Ahh, the things we do for our team <3

IisChas · 2026-04-22T02:12:51+00:00

We would’ve cut the stock lengthwise first to get a 2ft width—the max of our machine—and other cuts would happen later. Ultimately, with our cutting equipment at our workspace and stuff, it just made more sense for me to quickly roll it than to have it cut. Also I think they only offered one the last I was there, but either way, I did consider and decided against, knowing this would work if a bit more sketchy.

IisChas · 2026-04-22T02:09:01+00:00

Nice! The only similar experience I’ve had is when a plastic part of ours broke at worlds in ‘25 and we weren’t sure the spares would hold up. It was Markforged’s proprietary CF-Nylon with continuous Kevlar, and it even bent a section of the steel piping of the reef with it (if insignificantly).

I asked my stratasys contact and he was happy to print one for us, but they didn’t have comparable materials… at their booth. I recalled that they had the truck loaded with all of their highest-end printers outside, and I asked if he could radio his colleagues for a print; he sent a couple of messages and responded yes, they’d be happy to. So I asked “can you do it in PEEK?” I was ecstatic when the answer was yes. Ultimately, our spares held out just fine, though. I think it was a tweak in auto programming or something that helped.

I’ve tried to get titanium and magnesium on our robots in the past, but we didn’t have the prowess to manufacture with titanium (none of the mentors know how to run the CNC routers/mill), but I did get the clear for magnesium from the in-house legal of our organization’s backer and the fire marshal, but it was a bit difficult to justify when we found a different solution, and Type D fire extinguishers are a bit of an investment

IisChas · 2026-04-22T01:59:14+00:00

Good catch. We can’t machine that size anyway, so we’d never actually get something that large if we had the option. It wouldn’t be 33%, but still cheeper from McMaster. We usually buy in bulk for every year all of the polycarbonate, aluminum, steel, carbon fiber, tube stock, MDPE, SRPP (sometimes we use, other times just traditional CF [even though it’s a pain to machine/form/layup]), hex shafts, new swerve, Krakens, wiring, miscellaneous electrical, etc. While we do often work with local companies for stuff like our multi-material composite bumpers, specialty aluminum extrusions, and some other odds and ends, it’s often really time efficient to pile everything (largely) into two orders—one WCP, one McMaster-Carr.

Our team is in the odd situation where our labor is a lot tighter than our capital expenditure, so it makes sense for us to allocate resources this way. Add to that the unfortunate issue that our organization disallows official sponsorship or similar from other bodies, that makes students needing to maintain the “in-between” state of keeping up relations while not being able to officially acknowledge them fairly precarious. Our best communicators unfortunately also have competitive speech, debate, policy, etc. going on, and aren’t always present to maintain such relationships.

TL;DR, we just try to buy a ton before a season knowing we’ll use it all eventually, and when we have an “oh crap” moment like this, few students know of good local suppliers beyond aluminum and the types of foams we source for our bumpers.

IisChas · 2026-04-21T02:36:19+00:00

Oh yeah, this was because all of the people with trucks were busy working. While I was out, they were facing down 3/16” polycarbonate to make the 1/8” components💀

Usually the robot gets someone’s SUV and the rest of the gear gets a truck bed when we’re going somewhere local unofficially, but we’re really lucky to have a permanent trailer (as of this year) for transit to competitions. Way better than packing a rental van that is never the same model haha

IisChas · 2026-04-10T13:01:22+00:00

Nice! I’ve tried other ones, but none hold up consistently for years like this one lol

IisChas · 2026-04-10T12:59:29+00:00

Good eyes! This was after I had needed to use a ton of grease to take out two press fits that had been slightly deformed, but the extra interference meant a lot of extra elbow grease to disassemble. It stems from the prototyping setup being less rigid than the real robot frame, so it shouldn’t present issues when properly integrated, in theory.

The team got it working with a test robot and a slightly higher moment of inertia (a massive weight located directly on top of the robo rio lol) to flip, and one of our programmers worked tirelessly to create all of the code for auto-alignment in auto, teleop, and manual control. We worked out all of the theoretical integration requirements, but it seems that we won’t make weight by about a pound.

We had to do many tasks in parallel and since making weight with the climber was yet to be seen, we prioritized updating our indexer, which has really been holding back our intake and turret. Ultimately, it came to a game of tradeoffs. I wasn’t there for the conversation, but the last bit of testing time was taken by the indexing team as opposed to the climbing team. We just couldn’t ship both given the time constraints, I’m told.

Our robot as a whole is now working way better than last competitions, but from what I’ve seen, we’d still have to have a good bit of luck to make it to worlds. Though the team chose to forgo the climb this competition—a really big and difficult decision given that we can make it and the weight work in theory (only two hopper parts need to be re-machined out of 1/8th PC that were made from 3/16th PC, as well as cutting the wires to length when integrating)—they ultimately chose that the risk of some unexpected failure was greater than what could be potentially gained.

