We've been making significant strides with code developments this season with vision-based localization using Limelight and April Tags, fundamental movement controls for driving and maneuvering, and game mechanisms like our flywheel launcher.
... 
We recently presented our flywheel subsystem to the Dallas Personal Robotics Group, and the discussion that followed highlighted the complexity of our problem, but we did...
After initial testing during our “Launcher in 2 days” experiment we knew he had a decent way to go before arriving at a properly functional and unique flywheel design. Flywheel v1 is a result of using our...
When building a flywheel launcher, understanding the physics is essential. Our Desmos-based trajectory simulator helps us model and test different launch scenarios using kinematic equations.
...
This Saturday we had our first official meeting of the season where we welcomed back returning members and several new recruits...
Our “Launcher in 2 Days” (Li2D) experiment kicked off immediately after the game reveal as part of Iron Reign’s tradition of rapid prototyping to better understand each season’s...
This past Saturday, we presented at the 10th annual Flyset Workshop, hosted by team 8565, TechnicBots and UTD.
We had an amazing time listening...
Earlier today, some members from our team went to TAG’s annual club fair to promote our club and recruit...
This Saturday we were exhibitors at the 17th annual Moonday,...
Today was our second meeting with the GEMS organization. Since we focused on 3D modelling last time, the...
Today we held our first meeting with the GEMS after school program. The GEMS organization is a non-profit,...
Today, Iron Reign participated in the NTX Area Championship. Robot-wise, we performed quite...
Today we met with 2 Lockheed engineers and did a mock presentation. We hoped to gain insight...
Today we had another meeting with DPRG to have a mock presentation. We went 30 seconds over and...
Today we met with Hoya to practice our presentation for our upcoming tournament at regionals. We...
Today our team members volunteered as referees for both the First Lego League Regionals Championship as well as FTC’s Semi Area Championships. We had a lot...
Currently, due to constant build fixes and code changes being implemented on the robot, the drive team does not have strong experience...
Today, we had a meeting with a Senior Solutions Architect from AWS to receive advice mainly on our software and presentation skills. We discussed how to make better use of...
After winning Inspire 2 at the U League Tournament and advancing to regionals, our CAD and Build Team put together a to-do list for...
After our analysis of the U League Tournament, our CAD and Build teams went...
Today, we conducted a SWOT (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) dissection of the robot...
Today we conducted an in-depth analysis of our performance at...
Today we had our U League Tournament. Overall, we won the majority of...
Today we had a meeting with the Director of Research and Development at...
Power Issues:
Today, we experienced some significant power challenges. When we attempted to fix the cables,...
The beginning of our Intake articulation
There have been several strides on the code end this season including coding Auton and shifting to using a Limelight camera. Autonomous wise, we had a good start in the beginning...
Today we met with a current mechanical engineering student from Texas Tech to discuss several...
Over the past few weeks we have been working on getting V3 of our roller claw, now forever to be known as Speciminer, into working order. V2 of Speciminer worked well enough at intaking...
Today, the debacle continued with V4 Sampler. While we were trying to finish up solving the problems that arose last time, we discovered that some...
In Iron Reign's history, we've had many mishaps with our parts breaking, and the most notorious (and one of the most expensive) examples we've had are the numerous Axons we've...
We are on V4 of our Sampler, our intake designed for samples, but a lot of unforeseen issues have arisen due to a lack of effective testing...
When we decided to switch to a worm gear as our shoulder as opposed to a coaxial shoulder or...
On December 20th, Iron Reign began cutting carbon fiber to assemble our redesigned Arm and Shoulder for V3 of our Into the Deep robot.
We underestimated the time it would take to CNC as...After working with V2 of our Sampler for a while, we decided it was time to get to a more streamlined building process, involving a template for...
After every competition, the team sits down and runs a SWOT(Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis on the...
We had our second league meet today at UME Preparatory...
On December 7th, the team accomplished several key tasks that were crucial to our robot’s development. We CNC’d the carbon fiber parts. We set the plate fix holes and...
After some trial and error, this is the most convenient way I've found to convert .dxf files to easily...
This past Thursday, Iron Reign went to William B. Travis Middle School to help and mentor their First Lego League robotics team. Iron Reign first...
