh My!

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...

Task: Design and create a more efficient and compact foundation grabber

Moving the foundation throughout a match is an important part of the overall gameplay of a...

Task: Measure the coefficient of friction of our potential gripper materials

We want to measure various constants of materials on our robot. These materials serve to improve the grip on our...

Task: Develop the controller so that it can extend to tower height

Since we have decided to move onto using 2 controllers, we can have more room for optimizations and shortcuts/...

Task: Gripper swivel, extendToTowerHeight, and retractFromTowerHeight. Oh My!

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...

Task: Create a system to test our materials to better understand their grip potential

Here at Iron Reign, we're used to using off-the-shelf materials for our robot. For this season,...

Task: CAD a slightly different capstone version to improve upon v3's issues

On this minor update to our flat gripper design a dropper for the latest capstone was...

Task: Code some driver enhancements for the turret

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 our volunteers!

Thank you to all the volunteers that gave up their Saturday to contribute to the FTC community in North Texas. Because...

Task: Run the Townview Tournament

On Saturday, December 15, Iron Reign hosted 31...

Task: Prepare Townview for the upcoming qualifier

Tomorrow, December 14th, Iron Reign will be hosting the 2019 Townview Qualifier. 31 teams will be...

Task: Plan out potential robot articulations to improve game strategy

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...

Task: Go over all 3 of our capstone iterations

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...

Task: Plan for upcoming tournaments

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...

Task: Begin analyzing our performance at the Allen qualifier

It’s officially been a week since our first qualifier at Allen. Although we succeeded in qualifying there’s still...

Task: Design a minimalistic capstone that can be deployed by the stone gripper

This version of our capstone is to be 3D modeled and printed as well as be as compact...

Task: Create a list of parts needed for the new robot

To determine all the materials we need for the new robot, we started a Bill of Materials. To...

Task: Create a handle for the robot to make it more inspection-worthy

The robot handle is a revolutionary piece of precision engineering, designed to allow the robot to lifted by a carbon-based...

Task: Design a more comapct and efficient gripper design

This version of the finger gripper is going to be mostly custom made to make it as simple and as...

Qualifying Tournament needs Volunteers!

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...

Task: Analyze our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for our code at the Allen Qualifier

Fresh off our first qualifier at the Allen STEAM Center, we decided to begin...

Task: Update the current robot model

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...

Task: Design a swivel and add ninjaflex parts to improve the finger gripper

From what we learned at the Allen Qualifier the gripper needs some major improvements before it...

Task: Design a swivel mount to improve the degrees of freedom on the gripper

After the recent competition, we realized that a good way to increase precision would be to add, of...

Task: Respond to a request for outreach help from Team 6964

Recently, Iron Reign received a request for advice on how we run our outreach events from FTC Team 6964...

Task: Debug code after the Allen Qualifier

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...

Task: Identify points of improvement after driving at Allen

While using our untested code and inexperienced drivers at the Allen STEAM Center this weekend, we encountered many...

Task: Begin analyzing long-term build improvements

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...

Task: Compete at the N. TX Allen STEAM Center Qualifier

Right off of a subpar performance at the Woodrow Wilson Scrimmage, Iron Reign walked on...

Task: Compete in Qualification Matches and maybe some Playoffs

Today was our first qualifier at the Allen STEAM Center and we were able to...

Task: Transform a mass of metal into a functional something in the span of one night in time for the qualifier tomorrow.

Twas the night before competition and the...

Task: Debug some last-minute code to be ready for our first qualifier of the season

This article may seem a bit rushed, but that's because it is - for good reason. Tonight is the night...

Task: Create a morph chart to analyze all our designs so far in this season.

Iron Reign has seen several iterations of several subsystems over this past build season....

Task: Use existing code from the code base to program TomBot

To code TomBot, we decided to use the codebase from Frankendroid, as its...

Task: Mount linear slides to the robot.

Today we focused on getting the arm and linear slide ready to be powered up. Our first task was to move down one of...

Task: Compete and work on TomBot at the scrimmage at Woodrow HS.

This Saturday Iron Reign attended a scrimmage at Woodrow High School....

Task: Share with other teams how Iron Reign creates its engineering notebook

This weekend Iron Reign attended the Woodrow Wilson Scrimmage....

Task: Design a system that could linearly reduce torque.