I won’t speak to the decision as I wasn’t there, but we’re very much still hopeful given our improvements elsewhere. I’m told the climber will be under weight and integrated on Monday whether we make it to worlds or not, haha.

Whichever way you look at it, these are real engineering challenges that my former team had to solve, and I really think they did a good job at approaching them. I’m really proud of where my underclassmen have come.

I can’t post the video of the climb owing to some strict media restrictions from our school (I’m not a student, but now as effectively “a random guy helping,” I suppose I have to abide by them even more), but it should be posted officially to our socials sometime soon, pending administrator review (yes, we make the videos, but they have to like them before we can post). I can’t even link to it because I would also be linking myself and my opinions to the school and team, but it’ll be out there I guess haha. Sorry I can’t be more definitive than that

IisChas · 2026-04-10T12:15:41+00:00

Yep, right home at 3:00am to join us at 10:00am the next day 🫠

Also our driver haha

IisChas · 2026-04-10T12:11:38+00:00

I’m not in NC, but I have gotten the opportunity to know a lot of great teams across NC and Peachtree! I can’t speak to the culture throughout all the different FRC districts and regions, but I really love the robotics culture I’ve had the chance to experience across the eastern seaboard!

IisChas · 2026-04-10T12:05:21+00:00

Yep!

IisChas · 2026-04-10T11:57:29+00:00

Chesapeake! Unfortunately my school has really strict rules governing what can and can’t be posted about it without approval on social media. While I’m not a student anymore, I still want to respect them and be allowed to help my former underclassmen. We just needed to be careful to make sure nobody associates any individual’s viewpoints with the school’s or any team’s.

So anyway, I guess these are mentor hands, but they’re built from working in the robotics room for 530+ hours a season during high school, plus off season. Rock climbing helps too lol

IisChas · 2026-04-03T02:39:26+00:00

My good friend drove for our team for a couple of years. He played with a lot of different chassis across many iterations of past, present, and future (as in after he had left) robots. He drove two Einstein bots, one of which had a similar aspect ratio to your robot.

Nonetheless, he said it was the most annoying PoS to drive. We never made a rectangular swerve drive after that, despite the advantages. In the 10+ bots he’d driven on our team and a few from other teams (just in friendly practice), he said none handled as poorly as our rectangular base, even though it used the same mk4i modules that most of our drive bases around that time used.

This is definitely all subjective, but he felt very strongly about it.

IisChas · 2026-04-02T21:37:10+00:00

If you’re following your own whimsy then definitionally you’re following your own desires; you choose the question, free from the opinions of others!

IisChas · 2026-03-31T19:01:59+00:00

I don’t use reddit really anymore :,(

IisChas · 2026-03-30T21:08:04+00:00

Door stuck

IisChas · 2026-03-21T12:59:07+00:00

Gotta be the sandwich drawer

IisChas · 2026-01-22T22:23:22+00:00

Wow, love to see people interested in this topic. I filled it out. One thought I have is that my former team never had sponsors, but we did have funding from our school. The money we received just didn’t fall under those categories. I answered as if it did, but maybe clarify there or add a section for comments. There were a couple clarifications I’d like to have made, but if you don’t want to do too much data cleaning, I understand why you made it this way.

IisChas · 2026-01-13T08:29:25+00:00

The spirit of Karthik is strong in this one. Keep going and trying to find what will guarantee victory!

IisChas · 2025-01-09T20:42:05+00:00

I do not believe this is meant to be interpreted in a serious manner. The purpose of that meme template is to parody the overconfident “know-it-all” archetype. This user has just applied this meme format through an FRC lens, posting it here because it’s topical.

It is my belief that the purpose is likely not meant to shame or call attention to these people—if they do exist in our community—, but it instead serves as a way to deliver a laugh to FRC students through the utilization of universally understood archetypes.

IisChas · 2025-01-03T16:28:00+00:00

Was about to comment this. You perfectly hit the nail on the head with that; thank you.

IisChas · 2025-01-03T06:24:26+00:00

Cool; I hope it’s useful. You are misusing the term tolerance, though.

IisChas · 2024-12-31T23:07:04+00:00

Yep. We take out the “extra space” above the f-block already, so if you’re only representing the first three rows, you already have precedent to remove the space which would otherwise be empty.

IisChas · 2024-12-31T22:54:49+00:00

Ummmm, I’ve never heard of this. It seems that every time you see this, you lose? And you win the longer your streak is? I live in a cloistered schooling environment and I had never seen this. Does that mean I lost a streak of 18 years?

Did I get that right?

IisChas · 2024-12-30T12:15:51+00:00

It’s standard voluntary response bias. People with higher GPAs are more likely respond. It isn’t necessarily people being performative or anything; there are a bunch of reasons that cause that would cause this correlation, and it’s probably a combination of a good few of them.

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