This week, the team made significant progress in various areas as we prepared for the upcoming build. Fernando learned how to CAM, this skill helped him create a custom mount for the...
We developed an intake system using a 3D printed beater bar out of ninjaflex. The beater bar is used to...
After every competition, the team sits down and runs a SWOT(Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis on the robot and...
Today, Iron Reign went to our first League Meet of the season....
Today, we experimented with a potential lift mechanism, refining ideas to improve its functionality and stability. Additionally, we worked on upgrading an...
We’ve made progress on the 2nd version (V2) of the roller claw that is more structurally sound and has an improved intake. To improve the structural stability...
Today was packed with advancements and challenges. We drilled and attached the intake mechanism onto the arm and completed the real wiring for...
Today, Iron Reign attended the annual Full Moon Scrimmage hosted by Marcus High...
Today brought exciting progress on both robotics and jewelry fronts. On the jewelry side, we transformed all current charm designs into silver earrings, creating a complete...
Today we built a proof of concept for a roller claw concept that we came up with. This claw took inspiration from a passive rubber band...
This week, the team had both portfolio development and robot improvements. The Ideas Festival (previously known as Robot in Two Days) portfolio slide was completed,...
Today, we met with Robotics Application Engineers from Eli Lilly & Co, a pharmaceutical company that manufactures...
This week, the team made significant progress on multiple fronts. On the portfolio side, members worked on slides focusing on team organization,...
Recently, one of our readers, a girls STEM club, reached out to express their appreciation for our online blog and how they used it for their robotics research project. We’re really glad that people find the...
Today saw a creative leap forward with a prototype for an A-frame and pulley system, designed to rotate the linear slide...
Today, the team made substantial progress both in building and portfolio development. We began working on the Ideas...
Today, Anuhya started modeling the full bridge and then moved on to designing the plate that attaches to the bridge structure. The next steps will be refining the attachment to...
Today marked the first full program robotics meeting of the Into the Deep season. We had about 20 new recruits come into...
One major component of the intake system we designed during robot in two days was a pincer gripper claw. Attached to a linear slide outtake, there is...
Since we chose to build on the swerve platform that we developed over the summer, we needed to make some additions to the code for the swerve platform. The swerve module is built...
Robot in two days (Ri2D) is an ideation process Iron Reign goes through to explore the new seasons and brainstorm designs and ideas for the game....
Yesterday, we hosted our first interest meeting! We were able to introduce a lot of kids to robotics, and got a lot of new recruits...
This past Saturday, we presented at the 10th annual Flyset Workshop, hosted by team 8565, TechnicBots and UTD.
We were given the opportunity...
On August 6th, we presented to Code/Art. Code/Art is a non-profit organization that introduces young women from underrepresented backgrounds to STEM. They specialize in teaching programming using...
These past three days, we hosted a Robotics camp focused on CAD and coding Lego Sumo robots at Kinwest Montessori, a school...
This past Saturday, we had a very fulfilling day at the 16th annual Moonday, honoring the...
On Thursday, June 13, our robotics team presented a Girls in Robotics presentation to Code/Art. Code/Art is a non-profit organization that introduces young women from underrepresented...
This year’s challenge led Iron Reign down a complex process of developing...
Iron Reign’s state bound! At NTX Regionals, we proudly got Inspire 3, and were the 5th advancement to FTC Texas UIL and the State Championship!...
On March 8th we...
Today, we had our second meeting this season with the Director of R&D at Hoya, Abhi Patnaik....
Today, Iron Reign mock-presented at the DPRG weekly meeting and received tons of valuable...
This past weekend, we...
Today, Iron Reign met with four members of the Salisbury Robotics Lab at Stanford...
Today, 3 Iron Reign team members met with three Sudie L. Williams FLL teams...
After we advanced to Regionals by winning Inspire 2, we sat down as a team and discussed our...
Today, Iron Reign competed in our U^2 League Tournament. We won Think...
Today, we met with Dr. Jason Treadway,...
Today, Iron Reign met with the Director of R&D at...
After our performance at Meet 3, Iron Reign sat down as a team and discussed what...
Today, Iron Reign had its third league meet. It was more successful than our last league meet,...
A huge focus this season has been navigation; each scoring sequence spans the...
With the rigging and the backdrops being introduced as huge obstacles to pathing this year,...
