This Wednesday, we had our first meeting with the GEMS organization this season! We decided to teach the girls fundamental CAD skills to expose them to an essential engineering tool that we use daily in our robotics work. The session focused on hands-on learning, culminating in each participant designing and 3D printing their own custom keychain to take home.
We began the session by introducing...
Following League Meet Three, we conducted our comprehensive SWOT analysis to evaluate progress from Meet Two and identify our next steps forward. This analysis reveals both significant improvements and persistent challenges that will shape our strategy heading into the league tournament.
Strengths:
Enhanced Intake Efficiency: The addition of the right wing has greatly improved our intake performance. Artifacts now enter the...
Today we competed in our 3rd and final league meet of the season. While we ended the day with a 2-4 record, the matches revealed critical technical issues that need immediate attention before the league tournament.
Match 1: 30-54
Partnering with our sister team 3734 against 31792 & 28144, we faced immediate technical challenges. Our robot failed to start...
After our first league meet, we identified the shooting system as a major bottleneck. Watching match footage revealed how much time we lost with the manual, single-ball operation. Our drivers were constantly managing button presses while trying to navigate and position the robot, creating unnecessary pressure during critical scoring moments. We decided to overhaul the system to make it faster and more autonomous.
The new sequence activates the flywheel and uses...
V2 of our launcher has proven to be significantly better than v1. The main difference between the two being the switch over to using Rimfire (v3 of our flywheel) on v2 of the launcher. Make sure to check out our blogpost on Rimfire in order to learn more about what we changed in regards to that. Initially, we started off by using the exact same launcher structure as v1,...
Following League Meet Two, we conducted a comprehensive SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis to guide our strategic planning. This analysis combines performance data and technical observations to help create a roadmap for improvement.
Strengths:
Autonomous Performance: Our autonomous routine has become a significant advantage. Consistently scoring 2-3 artifacts before leaving the shooting zone gives us a strong foundation in...
After a challenging first league meet, we returned with renewed focus and determination. Our second competition showed marked improvement with a 4-2 record, demonstrating that the lessons learned from Meet One were paying off.
Match 1: 95-24
Partnering with 23778 against blue alliance 30461 and 23913, we started strong. Our autonomous routine executed smoothly, scoring two purples and a green in the opening seconds before leaving...
Our first league meet of the season proved to be an intense learning experience for our team. Competing in five matches, we walked away with a 1-4 record, but more importantly, we gained crucial insights that will shape our improvements moving forward.
Match 1: 38-5
We secured our only win of the day, though it came with a 30-point penalty awarded to...
Our first iteration of the shooting system was designed around driver-controlled, single-ball operation. Each time the driver wanted to fire a ball, they had to press the shooting button to initiate the sequence. This approach gave us precise control over when balls were fired, but it placed significant demands on the driver during matches.
When the button was pressed, the flywheel motor would spin up to launch speed. Once ready, the...
Over the past few meetings, we taught one of our team members how to use the CNC machine. Here is his experience with it and some of the challenges he encountered:
Learning to use our CNC machine wasn’t exactly a smooth process. In fact, it started with some confusion, the fear of damaging thousands of dollars' worth of equipment, and a whole lot of...
We’ve made some crucial updates to our flywheel design, resulting in a much-needed boost in power. This iteration, named Rimfire, builds upon lessons learned from our previous versions and focuses on improving rigidity, airflow, and traction to create a more efficient and powerful launcher.
One of the biggest overhauls was to the disks of the flywheel themselves. The T-tires were made larger and more substantial, which required a...
This is v1 of our actual launcher. With this iteration we’ve moved away from the large testing rig and over to a smaller and more standard launcher design/formfactor. Since we are still in the testing phase we’re continuing the use of MDF due to it being cheap and easy to manufacture with. For large parts that are highly subject to change we’re using PLA. Testing from our v0 launcher,...
Since designing, building, and testing the first iteration of our flywheel, we’ve made some minor but important changes to the design. These changes resulted in the flywheel being capable of launching with enough power. While the results are satisfactory, we will continue to improve and experiment on this design as well as possibly test different flywheel concepts entirely.
The major difference between v1 and v2 are the flaps that...
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.
At the core of the simulator is the projectile motion equation: y = x·tan(θ) - (g·x²)/(2(v·cos(θ))²). This combines horizontal and vertical motion into one formula. The x·tan(θ) term represents the initial upward direction of the launch, the second term accounts...
Earlier today, some members from our team went to TAG’s annual club fair to promote our club and recruit prospective members. To everyone who seemed interested, we gave a quick presentation about the three main parts of our team and showed off our robot from last season. We also gave out business cards to interested members so they could...
This Saturday we were exhibitors at the 17th annual Moonday, which is held to honor the anniversary of the first moon landing in 1969. Moonday is hosted by the Frontiers of Flight Museum in Dallas,Tx. This year, there were approximately 1000 attendees. During this event, we introduced robotics concepts like...
Today was our second meeting with the GEMS organization. Since we focused on 3D modelling last time, the team decided to start teaching the students basic coding skills. Using code.org’s block code programs, we were able to show how pseudo block code can turn into real java.
First, we did a make your own music...
Today we held our first meeting with the GEMS after school program. The GEMS organization is a non-profit, founded in 2010. They are committed to introducing middle school girls to the world of STEM. Focusing on key aspects like Science and Technology, they hope to make STEM opportunities more accessible to minorities.
We did a brief...