Since last season, we have conducted a significant amount of experimentation on our elbow and slide mechanism. We are using a similar design because...

Task: Respond to an email about the MXP to the local Idaho STEM director of Girl Scouts.

Today, Iron...

Task: Mount a slip ring onto TomBot's chassis

On our robot we have a turntable in order to increase the degree of precision at which we can maneuver skystones. We have one...

Task: Model and CNC way to mount the turntable to the chassis

Today we worked on creating a 3d model for a CNC cut part to mount the turntable to the chassis. Since...

Task: Go over our 9 gripper iterations

This season, we experimented with 9 gripper models - both for our robot in three days project and for our competition bot. While we do...

Task: 3D Model and build an 8th gripper design

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...

Task: Finish assembling the turn-table

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...

Task: Building gripper iteration #7

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...

Task: Discuss the transition from using the Expansion Hub to using the Control Hub

Over the past month we have used the control hub our...

Task: Attatch Omni wheels to Round Chassis

Today we finished assembling the round chassis for our circle robot, TomBot. The most important system we added was the omni wheels to...

Task: Update the model to plan TomBot's build

With our first qualifier being less than a month away, Iron Reign embarked on an ambitious project to create...

Task: Order a slip ring for the turn table

In order to spin the turntable on TomBot we need to use a motor with a specific gear to make it spin and...

Task: Discuss what went and what needs improvement in our code

Taking part in the annual Hedrick Scrimmage, we got to test our Robot In 24 Hours, FrankenDroid. Specifically, since...

Task: Design a suspension for TomBot

We've decided to design a suspension for our circular chassis for one reason. Under the neutral bridge, there is a 15mm lip...

Task: Finish the temporary auto and work with drivers for teleop

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...

Task: Compete and observe important things needed to continue the build of circle robot and for future competitions.

This...

Task: Figure out what went wrong at the scrimmage

We didn't do too well in teleop driving at the Hedrick Scrimmage, with our max stone deposit being...

Task: Map and test controls

With the Hedrick Middle School scrimmage being a day away, the robot needs to be in drive testing phase. So, we started...

Task: Invest in a CNC router using our grants from the previous season.

Last year was a very successful season for Iron Reign, financially speaking. We earned around $11,000 in...

Task: work on actually filling out the auto

As seen in the last post, the skeleton of the auto was done. Tonight...

Task:

As most people in the FIRST community know by now, Dr. Woodie Flowers passed away on October 11th. As a team...

Task: Start assembling the TomBot chassis

Today we made some progress on our round robot. We moved the rev rails and big wheels on the Bigwheel chassis to...

Task: Lay out our robot's path for autonomous

To kick off our autonomous programming, Iron Reign created our first version autonomous path plan. We begin, like all...

Task: Analyze the viewer statistics of our Robot in 2 Days Reveal Video

...

Task: Design an intake for the stones based on wheels

We've been trying to get our start on autonomous...

Task: Calibrate FrankenDriod's Ticks Per Meter in preparation of programming autonomous

Today we worked on the calibration of FrankenDriod's TPM. This is used to accurately and precisely move during...

Task: Autonomous coding and TomBot progress

DISD students have been blessed with a long weekend, which we plan to take full advantage of as our first...

Task: Test block gripper

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...

Task: Meet with Representative Colin Allred's office to discuss FIRST robotics and STEM-based legislation

Today, we presented to Mr...

Task: Reach out to congressional representatives in our area to improve the implementation of STEM-based legislation

This summer, our team reached out to three congressional...

Task: Fix the old mecanum chassis from last year

Tonight, I worked on fixing the Iron Star robot from last year, since its a viable option for replacement of...

Task: Modeling a planetary gearset for robot turntable

We decided on using a turntable on the robot to allow for maximum articulation...

Task: Plan for 30+ influx of team members

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...

Task: Design a concept for a circular chassis

A challenge we face this year is running into other robots. Last year, it was possible to easily get around other robots; however,...

Task: Design an Intake Wheel

Last season, we designed a ninjaflex gripper for Icarus, our World championship robot. This season, we are...

Task: Design a new intake system

After the end of the two day robot build, we had come up with two main gripper designs. One...

Task: Help the freshmen teams finish their code and continue the development of gripper designs.

This meeting we made substantial progress on designs...

Task: Train the influx of new recruits

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