Today we met with four FLL teams at Sudie L. Williams TAG Academy: the Code-iators (11978),...
Today, Iron Reign held a portfolio workshop for team 9161 Overload from Aledo, TX....
After our performance at Meet 2, Iron Reign sat down as a team and discussed what...
Today, Iron Reign has its second league meet. It was, in general, a helpful experience and a...
The first iteration of the drone launcher is a simple servo-powered elastic launcher that is...
After Meet 1, Iron Reign met to discuss their performance as a team and make plans...
Today was our first league meet, which means all our wins, losses, overall...
Today, 6 members of Iron Reign virtually connected with Bilal, an Amazon Web...
Today, at the Woodrow Scrimmage, in addition to participating...
Earlier today, we had our first scrimmage at Woodrow Wilson! This was...
Today, Iron Reign focused on turning our ideas and designs on CAD into real-life prototypes in preparation for our first scrimmage on...
Today, Iron Reign members Sol and Vance represented Iron Reign at a recruiting event at Solar Prep...
Today, Iron Reign continued working on designing and prototyping our robot in preparation for scrimmages and our initial meets. We began working on...
Today, Iron Reign had an extended meeting to focus on preparing R2V2 for video production and to start designing and...
Today, Iron Reign hosted our introductory meeting for...
Throughout this month, Iron Reign has been presenting its recent work at DPRG(Dallas Personal Robotics Group) meetings on Tuesday evenings. On August 22nd, Iron Reign...
This blog post...
Today, Iron Reign attended the season reveal for the new...
During our PowerPlay season, we used FTC Dashboard extensively. However, because of some suboptimal code and some...
One of the main components of our...
An essential part of effectively remote controlling R2V2 is the developing...
This weekend, we participated in the FlySet workshop, graciously hosted by team 8565, TechnicBots. We gave two presentations: one...
What if you took an RV, converted it into a mobile learning lab, and then turned that into a droid? What would you call it?...
Today, Iron Reign presented at TAG’s Flight School in order to recruit new members in preparation for the upcoming season to...
Today, Iron Reign presented at the 15th annual Frontiers of Flight Museum “Moon Day” celebration, meant to...
FIRST Robotics is an incredible opportunity for kids of all ages to get involved in STEM! It starts with FIRST Lego League (FLL), which...
Over this past week, we had our final preparations for the FTC...
Today, we attended a scrimmage that team 8565, Technic Bots, graciously invited us to. The point of this scrimmage was to get some...
A small change can make a huge difference: we have...
Today, we did drive practice, and worked out some of the smaller issues with transfer.
While doing robot testing, the servo on...
Trey redesigned the gripper stopper on the underarm to limit the degrees of movement so that the underarm...
This weekend, Iron Reign participated in the FTC...
This past week we participated in the...
Finally back from a much-needed break after regionals, the team got back...
Today, team 6832 met...
This past Saturday, team 6832 Iron Reign participated in the NTX Regionals Championship...
Today, Iron Reign participated at the NTX Regional Championship in Flower...
With regionals just 4 days away, we had a lot to work on for TauBot2. Today,...
To start we began to...
With the Regional competition coming up quite soon, we needed to get to work...
Inverse kinematics is the process of finding the joint variables needed for a kinematic chain to reach a specified endpoint. In the...
With our primary game strategy for this season being to limit our movement around the playing field,...
First off, we...
Today was another day of onboarding recruits. For the next few weeks, along...
Today, Iron Reign attended a meeting with multiple local FLL teams...
Today we hosted a...
Today, Iron Reign presented at the DISD Stem Expo in the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention...
Today we onboarded most of the new recruits...
Team 6832, Iron Reign, and our sister teams, Iron Core and Iron Giant had...
Today, Iron Reign and our two sister teams competed in the D&U League Tournament...
The past three weeks have been...
Today, Iron Reign and our two sister teams...
You can watch our full presentation here. Today was our second meeting with
Today,we focused mainly on documentation and the continued CAD for the next iteration of TauBot. We worked on the outreach and Motivate sections of the Engineering Portfolio...
Today we focused on building and modeling our second iteration of Toubot. After designing and cutting out the parts for the underarm on the CNC we began...
Recently, Vance implemented a new control scheme : scoring patterns. This required some changes to the way the cone is “transported” throughout the field when the driver operated,...