Today, Iron Reign participated in the NTX Area Championship. Robot-wise, we performed quite well, winning 6 out of 7 matches and becoming the 4th seed in the Ruby Division. In playoffs, we made it to match 8, where we lost to the 1st seed alliance. Awards-wise, we unfortnuately did not win anything and...
Today we met with 2 Lockheed engineers and did a mock presentation. We hoped to gain insight on our presentation skills along with our actual design. We ran a little over time, but we were able to cover the majority of our slides, an improvement from previous mock presentations. They also gave us mock questions, which allowed...
Today we had another meeting with DPRG to have a mock presentation. We went 30 seconds over and still did not finish our slides, so we plan to cut down what we say and focus on the key details. After our presentation, we went through each slide and they told us ways we could highlight the key details...
Today we met with Hoya to practice our presentation for our upcoming tournament at regionals. We went through our presentation, but we went over the 5 minute limit by 40 seconds, so we will work on our delivery and try to find solutions for this issue.
Hoya gave good advice and intriguing questions. He...
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 of fun helping out with these FIRST events and gained some insight as well.
For the FLL Referees, they started off their morning learning over how the Submerged game works. We saw how...
Currently, due to constant build fixes and code changes being implemented on the robot, the drive team does not have strong experience with the robot.Therefore, moving forward, we aim to prioritize a strategy to reduce the amount of mistakes made during official matches and to ease communication between drivers, drive coaches and coders.
Firstly, we changed some movement articulations to...
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 our Limelight camera, how we do automated robot movements, and our autonomous movement. We shared the capabilities of the Limelight and how it does not take up too much energy from our robot to compute colors and sense distance. We...
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 the next 3 weeks. We hope this to-do list will keep us on task, and ensure we keep our goal in mind, making sure we are ready for regionals.
To-Do List
After our analysis of the U League Tournament, our CAD and Build teams went further in detail of problems we have or will have in the future with swerve chassis.
Today, we conducted a SWOT (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) dissection of the robot and the team as a whole of our playthrough at the U league Tournament. These analyses allow us to learn what we did well and ensure we continue doing those habits. It shows us where and how we need to...
Today we conducted an in-depth analysis of our performance at the U League Tournament on February 2nd. We discussed how presentations and interviews went, how coordinated our team was.
Logic and Preparation
The day started off shaky due to us not being 100% ready...
Today we had our U League Tournament. Overall, we won the majority of our matches at 4 out of 6, and became an alliance captain during the playoff matches. While we lost both of our playoff matches, we still made it to 8th place. During awards we won Inspire 2, and have qualified...
Today we had a meeting with the Director of Research and Development at HOYA. We discussed our robot’s design and updated him on this season’s challenge. Specifically, we spoke about our past versions for Sample and Speciminer, our current design, and our future robot. We finalized our presentation with a detailed report on...
Power Issues:
Today, we experienced some significant power challenges. When we attempted to fix the cables, some of the crimps did not work, so we had to redo them. Additionally, we realized that the elbow was drawing a lot of power to maintain its position.
We realized that all the rails for the servo...
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 of the season, since it was very reliable during meet one. In our first meet we were able to score a preloaded sample to the low basket consistently. Since then, we have started coding Auton so the robot can score...
Today we met with a current mechanical engineering student from Texas Tech to discuss several important things like our progress through this season, the current robot, and the future version of our robot.
After explaining the basic structure of this season’s game, we divided straight into talking about the current iteration of the...
When we decided to switch to a worm gear as our shoulder as opposed to a coaxial shoulder or a bridge mechanism as our earlier robot had, we had to consider how we were going to attach the linear slide arms to the worm gear axle.
V1:
Because the worm gear axle has a key...
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 we did not allocate enough time for errors. Our inexperience with the CNC led to numerous time-consuming mistakes we did not account for in our planning. Our coach had to step in and run the remaining operations to ensure that...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 the polycarb base of the Sampler. However, because we needed to get this new version of the Sampler on the robot ASAP, we essentially moved over everything that wasn’t the polycarb base from the old version onto the new version....
After every competition, the team sits down and runs a SWOT(Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis on the robot and its performance. Here is a breakdown of everything we learned using the SWOT technique after League Meet 2.
In our conversation, everyone could agree our key strength was the structure of our linear slide. Earlier...
We had our second league meet today at UME Preparatory Academy. Overall, we had a satisfactory performance because there were definitely parts of our performance that could be developed, but some of the things worked relatively well.
Match 1: 31 to 18 Win
...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 drilled out the M3 and large part fix holes. Due to a collet mismatch with the 2.4mm bit, we had to drill and screw all the parts manually, but the process went smoothly.
The team also worked on...
After some trial and error, this is the most convenient way I've found to convert .dxf files to easily printable files with a level of control over how it prints. It requires the use of Inkscape, which is a free-to-download, free-to-use vector-based software.
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 was established as an FLL team at Travis, and it was a full circle moment to go back and mentor the current team there. Primarily, we helped out with building challenges, starting the code for their robot, and their presentation....
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 worm gearbox. The mount came together smoothly after completing the CAD, CAM, CNC machining, and post-processing steps.
Additionally, we have been printing swerve parts to ensure we’re ready for our build plans next week. We discussed the design...
We developed an intake system using a 3D printed beater bar out of ninjaflex. The beater bar is used to pull the sample onto the platform. We used clear 1 mm polycarb to form the walls of intake. The walls curve slightly allowing samples faced in many angles to correctly position itself to enter the intake via the beater bars....
After every competition, the team sits down and runs a SWOT(Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis on the robot and its performance. Here is a breakdown of everything we learned using the SWOT technique after League Meet 1.
