2910 Jack in the Bot | Behind the Bumpers | FRC REBUILT Robot

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-13

[00:00:02][music] Hi everybody, it's Tyler here at the first championship check in with your returning world champions. It's 2910 Jack in the Bot. This team has gone through just such an incredible season following all the way through of different iterations of robots. It's been great for us to watch. I know probably a lot for your team to go through on there, but it's been really inspirational to see everything with that. This robot here, if you didn't see their Instagram post they had recently, the BPS on this thing is absolutely insane. Got to watch it in a match recently as well too. And Jackot is back and in some incredible form. We'll be doing an overview from this incredible intake, how all this has come together, some of their different system integrations as well. You learn a bit more about some of their programming that's gone this well, too. So, let's find out more here on Jack in the [music] Bot on Behind the Bumpers.

[00:00:48]Kyler, your team has gone through a lot of different iterations for the season as well, too. Can we talk about some of like the engineering process of your team, how you approach it, and then we'll start to dive a bit more into the robot itself?

[00:00:57]>> Yeah, for sure. So, uh, prior to kickoff, uh, our team comes together to, um, plan out what our season goal will be. So, this year, our season goal is to win the world championship again. And, um, we re recognize that this is an extremely broad goal. Um and so we always set some constraints for ourselves to ensure that we don't overreach on our resources and knowledge level. Um and so this year our constraints was reliability and um simplicity as well. Um [music] and so during kickoff uh we analyzed the game and pick a strategy that we believe will be the Einstein level winning strategy.

[00:01:38]And so we were thinking, okay, well on Einstein, what is an a Einstein living Einstein winning alliance like? And we recognized that throughput was going to be incredibly important. And so we wanted our main strategy to be throughput, right? Everything was going to be about throughput. So regardless of how our robot design and architecture was going to be, it needed to really bias throughput. Um and so from there we made our priority list and detailed superructure lists and designed our original robot um which was called Blitz. Um and essentially it had two intakes that were uh four bars um and it had a serpentine shaped um kind of ball path that would shoot out on a drum shooter. Um it had no hopper um because we were thinking like our entire field would be our hopper. And so although like the strategy that we picked uh was mostly correct uh it that robot unfortunately failed to really perform to a level that we wanted [music] um it just wasn't able to execute the strategy that we wanted to an excellent level.

[00:02:48]And so um uh we realized that after our first event um at week [music] 2 and right after our week 2 event um we had an engineering realignment meeting [music] and we uh decided that we needed to rebuild a entire robot from the ground up uh because our our original robot blitz just did not meet our like expectations and was not able to perform to the level that we wanted. And so, um, here's our new rebuild, uh, Reb Blitz.

[00:03:20]Uh, our team followed the game true and true. And so, kind of before I jump into like the technical stuff of this robot, um, I do want to preface everything by thanking team 254, the cheesy poops, um, Citrus Circuits and Mechanical Advantage for really inspiring, um, our design of [music] our robot.

[00:03:45]Before we get to our next segment, we'd like to thank the following. FRCT's [music] managed store program is an easy and profitable way to fundra for your team or offseason event. FRCTS will handle everything from production, packaging, bulk or drop shipping, [music] payment collection, and accounting. Teams can set their own prices and FRCTS will take care of the rest. Fill out a quote request or get more information when you schedule a call back at frT.com.

[00:04:08]Build your alliance with so many other first alumni who go to Ketarine University. Every student at Ketering experiences their cutting edge co-op programs that seamlessly blend the professional and academic worlds.

[00:04:18]Ketering co-ops are a fully immersive working experience [music] at the leading edge of industry. Head on over to ketarine.edu/first to learn more about their incredible programs and to get more information.

[00:04:29]Real quick, your team uh you mentioned that you went from one strategy to another, that sort of thing. I think it's fantastic that your team is able to align that way where you're like, "Hey, you know what? We went in what what we thought was a winning strategy for it, but we understand that in these circumstances, we have to do something different. I think a lot of teams are super impressed by your initial robot as well too. And um it's really cool to see that you've done this sort of uh rebuild for it. So yeah, let's dive more into kind of some of the key features of it as well.

[00:04:55]>> Yeah, for sure. So, uh, basically kind of to give a high level overview of our robot, um, it's basically a drive base, um, an over the bumper intake, um, that's a slap down style. Uh, it's got a feeder, it's got a shooter, and also a 55 ball hopper. Um, so basically our hopper, um, is to keep things simple, is just passively deployed. Um, so this is our starting configuration for any match. And uh essentially once our intake deploys um the entire hopper will deploy and it just stays out like that.

[00:05:34]So David, if you want to show people how the deploy works. Yeah. So uh once it deploys, we'll basically intake a ball.

[00:05:45]And so this is kind of the how the ball path works if you want to shoot the ball.

[00:05:50]Yeah. Just Yeah. And so basically our intake will kind of um it will stow to kind of agitate the ball up over into the feeder and out through the shooter.

[00:06:00]So that's kind of how our um overall ball path looks like. And so kind of to talk more in depth about um our intake.

[00:06:10]Um, we have a uh really really robust uh 2x two bash bar um which is at the very front of our intake and that um allows us to protect this 2in um OD roller is our which is our main intake roller um because we recognize that this is a super defenseheavy uh game and so it's just the ball will go over and you have these one 25 in OD uh lower kicker bars to really try to maximize our throughput and get as many game pieces as possible into our hopper and load them up as fast as possible. And so it's a four bar intake.

[00:06:53]Um and yeah, uh one of the things that I think a lot of people will like to kind of notice is that our intake is super super robust. Um, and this actually comes from past experience because the original two double intakes that we had on our original robot were super uh not impact resistant. [music] And so we wanted to make sure that this intake could ram into other game pieces um without really or game elements without being damaged. So these are like 6 thick billet plates >> [music] >> um 35 chain for the pivot um and so super super robust. Yeah.