Today, we virtually presented...
We implemented inverse kinematics with driver...
Team 6832, Iron Reign, and our sister teams, Iron Core...
Today we worked on finishing the nudge stick and auton code, along with doing driver practice and other preparations for the upcoming...
We partially remade the joint that connects the extension part of the crane to the turret, as we found that under high stress...
We spent today's meeting fixing minor build problems, then ran timed practice matches. Additionally, we started modeling the prototype for the...
The League Meet was a rude awakening for...
1st...
The day before a competition always sees arguably the most productivity from all the teams in a rush to finish up...
We fixed the turret heading PID so that it does not spin uncontrollably when the angle changes from 359...
The LED battery holder from the previous meeting snapped, requiring us to rebend and make a new gate for the LED...
In tandem with yesterday, the main goal of this meeting was to improve upon the robot after the Screamage. This consisted of...
After the Screamage, many different problems became apparent, including the fact that the robot just barely fit sizing requirements. In order to combat this, we...
Today, Iron Reign attended the Screamage at Marcus High School to play a couple of practice matches. This event...
Today was mainly focused on getting proper drive practice and getting the path following for the April Tags...
After Robot in 2...
As a base robot, we started with an 18 inch cubic frame. This...
Today was the season's official kick off the 2022-2023 game, Power Play! However, Gabriel, one of our members, gave...
To gain more members for our sister teams, Team 15373, Iron Core, and Team 3734, Pandemonium, we held an interest meeting...
At the FLYSET Workshop, hosted by team 8565, Technicbots, and team 20313, Mustang Robotics, we were tasked with introducing...
Earlier this afternoon, at TAG's flight school event for new freshmen, Iron Reign had a club booth for all the new...
This morning, Iron Reign demoed at the Dallas City Learning event at...
With the limits of our current workspace reached and the need to expand with more recruits and machinery; Iron Reign set off on...
Intrinsic Hazards and Safeties
Primary Safety
Backup Safety
Site Safety
Operational Safety
It’s important...
This marks our final competition of the Freight Frenzy season.
With only one week...
This past year, we connected with a lot of professional engineers that helped us optimize our robot performance and capabilities. We...
Our first gripper design was for robot in 2 days and with the time crunch came some downsides: little power and poor reach. Our second design intended to fix...
After six broken servos amounting to around 240 dollars worth of funding, it became apparent that the current model of servo we...
We took some time out of our week to get in some drive practice at Woodrow so we...
This weekend, we worked on giving the new recruits a basic understanding of HTML...
Our robot, The Reach, utilizes a hybrid-differential swerve drive along with an extending design...
To better prepare for UIL, we have started using Driver Practice to find issues that would’ve impacted the robot performance at the competition. Within the first 15...
This weekend, we focused on on-boarding new recruits as well as getting more drive practice to get us...
Iron Reign has seen several dIfferent iterations of our swerve module this past season. In this post we’ve identified the different...
Iron Reign has its final event of the season, the UIL championship,...
The continuous expansion and contraction of the robot placed a lot of stress on the mounting gear attaching the slides directly to the chassis. With...
Having a chassis able to elongate and contract during play poses its advantages and drawbacks. If properly used, the chassis...
Due to having an unconventential drivetrain consisting of two differental wheels and a third swerve wheel, it is crucial that...
This Saturday, we had the oppurtunity to present at the Flyset workshop, an event in which multiple teams could present a topic of...
The new challenge is upon us and with a new challenge comes new robot designs. This year we have found that we are...
To better prepare for “robot in three days” (ri3d for short), we decided to get ahead a bit and resuscitate the code base. After making sure everything...
The challenge reveal is going to be quite soon. In the weeks leading up...
This season, we plan to utilize the PAA5100JE Near Optical Flow Sensor (left image) and Realsense...
Thank you for your interest in Iron Reign robotics! Please fill out the following interest form. Check out the rest of this article for more on our robot!
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This Saturday, all of Iron Reign met with team 16296, Wattever, to discuss how the Iron Reign robotics program...
For the first time in 11 years, Iron Reign had a no-recruitment year, owing to the pandemic, and the difficulty...
As discussed in the post "Making the Ringevator Legal" there was a lot of rushed build leading up...
We’re at the point now where we have a lot of our systems ready to...
