2024 Flyset Workshop

By Anuhya, Jai, Aarav, Fernando, Sol, Alex, and Nalin

This past Saturday, we presented at the 10th annual Flyset Workshop, hosted by team 8565, TechnicBots and UTD.

We were given the opportunity to watch many interesting presentations from other teams around Texas and the country, including a presentation on Kalman Filters from team Area 52 and the KISS design process from Terrabats. We also presented about the thought process behind our engineering portfolios and presentations, as well as some experiments we've conducted this summer!

How to Portfolio: the Iron Reign Way.

Our portfolio presentation featured our main goals when we draft our engineering portfolios. We started with giving general advice, like organizing the pages on the portfolio by award (Innovate, Motivate, etc.) as well as colorcoding pages to make it easier for judges to flip through and understand content. We then showed them our portfolio from last season while passing around a physical version of the portfolio for them to physically see. We went through the details in our portfolio, including color choices, why we chose handdrawn diagrams, and our font size choices and bullet choices.

Summer Studies

Our summer studies presentation included 3 main projects: InchWyrm, SimplySwerve, and HoverCraft.

InchWyrm was one of our member's deep dive into the robotics application of a spine, and they spent the summer researching different ways to develop a subsystem which functioned similarly to a spine. They ended up recycling field elements from past years (the yellow poles from PowerPlay) and adding TPU plugs to create a spine, which could be operated using winding string.

We also developed a swerve module off robot which we could eventually put into use during the season. Our swerve module consists of a motor, servo, and a belt drive which controls the rotation of the wheel, while the motor powers the actual rotation of the wheel.

The HoverCraft was our shot at letting our mentors childhood dream of having a hovering bean bag chair come to life. While we didn't quite manage that, we did design a plywood platform which can “hover” using air pressure from a leafblower and be very fun to ride.

Next Steps:

As the season reveal is coming very soon, we are going to keep innovating our summer projects until we can use them on our actual game robots! We want to implement the swerve on our robot, no questions asked, but we still need to see how much load the spine mechanism can bear, and will continue testing until we are able to prototype our first game robot.