One of the biggest strengths that our robot has was auton reliability. In every single match we played, the...
Today, Iron Reign went to our first League Meet of the season. We made it to 7th place out of 29 teams, and improved heavily from the Screamage.
Match 1: 29 to 9 Win
Scored 1 sample into the low basket during Auton. 1...
Today, we experimented with a potential lift mechanism, refining ideas to improve its functionality and stability. Additionally, we worked on upgrading an older swerve drive module so it can meet the latest requirements of our design.
A big milestone was achieved with our new joint for the robot’s elbow, which we call the "Axle Oreo." The team retrieved parts, assembled...
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 we added a second standoff between the plates of the claw halves to stop them from twisting while intaking. Additionally, we added a large pyramidal structure in the center of the claw in order to help align samples during intake....
Today was packed with advancements and challenges. We drilled and attached the intake mechanism onto the arm and completed the real wiring for the arm, marking an essential step forward in functionality. Although we faced some issues with the protective sleeve, we tied it up temporarily, and once the sleeve is in place, the setup will be complete.
There was a...
Today, Iron Reign attended the annual Full Moon Scrimmage hosted by Marcus High School. We competed in two matches and won both, but they were primarily due to our alliance partners since we faced lots of problems with our robot.
The biggest issue we faced was our wiring management. Since our...
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 set of each design.
In terms of code, we made more progress with Limelight, focusing on translating pose data from the Limelight to the robot. We also consulted the FTC Discord for additional insights. For our ongoing bridge...
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 pincer gripper designed by a team on the unofficial FTC Discord server. It also took inspiration from a previous roller/beater intake designed by Iron Reign for the Relic Recovery season (see below).
To create...
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, and a recent Lilly meeting was added to the Connect portion, along with a dedicated blog post.
On the build side, progress included attaching the power switch, adding a physical stop for the hinge, and making minor tweaks...
Today, we met with Robotics Application Engineers from Eli Lilly & Co, a pharmaceutical company that manufactures medicine using biotechnology and machinery.
We first started off by going over our Summer projects (Simply Swerve and RoboSpyne). We talked about how we came up with the swerve’s design and refined...
This week, the team made significant progress on multiple fronts. On the portfolio side, members worked on slides focusing on team organization, financial management, and sustainability of skills. Jewelry project images were organized and refined, and an Instagram post was prepared for the Jewelry. Additionally, an earring order form and website layout were created to expand our online presence.
The...
Today saw a creative leap forward with a prototype for an A-frame and pulley system, designed to rotate the linear slide from a parallel to a perpendicular position relative to the ground. Though the design is still rough, it’s an important first draft to explore the concept. Plans are underway to improve the bridge-to-A-frame connection, potentially using a Ninjaflex hinge or...
Today, the team made substantial progress both in building and portfolio development. We began working on the Ideas Festival page (previously known as Robot in Two Days) and brainstormed fresh ideas to enhance our portfolio. We also engaged with new team members about outreach strategies and portfolio improvements. To boost our presence, a new Instagram post was created,...
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 ensure it integrates seamlessly with the rest of the design.
Nalin and Ren filled up two Motivate pages in the portfolio in preparation for the Early Qualifier. They also took photos for our upcoming jewelry catalog and shared...
This year’s challenge led Iron Reign down a complex process of developing an efficient means of scoring, which involved the interaction between the intake and outtake. Currently, we are in the process of implementing Forward and Inverse Kinematics to find and alter the orientation of our outtake, known as PixeLeviosa.
...
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! With the State championship coming up in only a few weeks, we have a lot of work to do to get our robot up to par, including buying new parts and increasing our outreach efforts. New motors and servos are...
On March 8th we had a meeting with Luis Sanoja, a Program Management Director of Precision Fires Development and Transformation at Lockheed Martin, with a mechanical focus. Our plan for this meeting was to introduce him to the CenterStage game and talk about particular...
Today, we had our second meeting this season with the Director of R&D at Hoya, Abhi Patnaik. This past weekend, Mr. Patnaik was able to attend the North Texas Regional Championship, where he watched our robot and many others in action. Our meeting today mainly consisted of a Q&A session where Mr. Patnaik asked us questions about...
Today, Iron Reign mock-presented at the DPRG weekly meeting and received tons of valuable feedback. We went through our typical presentation for competition, albeit at a slightly slower pace (we took about 7 minutes as opposed to the traditional 5). After the presentation, we had a long review session where we went through the...
This past weekend, we had our regional competition! We were incredibly fortunate to have gotten Inspire 3 and were the 5th advancements to the FTC Texas State Championship in a couple weeks! However, we went into Regionals with a robot we had barely finished...
Today, Iron Reign met with four members of the Salisbury Robotics Lab at Stanford University. During this meeting, we discussed project ideation and making the design process more efficient. One piece of advice we received was to split the design process into three parts: synthesis, analysis, and judgment. The synthesis portion is creating the...
After we advanced to Regionals by winning Inspire 2, we sat down as a team and discussed our performance as a team. Although we advanced, we are not as far as we want, with PPE V3 not built. If we want to advance to State, we need to show up to Regionals with a fully-built V3 that hopefully...
Today, Iron Reign competed in our U^2 League Tournament. We won Think 1 and Inspire 2, advancing us directly to the North Texas Regionals competition on February 24th. Although we could not get V3 of Purple Pixel Eater(our robot) built in time for this competition, we performed well on the field and...