This year we have done a lot of work on intakes and launchers. The purpose of this post is to...
Iron Reign has seen several iterations of our intake over this...
At today's meeting, Paul worked on the ringevator, with the guidance from Mr. V. The intake mechanism required a motor to be installed,...
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Today’s meet consisted of Cooper working on code, Paul burning polycarb, and Trey working on the intake with Paul. We were able to...
With our first qualifier being a week away, Proteus (our robot) needs to be in drive testing phase. So, we started out by mapping...
With the goal of having the turret continuously aim towards the goal, the elbow tilt to the correct...
The Ringslinger 9000 is a crucial part of the robot and requires careful planning to build. Although we have a relatively...
In order to visually represent the significance of placing the constraints we did, we modified our desmos...
The three of us worked on the engineering portfolio, discussing what we needed to get done in these 3 weeks between now...
In the previous trajectory calculations post, "Derive And Translate Trajectory Calculations Into Code", we did not take into account how the length of the launcher would effect...
Today we performed proper field testing of the Launcher subsystem. While we have done many tests in the past...
A ring launcher is more than just a flywheel; it needs a barrel to give the ring a path to move through. A 90 degree...
Here at Iron Reign, we're used to using off-the-shelf materials for our robot. For this season,...
This season, we experimented with 5 gripper models - both for our robot in three days project and for our competition bot. While...
2 weeks ago, Iron...
We participated in the “Pink v....
We wanted to setup FTC Dashboard for graphing, configuration, vision, and later on, odometry. FTC Dashboard enables graphing of numeric variables, which can simplify PID tuning...
Today we worked on different intake systems to place the rings in the launcher. We finished our first prototype for a belt type intake and lift....
To ease the work put on the drivers, we wanted to...
In the past week, we've been experimenting with a series of equations to derive the angle...
First thing to do in this CAD session is to design a secondary mounting point for the ring launcher. To...
For this years new season we used an innovative flywheel-based...
Every year, Iron Reign presents our robot or standout subsystems to the Dallas Personal...
As mentioned in our earlier posts, one of the biggest control challenges we face in this...
The main thing here is a huge wall on the left to guide rings to their resting position at the back of the ring launcher. But...
The first step in accomplishing this task is to expand the center aluminum plate to almost...
Leading up to the scrimmage, many code changes happened, mostly in the area of auton. To start, I tried to run 10...
With our first qualifier being around a month away, Iron Reign is currently in the midst of trying to...
Today we continued to further...
Iron Reign will be participating in our first competitive event of the year at the PvC scrimmage. One of the submissions we...
Following the milling of the aluminum plates and the 3-D printing of the core of...
The initial vision for the ring laucher was to be a semi-circle in order to give the ring as much acceleration as possible. In this meeting,...
For the intake system of this year's challenge we first brainstormed several ways which a ring could be collected and...
With our first qualifier being less than 2 months away, Iron Reign embarked on an ambitious project to create a...
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...
One of the first intake systems we made was...
The so-called “FTC Legal” belt sander was an early iteration of the intake mechanism for this year's robot....
A key challenge in this year's...
To begin, as you can see up above (a diagram that was generated on https://ftcchad.com/ ) our first auto path takes very little...
The initial vision for this intake design was inspired by FRC team 1983’s Ultimate Ascent robot. The “ladder” pivots...
Owing to the ongoing pandemic, our recruitment goals are not similar to that of previous seasons. One of our bigger concerns is that it will be harder to teach...
Today we gave a presentation to rookie FTC teams about FIRST and our team over...
On Saturday October 10 we received an email from the robotics coach at Dealey International School. Dealey...
Instead of using a grip wheel to launch rings we went with the approach to make a custom flywheel. The key concept of a flywheel is to maximize rotational...
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...
The Archimedes Screw Intake, as the name goes, was based on an Archimedes screw. A screw...
This intake design is the most plain of them all, just compliant wheels on a shaft. The idea with this is to have it low to the...
A new season, a new design challenge,...
Recently, this year’s competition details were released, and while we couldn’t quite get started on a robot immediately like we...
Today...
Earlier in the summer, we learnt of an...
Over the summer, we collaborated with FTC teams 3658 and...
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...
E-Mail: ironreignrobotics@gmail.com
