Business Plan Updates

By Ethan

Task: Update the Business/Strategic Plan

See the first and second posts here.

Cumulative Updates as of 3/22/2018

MXP

To make Iron Reign’s history entirely clear, we built the RV last year. We do not claim any credit for the actual construction of the RV; however, the goal of this year was to make our Mobile Learning Lab run year round, make it sustainable, and expand the programs to more communities around the nation. We have done all of this.

BigThought, our programmatic sponsor for the Mobile Learning Lab, is helping educators and professionals in five cities across America create their own programs like the ones we run.

Business and Funding

This year, we went further in finding local businesses by looking up relevant companies that can directly benefit Iron Reign as mentors and sponsors. So far, one company has come to our aid: Advanced Waterjet Cutting. We contacted them over phone and asked about an initial meeting to see if they would sponsor us for creating side-shields and other specialty parts. They agreed immediately and we created a mentor partnership that assists us in materials research and design.

Recently, we have designed our own 3D-printed-parts kit, called REVolution. Our intention was to convert a normal REV bar, as seen on our robot, into a usable driveshaft for design flexibility. Upon finishing, we went to the REV headquarters and presented our design to them. We also have shared the basic designs on Thingiverse so that any interested FTC or FRC team can print them out and use it themselves. Note: The main REVolution discussion is in the building section.

Building

Iron Reign’s pinnacle of design and building so far this year is our REVolution system. We were sick of stripping set screws and twisting axles, and wanted something dependable that also was reusable. Thus came the REVolution system, the purpose of which was to turn REV extrusions into driveshafts so that we could have a solid base and more adaptability in our robot. To these ends, we created a library of parts: mounts, bearing holders, and connectors so that we could use extrusions to do almost anything on our robot. Attached in our engineering journal is a complete list of parts with names, descriptions, and pictures.

Design Process

Later, we further improved upon the grabber design, attaching it to a conveyor belt so that we could move glyphs all across our robot in order to score higher, using our REVolution system. This is the most ambitious use of our REVolution system yet, and we strongly encourage the reading judges to view it at the pits.

You can download the full plan here.