Today, we met with Dr. Jason Treadway, Director of the Dallas College STEM Institute and a former structural engineer. We virtually presented our progress throughout the season, demoed our robot, and shared our work on Mechavator and R2V2. From him, we received valuable feedback about our robot...
Today, Iron Reign met with the Director of R&D at HOYA ITC, Abhi Patnaik. This meeting was focused on discussing the team’s portfolio and materials usage. We presented our work and participated in a Q&A style period to receive feedback, including on our own presentation styles.
...
After our performance at Meet 3, Iron Reign sat down as a team and discussed what happened. Here’s an overview of our takeaways and next steps as a team, divided into our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and potential threats.
Strengths:
Today, Iron Reign had its third league meet. It was more successful than our last league meet, with more success with both the drone launcher and our autonomous code. Overall, we went 5-1 and ended up ranked 3rd due to our relatively high tie-breaker points. We ended up perfectly tying with the 2nd place team when it...
A huge focus this season has been navigation; each scoring sequence spans the whole field: from the wing or stacks to the backdrop, and it’s crucial to make this happen as fast as possible to ensure high-scoring games. To do this, the robot needs deep knowledge of all of the components that make...
With the rigging and the backdrops being introduced as huge obstacles to pathing this year, it’s absolutely crucial that the robot knows exactly where it is on the field. Because we have a Mecanum drivetrain, the included motor encoders slip too much for the fine-tuned pathing that we’d like to do. This year, we use...
After our performance at Meet 2, Iron Reign sat down as a team and discussed what happened. Here’s an overview of our takeaways and next steps as a team, divided into our strengths, weaknesses, potential threats, and opportunities/next steps.
Strengths:
Today, Iron Reign has its second league meet. It was, in general, a helpful experience and a great chance to compete with local teams. Overall, we went 3-3 and ended up ranked 9th due to our high tie-breaker points. Even though our record was slightly worse compared to the first meet, our robot performance was significantly worse,...
The first iteration of the drone launcher is a simple servo-powered elastic launcher that is controlled like a switch. A linear slide has a servo mounted to the back end and a V-shaped nylon airplane holder is attached to surgical tubing which is attached to a zip tie held by the servo. The system is...
After Meet 1, Iron Reign met to discuss their performance as a team and make plans for the next month in preparation for Meet 2. Here are our takeaways and analysis, divided into strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities.
Strengths:
Today was our first league meet, which means all our wins, losses, overall points and points gained in autonomous would count towards league tournament rankings. This was a good opportunity to see how we'd hold up against other robotics teams who all had the same amount of time to prepare for this season's...
Today, 6 members of Iron Reign virtually connected with Bilal, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Solutions Architect, in order to present our team and gain some valuable advice. As a Solution Architect, Bilial focuses on designing, setting up, and troubleshooting client-server solutions through the AWS infrastructure, which involves technical skills, teamwork, and a...
Today, at the Woodrow Scrimmage, in addition to participating in mock inspections and matches, Iron Reign hosted two workshops for Scrimmage participants, one on constructing effective portfolios and another detailing our summer activities. These workshops were significant successes, with 25+ attendees in two sessions, each lasting 30-50 minutes.
...
Earlier today, we had our first scrimmage at Woodrow Wilson! This was our first proper opportunity to interact with other teams and their robots this season and we got a chance to troubleshoot any design issues with our robot. We entered this scrimmage with our beater bar system in the vague shape...
Today, Iron Reign focused on turning our ideas and designs on CAD into real-life prototypes in preparation for our first scrimmage on October 28th. We began assembling our beater-bar intake system that relies on a custom ninja-flex belt with protrusions that bring in pixels from the ground and from the stack. The ninjaflex belts on the prototype are controlled by a motor...
Today, Iron Reign members Sol and Vance represented Iron Reign at a recruiting event at Solar Prep for Girls in Dallas. This was an event to recruit new members for the program from middle school and recruit students to attend Townview next year. We had a booth set up with TauBot, our Power Play robot, which we...
Today, Iron Reign continued working on designing and prototyping our robot in preparation for scrimmages and our initial meets. We began working on an intake system for the pixel stack, based on Ringevator, our 2019 intake system. It involves custom ninja-flex belts that grab the pixels and propel them to a collection point for further manipulation. We finished designing it in CAD and...
Today, Iron Reign had an extended meeting to focus on preparing R2V2 for video production and to start designing and testing robot ideas. We plan to produce a complete walkthrough of R2V2, with footage of the individual subsystems and the entire RV driving around autonomously. We were hoping to begin filming today, but we needed to repair both the Steering...
Today, Iron Reign hosted our introductory meeting for all new recruits at our workshop. We also began planning and brainstorming for our competition robot and potential subsystem ideas.
We had approximately 20 recruits in attendance, and we initially showed them the Center Stage reveal video and...
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 presented our summer project, R2V2, to DPRG. We received lots of great feedback about improving and expanding our project, including vision-based object tracking to allow the RV to follow specific objects. You can watch a recording of that linked below:...
This blog post will serve as a more in-depth analysis of Ri2D, including dives into specific subsystems and rationale.
In order to save time, we repurposed a basic mecanum and REV rail chassis from our sister team, Iron Giant....
Today, Iron Reign attended the season reveal for the new FTC season and began working on this year’s Robot in 2 Days, a tradition where we prototype a preliminary robot the weekend after the reveal to experiment with ideas and concepts. Unfortunately, because of the complexity of this year’s field,...
One of the main components of our mission to make a remote-controlled RV was figuring out how to automate our steering wheel.
