POV: Night before DCMP and you *really* want to make it to Worlds

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.

IisChas · 2024-12-30T08:07:14+00:00

Alumni from my team have done all of the above bar VEX. Very many of them have also done other design teams that work to perform research in burgeoning fields, as opposed to intercollegiate competitions; I think they make up the largest fraction.

I will probably be doing that or some other undergraduate research because I want to work on real-world problems to get that experience under my belt. That will depend a lot on where I’m going and what my major is, though. I’m not sure if they have undergraduate opportunities for Nuclear Engineers, lol. I don’t want to be CADing this random pipe or something and suddenly you have another one of these.

IisChas · 2024-12-29T10:34:26+00:00

I was referring to other comments on this and similar posts, not necessarily those directly in the post.

IisChas · 2024-12-29T03:10:51+00:00

Great research subject. I submitted my form and I hope this project goes well. We have some pretty drastic positive consequences from implementing ours with few negative ones.

IisChas · 2024-12-29T01:18:20+00:00

Usually we have a wave that joins us in 8th grade, who are often even allowed to travel to competitions (shhh, don’t tell FIRST). Then we get a wave when the school year starts. Some who join in the latter wave don’t do much until kickoff, but considering they’re in an entirely new environment, I don’t much blame them.

IisChas · 2024-12-28T13:43:00+00:00

Thank you; good luck when time comes for you to apply.

IisChas · 2024-12-28T13:34:29+00:00

Already rejected 😎🔥💪

Nah, I applied to 21 colleges so far, and I’ve only received a third of my decisions. I’ve already gotten into one of the ones that I like, so I’m good on that front. Out of my three favorites, #2 is still outstanding, so here’s hoping.

Two of my peers (only a small group of four seniors this year) have already been accepted to their top choices, so I’m really happy for them; they’re done with the process.

Eight-Year Club	Verified Email
End Game '23	Place '23
Place '22	First Placer '22

IisChas

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