Our first plan was to attach a sprocket and chain to the plywood...
An essential part of effectively remote controlling R2V2 is the developing a method for controlling the brake autonomously. We decided, for safety reasons, to not involve the accelerator at all, so the movement of RV2V would be reliant on the application of pressure on the brake.
Our main requirement...
This weekend, we participated in the FlySet workshop, graciously hosted by team 8565, TechnicBots. We gave two presentations: one on our summer project, R2V2, and one on changes we made to FTC Dashboard.
Aarav...
Today, Iron Reign presented at TAG’s Flight School in order to recruit new members in preparation for the upcoming season to fill out our sister teams, Iron Core and Iron Giant. There was a quick recruitment presentation and a demonstration of basic REV components for interested freshmen. The idea was to generate hype and interest in order to ensure attendance at...
Over this past week, we had our final preparations for the FTC Worlds Championship in Houston, Texas, which was our final destination after everything we’d done this season. This Championship was an incredible opportunity for us to interact with teams from around the world, and establish relationships with teams we never would...
Today, we attended a scrimmage that team 8565, Technic Bots, graciously invited us to. The point of this scrimmage was to get some time seeing the changes which the other Worlds-advancing NTX teams had implemented, and to get some ideas of strategies and alliances. This was the first time we were able to get proper driver practice with the newly designed Transfer Plate...
A small change can make a huge difference: we have learned that we really should have put the shoulder spring back in place after we rebuilt Taubot. The Crane arm fails to maintain its shoulder angle, and this is an issue which has only started since we built Tau2. We're...
Today, we did drive practice, and worked out some of the smaller issues with transfer.
While doing robot testing, the servo on the underarm shoulder joint broke. We took apart the joint in order to fix the servo, but the servo's gearbox was not accessible, rendering us unable to diagnose the problem, so we had to replace the old servo with a...
Trey redesigned the gripper stopper on the underarm to limit the degrees of movement so that the underarm gripper will not get stuck. The original design of the gripper stopper did not fully stop the gripper because it did not limit the gripper's movement as much as we wanted it to.
The tensioning belt on the...
This weekend, Iron Reign participated in the FTC UIL Championship, which was mainly robot game, and the FTC Texas State tournament, where we advanced to FTC Worlds with the Think award, an award granted for the engineering portfolio and documentation. We learned a lot from our gameplay and...
This past week we participated in the FTC state championship and UIL state competition in Belton, Texas. Overall, we were successful, winning the Think Award at State and thus advancing to Worlds despite less-than-ideal robot performance. First, we will discuss judging and then transition into our game-by-game...
Finally back from a much-needed break after regionals, the team got back together for a more strategy-focused meeting, and we did some preliminary work on code, build, and portfolio.
To help us use our time efficiently, we focused the first couple hours of the meeting on planning. We created...
Today, team 6832 met with Jason Treadway, Head of the Dallas College STEM Institute and a former structural engineer. We virtually presented our robot and outreach efforts and were able to both intrigue him and received important input from him.
Overall, Mr....
This past Saturday, team 6832 Iron Reign participated in the NTX Regionals Championship at Marcus High School. Overall, despite some robot performance issues, we won the Motivate award, meaning we advanced to both the UIL State Championship and FTC State Championship. Today, 2 days after the competition, we had our Regionals Post-Mortem, and...
Today, Iron Reign participated at the NTX Regional Championship in Flower Mound. Even with major robot performance issues, we were still able to advance to both the UIL State Championship and the FTC State Championship by winning the Motivate award after a strong presentation and portfolio showing. We ended up with...
With regionals just 4 days away, we had a lot to work on for TauBot2. Today, we focused on implementing a new Joint class in all of our joints in the UnderArm, soldered wires for the new Shoulder and turret assembly, and continued to wire the robot.
One issue that we had run...
To start we began to bring the wiring for the UnderArm through our wiring sleeve. The current UnderArm wiring situation was less than ideal and it needed to be reworked. About half of our UnderArm’s wires were in a wire sleeve and today we added...
With the Regional competition coming up quite soon, we needed to get to work finishing up the build for TauBotV2, optimizing the code with new inverse kinematics for the double-jointed UnderArm, finishing up some subsystem blog posts, and practicing and preparing our presentation.
With a heavily below-par performance than the Tournament...
Inverse kinematics is the process of finding the joint variables needed for a kinematic chain to reach a specified endpoint. In the context of TauBot2, inverse kinematics, or IK is used in the crane and the UnderArm. In this blog post, we'll be focused on the implementation of IK in the UnderArm.
The goal of...
With our primary game strategy for this season being to limit our movement around the playing field, the ability to quickly and easily rotate our intake and deposit systems is vital. Additionally, the ability to reach a variety of poles and scoring options is also crucial if we are to remain stationary. This is why we implemented...
First off, we began assembling and wiring the UnderArm system. In the process of putting the UnderArm together, we ran into a couple of hurdles. The alignment on our parts was incredibly difficult to get right, and in the process of aligning them,...
Today was another day of onboarding recruits. For the next few weeks, along with regional preparation, we will be focused on the transfer of knowledge from seniors to recruits. Today the recruits shadowed the senior Iron Reign members, Trey and Gabriel.
Gabriel was working on TauBot 2. Trey was working on...
Today, Iron Reign presented at the DISD Stem Expo in the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center. Here, we both demoed TauBot and hosted a STEM activity for young children which involved building LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robots and then battling them SUMO style in a battle hexagon.
While this event was a great opportunity...
Today we onboarded most of the new recruits and continued to work on fixing our broken shoulder from the last tournament. We also organized a lot of the RoboDojo and brainstormed more ideas for how we can reach out to professionals to better prepare for the upcoming Regionals...
Today, Iron Reign and our two sister teams competed in the D&U League Tournament at Woodrow Wilson High School, the culmination of the previous three qualifiers. Overall, we did pretty well, winning both Inspire 1 and Think 2, which means we will be directly advancing to the Regional competition in about a month. There...
The past three weeks have been incredibly eventful, as we try to beat the clock and finish TaBbot: V2. We had a lot of work to do in build and code, since we were putting together an entirely new robot, coding it, and getting it competition-ready...
Today, Iron Reign and our two sister teams participated in the 3rd League Meet for the U League at UME Preparatory for qualification going into the Tournament next week. Overall, we did solid, going 4-2 at the meet; however, we lost significant tiebreaker points in autonomous points due...
You can watch our full presentation here. Today was our second meeting with Dallas Personal Robotics Group , or DPRG, this season. We updated the engineers at DPRG with our build and code progress. First, we ran through our newly assembled parts and subsystems. Then we showed our work in progress CAD in...
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 along with a few of the preliminary slides. Furthermore, we also made sure that the blog was all up to date.
On the CAD side of things, we finished the shoulder drive on the CAD model and began...
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 assembly.
As for modeling, we worked on the shoulder drive for Toubot2. We are redesigning our motor mounts because we need the extension on the arm to be stronger. We are changing the design for the shoulder drive...
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, and we found it was best to “fly the gripper” by controlling the 3 dimensional position of the cone on a cartesian space superimposed on the field. Basically, we control the x,y,z, which is a big change compared to the...
Today, we virtually presented our robot to the Dallas Personal Robotics Group(DPRG) to showcase our progress for this season and hopefully get advice on our robot's design, code, and presentation. DPRG is a group of engineers and robot enthusiasts who meet multiple times a...
This was a great opportunity for us...
We implemented inverse kinematics with driver controls, auton, and the memory system. We changed the driver controls to use height and distance rather than angle and shoulder. This makes it faster and much easier for the drivers to fine tune adjustments when dropping and picking up...
Today we worked on finishing the nudge stick and auton code, along with doing driver practice and other preparations for the upcoming meet.
We finished working on code for the nudge stick so it will rotate to the left or right of the pole in order to help the driver align the cone with the pole more easily and quickly....
We partially remade the joint that connects the extension part of the crane to the turret, as we found that under high stress the gears were prone to slipping. We also changed the gear ratios on the shoulder to increase the torque produced at the cost of the speed of the crane. We did this because under most situations we were hitting the...
We spent today's meeting fixing minor build problems, then ran timed practice matches. Additionally, we started modeling the prototype for the nudge stick.
We fine tuned the PID and speed, as well as the pickup and drop speed and staging. We also fixed the odometry, which calculates the position of the robot based on how...
The League Meet was a rude awakening for all the things we needed to improve upon and start. This includes a better autonomous, as other leagues are already having regular 30-40 point autonomous programs, documentation as even though League Meets don’t require them, the Tournament is slowly encroaching...
1st Match - The first round went horribly wrong, as Gabriel touched the phone after randomization, netting a minor penalty. While autonomous did read the April Tags, the arm was outside the tile, so regardless we didn’t score the 20 points...
The day before a competition always sees arguably the most productivity from all the teams in a rush to finish up what they hope to accomplish the next day. For Reign, this was getting autonomous working, final drive practice for Georgia, and the printing of the team beacons.
The first few hours were filled with commits from...
We fixed the turret heading PID so that it does not spin uncontrollably when the angle changes from 359 to 0, and adjusted and tuned ticks per inch. We integrated memory of drop off and pickup positions with the crane so our drives don't have to spend a lot of time precisely aligning the arm with the cones and...
The LED battery holder from the previous meeting snapped, requiring us to rebend and make a new gate for the LED Battery holder from scratch, which took a bit of time. In addition to this, all the set screws on the robot for the shaft collars and the pulley systems, as well as using threadlocker on the right motor mount in...
In tandem with yesterday, the main goal of this meeting was to improve upon the robot after the Screamage. This consisted of two main aspects, being a new way to mount the pulley because of the set screw of the motor that kept untightening from the axel and falling off at the most inopportune times, and a new battery holder for the...
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 decided to cut off .75 inches off the arm extension from the carbon fiber rod and added a new hole for the mount for the gripper system, which didn’t have an effect on the code or presets. Trey also continued...
Today was mainly focused on getting proper drive practice and getting the path following for the April Tags to go to the correct locations. As such, in between commits, our drivers Leo and Georgia were able to get some familiarity with the controls, while our coders Vance and David worked on PID tuning and autonomous corrections.
Our main coders, Vance and David, have continued working on reqriting the code base to make it easier to understand. We have many new recruits on our sister teams who are interested in learning...
As a base robot, we started with an 18 inch cubic frame. This was the frame we'd most easily be able to modify and build upon as we progressed further into the year. For an initial brainstorming session, our Robot in Two Days would let us get some ideas into place which we...
Today was the season's official kick off the 2022-2023 game, Power Play! However, Gabriel, one of our members, gave a wonderful keynote speech, taking inspiration from Steve Jobs, for the reveal of our Mechavator.
Our first thoughts when we saw the new game, which is about capping yellow poles mounted on springs throughout the game...
To gain more members for our sister teams, Team 15373, Iron Core, and Team 3734, Pandemonium, we held an interest meeting at Townview Magnet Center earlier today. It was crucial to get more members so we could continue the Iron Reign legacy for the future years, as our members are all from our sister teams.
Our new sponsor, Mr.Florczak,...
At the FLYSET Workshop, hosted by team 8565, Technicbots, and team 20313, Mustang Robotics, we were tasked with introducing our remote controlled excavator, Mechavator, to the advance track attendees.
Gabriel was tasked with making the presentation and script for the workshop, in which we would also include teasers about our video, Duck Hunt. Each of us were...
Earlier this afternoon, at TAG's flight school event for new freshmen, Iron Reign had a club booth for all the new freshmen to check out. There was a quick recruitment presentation for all the people who showed interest. Potential members also received information about the first meeting at our offsite location. Recruitment efforts like these are important to fill up our...
This morning, Iron Reign demoed at the Dallas City Learning event at the Frontiers of Flight Museum, which had over 550 attendees. This fair featured STEAM activities from local organizations and the museum, along with local industry professionals.
At this event, we demonstrated our previous year’s...
With the limits of our current workspace reached and the need to expand with more recruits and machinery; Iron Reign set off on a new summer project. The objective: design a new workspace for Iron Reign to be constructed further into the property. This new workshop would help Iron Reign improve our fabrication and machining capabilities and expand our program. It also served...
This marks our final competition of the Freight Frenzy season.
Trey, Georgia, Ben and Gabriel got in their last couple hours of drive practice at the RoboDojo. Knowing this was our last time we would be able to practice in our home field, we made sure that we...
After six broken servos amounting to around 240 dollars worth of funding, it became apparent that the current model of servo we were using wasn't up to the task that it needed to fulfill.
First came the issue of figuring out how to mount the motor. An HdHex Motor was decided upon as it was able to support additions to increase...
We took some time out of our week to get in some drive practice at Woodrow so we would be able to practice working together with another team and collaborating with a make-shift alliance.
Practice matches run: 16 The main purpose of our drive practice at Woodrow was getting drive practice with another...
This Saturday Iron Reign attended the scrimmage at Hedrick Middle School. This scrimmage was for many rookies, the first exposure to a competition environment and the basic structures of team communication. Both the rookies and the returning team members had an...
Today, Iron Reign competed in the DISD scrimmage at Hedrick Middle School. This was the first scrimmage of the year, so experienced teams and rookie teams alike struggled to get a working robot on the field. We go to this scrimmage every year, and it helps us gage just how much needs to be done...
We were helping our school's FRC team clean out their parts closet, which hadn't been cleaned in 10-ish years. Under the layers and layers of FRC junk, we found an Apple II-operated Patterson/Paxton CNC Milling Set. These were meant to run off of a long-since-gone Apple II in a classroom setting. But, it had long been auctioned off, leaving the set useless. But,...
The generic engineering journal rubric given to teams by FIRST heavily recomends having a season-summary intro page at the front of the journal. As well, every winning example journal includes the summary. So, we figured out that it might be a good idea to actually make one.
Iron Reign has been a FIRST team, in one form or another, for eight years....
In November, we went to a Oklahoman qualifier in Mustang. The reason for this was purely strategic - by competing in multiple regions, we have more chances of advancing, as well as having more in-tournament experience overall. There, we got 2nd-place Inspire and advanced to the Oklahoma Regionals. Then, when we came back to Dallas,...
It was a cold and dark morning. The howling winds of a cold front rushed through the grass. Under this cover of darkness, one car after another pulled up to a house, dimly lit. A car door would open for a second, letting a child out into the cold night. Under these auspicous conditions,...
After making significant development on our robot, we decided to model it. So far, we have developed the chassis of the robot seen below
To develop this, many types of contraints were used.
The entire model is dependent on this tetrix bar. The bar was constrainted using the Default feature since it was the base of the model. To this, the lift...
We have finally completed assembly modeling Kraken, Iron Reign's Relic Recovery robot. Named after the sea creature due to the robot's OCTOPUCKERS, Kraken stands as a fierce competitor in FTC.
To the chassis, we added the glyph system mounting. We first designed a linear slide replica and constrained that to a small TETRIX U connector piece which attached to the REV rail base. On the other side...
Since we're in the last weeks of December, our schools are legally obligated to let us out. And, while colleges aren't legally mandated to let their students out, they tend to do so, as not doing that would rather enrage their students and families. So, due to this fortuitous coincidence, us simple FTC students were able...
This past weekend, Iron Reign hosted a 28-team qualifier at Townview Magnet Center. Many of us attend the School of Science and Engineering inside Townview, so it was familiar territory and made the whole experience a little easier. We were lucky enough to host a Scrimmage as practice for our actual qualifier. Weeks of preparation and anticipation paid...
Even though we did very well in the Oklahoma qualifier, we still encountered several problems, that if not addressed, could lower our chances of getting to Super-Regionals. So, we had a team discussion on what to do differently in the next tournament, and what to keep constant.
Once done, our postmortem post will be here.
On Nov. 17, we went to the Oklahoma Mustang HS qualifier. Our strategy for this tournament was to attempt to qualify in multiple regions so that we have more chances to get to the South Super Regionals. For...
Since Iron Reign is hosted in our coaches' house, we only have so much space. Even though we've basically taken over their house, a consequence of that is that we don't really have a place to put the field...until now.
In prior posts, we've talked about building a pool deck to store our field, and its finally become a...
So, we were absolute failures. There's no way to get around that. We got 14th place out of 14, and our presentation flopped. But, its not the end of the world, even if it may feel like it. We have another qualifier in Oklahome in one week, and we need to analyze what we did wrong...
Any well-versed team understands that, depending on the competition for the year, a robot will either be modified to compete or be built from the ground up. In any case, however, a robot often starts at its chassis, and teams have multiple companies that provide solutions to the common robot chassis’ needs and specifications. To name a few: AndyMark® has its standard kits that include all the...
Today we started the task of building the field, which we received for free, thanks to DISD and their generous donation. The first task Charlotte, Austin, Karina worked on was assembling the balancing stones and the cryptoboxes. While building the field we ran into a few difficulties. First, when we were making the balancing stone, we accidentally had on the cover plate on...
Iron Reign has been a team for 8+ years now through multiple competitions. We started as a wee middle school FLL team at W.B. Travis, and we've grown exponentially since then. We've competed in MoonBots and FTC, represented our school at SuperRegionals, presented at the National Science Teachers' Association covention, and built our own RV in order to serve underpriveledged communities accross the Dallas Metroplex. But, after the current original team members...
Dear Iron Reign,
8 years ago, when I walked into Mr. Schulte’s room after school, I didn’t realize my life was about to change dramatically. I’d heard there was a robotics club which was attempting to be started. I’d had sparse experience with the subject, through extraneous events like the annual Engineering Saturday at UTA, so I decided to give it a shot. When I walked through that door on the second floor, I didn’t realize I would find my second family and grow...
layout: Do not touch. title: Title of your article (you can't use hyphens or colons.) tags: Enter as comma seperated list, case insensitive. Try to use one award and one normal tag
Hooray for graduation! Sort of. As we seniors write our farewell blog posts before we head to college, we have a lot of years to think about. In my case, I only have my 4 years of high school to pull from, but that's more than enough to express my gratitude for being on this team. I've learned so much in so many different areas, and not just scientific ones. I've learned...
Well... this is somewhat of a bittersweet moment for me. All of us seniors are leaving for college in hopes of spreading our horizons and making something of ourselves, but we're leaving this team that has become almost a second family. It's been a good few years since I first joined this team and I never thought that I would even make it to this point. I've learned so much in...
Many members were out of town this break but we still managed to make a good deal of progress. What we forgot to do was post about it. Github kept track of code edits and we have other records of the practices, so we have a list of 11 articles to be written by this Sunday at the latest. Tomorrow's practice (Saturday March...
Scouting:
Good
Bad
Notes: While we did well with scouting, it could have gone off much better. We made some mistakes...
On Febuary 25, we drove our RV to W.E. Pete Ford Middle School, in Allen, TX. The tournament was split into two divisions, and for many of our members, this was our first time encountering that layout. We didn't have any of our team members going to Dean's List interviews this time. We still didn't have an...
In our competitions we really can't rely on our robot performing as well as it does in practice and our sparring matches with Imperial. If we're going to increase our chances of advancing from Regionals to Super-Regionals 90% of the time it's going to be from judging. We've always had rocky presentations in my opinion, but this year we're getting our energy...
This year, to give our team a better chance of going to super-regionals for the first time, we decided to enter the Arkansas regional. We were actually pretty far ahead compared to our last seasons. We had a finished robot, a working autonomous, and good drivers.
To Arkansas...
I remember, vaguely, that someone on our team wanted to add a post counter for all the posts people appear in. And, today, I did it out of sheer boredom. And, here it is.
{% assign eh = 1 %} {% assign dc = 1 %} {% assign ed = 1 %} {% assign or = 1 %} {% assign js = 1 %} {% assign cr = 1 %} {%...
A bit of background: UIL is a Texas-specific organization that hosts competitions in both academic and athletic pursuits. This year, they ran a pilot program for Robotics, using the FTC rules and field from Res-Q. About 72 teams competed in the FTC-based competition, which then was split into two catagories. Unlike regular FIRST tournaments, the awards not earned by competition are given through nomination by other teams.
So as I've made changes to the blog I've realized that not everyone understands the little rules or guidelines I've made, but never quite explained. Following is a mock post, the content is a guide on what to put in each section.
Our main weakness in previous years had been our presentation. This year, we plan to change that. When our team was solely FLL, we practiced our presentations beforehand, so, we're applying that to this year. We've done 2-3 presentations so far and it seems it really helps us. As well, we're making a powerpoint presentation to assist us, giving us information we might forget and providing a visual...
In a rough order, here are the things I've worked on in the blog over the past month or so:
We rarely prepare enough for awards, usually hoping the practice before that we've done enough to be in the running. Last year we won the PTC Creo award at one competition, but that was a one time deal. This year we can prepare our journal in such a way to make it easier for judges to find what they're looking for when deciding. 
Out of the 9 awards, 7 are given at every tournament....
We've been tagging each blog post as we write them according to topics we think they fall into, but there's been no standard for what to choose from. For example, what I tag as "Mechanical" Omar tags as "Build." When we get some scripting done on the blog to separate according to topic we will need consistency between everybody.
So far these are the tags chosen to represent main topics and types...
Today, we reviewed opmodes in the FTC API and how to register new opmodes. We also learned about the differences between regular, linear and synchronous (from SwerveRobotics) opmodes.
Our Blog == our Journal. What we also did today was quickly review how to create blog entries so we can do that more frequently this year. We also tried to catch up on our lengthy backlog of journal articles. We were very busy...