[00:07:34]>> Yeah. Overall, I mean, watching your robot feel, it seems like no issues at all in regards to picking up stuff. Uh, your acquisition speed is absolutely crazy fast as well, too. What do you think like the biggest key to that is in terms of getting fuel acquired really quick inside your robot?

[00:07:47]>> Yeah. Uh, for sure. So, a few things.

[00:07:50]Um, our like intake, it's got two Kraken X60s that are powering the rollers of the intake. So, it's got a lot of juice in there to kind of really roll like to get that RPM up. Um, another thing is that these kicker bars right here um are chain driven. And you'll kind of see that eventually. It's kind of a running theme that everything in our robot is chain driven because we've recognized that like chain has like super super low resistance. And if you were to spin these right here, it's like super easy to and smooth to spin. Tanya, there's uh looking at in terms of the overall throughput of this robot. It's been really really cool to see on the field.

[00:08:33]So, can we talk more about how the feeder system works, [music] the shooter and if if I remember correctly in your guys' Instagram post, I mean, you were advertised like a 35 BPS around that sort of thing, right? I'd love to hear more about it.

[00:08:44]>> So, quite a few things actually contribute to our balls per second. Um so the first thing is that our entire feeder um system feeder system is chained together and it's powered by four Kraken motors. Um on top of that we have these if you notice we have these two polycarb um backing plates um [music] in front of the hood rollers and behind. Um so those just help guide the balls the fuel better into our shooter.

[00:09:12]Um, and yeah, like like Kylie mentioned, the really low resistance really does help with our balls per second. Um, we also really experimented with a bunch of different gear ratios, but we found that a 1:1 [music] gear ratio was worked the best for um, our robot and just specifically for getting um, that high BPS you mentioned.

[00:09:34]>> One of the things I noticed on your uh, roller floor that you have that I think not as many other teams have seen is you do a little bit of an angled roller floor for that. Is that helping you get fuel even even quicker through your robot?

[00:09:44]>> Yeah, for sure. Um, it does help just guide the balls up into the through the J curve of our um feeder and into the shooter the better. Yeah. And we also took a lot of inspiration from teams like the Citra Circuits and 254, right?

[00:09:59]And they have this insanely big hopper.

[00:10:01]But something that we thought could we could iterate upon was um a preloading system into our shooter. [music] So we essentially have two cane ranges.

[00:10:10]one in the hopper and one in the feeder.

[00:10:12]And they essentially just these are these are basically like a bean break, right? They tell us that if so the hopper can range basically tells us [music] if the hopper is around like 80% full. And then once that's tripped, the code knows to preload into this um J curve thing that we have right here with our feeder rollers um and until this feeder can range gets tripped. So once this gets tripped, it knows to stop and it [music] stops right before it hits the flywheel and ends up shooting. And this allows us to have eight or two rows of four. So eight more balls per hopper cycle. And I think that's something that um helps us with just that little bit of uh delta that's required for the strategy of this game.

[00:10:59]>> Yeah, it's been very impressive far. In terms of the shooter, you know, when you were looking at doing the rebuild, that sort of thing, what kind of uh different iterations did you go through or even like prototypes in terms of getting this rebuild done that maybe you didn't go with? Uh can you explain that a little bit more?

[00:11:13]>> Um we started off this we started off this rebuild this like Kylie mentioned just really um taking inspiration from uh the [music] cheesy proofs and uh the citrus circuits and the originally this these two backing uh polycart backing plates didn't exist. Um these were these used to be um rollers, but we found that um we found that the that more rollers didn't really didn't actually help our our balls [music] per second. It actually um created really inconsistent exit velocity for the field. So that really just uh spread out our shot. But when we switched to the backing board um we our BPS [music] really just shot up.

[00:11:56]So looking at, you know, in terms of getting from the fuel into the shooter itself on here, [music] um you have a couple of these different kicker rollers that you mentioned a bit a bit ago on that. Does going, you know, most teams we talk to, they always mention that it's going to be belt driven for things.

[00:12:09]Why has chain been so uh important for Jack in the Bot?

[00:12:13]>> So I think we just have um better experiences with um chains over belts by far. Um but also I guess the main [music] point for us was that um chains just have a lower resistance and that just helps with um us getting the high balls per second that we are talking about.

[00:12:32]>> Gita, let's talk about uh the code and the programming on this robot here.

[00:12:35]There's so much that goes into making this happen uh for Jack in the Box. What are some things you want to highlight on this?

[00:12:41]>> Yeah, for sure. So I kind of want to start talking uh off by how we structure our code, right? So we bas we don't use the command base like the WPI command base like a lot of the teams we instead use um finite state machines for all of our subsystems right and the reason why we did this is because it's just a lot more um easier to read a lot more like easy to debug a lot more easy to log and it's just basically for readability and basically just to make our code um a lot more like cleaner to read right and we've had pretty good exper experience with it. So, um I can basically just talk you through what happens when our [music] like driver presses the scoring button for example.

[00:13:24]>> Um yeah, so the driver basically just needs to worry about like three buttons plus the joysticks. Right now, >> uh it's the score uh pass and then intake and then the driving, right? So, for example, when we press the score button, uh it's fine. when we press the score button, yeah, a lot of different things happen, right?

[00:13:47]And we essentially have uh different different subsystems [music] that our code controls, but the main uh subsystem that controls all of these and orchestrates all of these different um these different actions is what we call the superructure. And this superructure is what um uh so basically from our controller bindings, right? [music] We send a enum wanted state to the superructure and then the superructure goes and then um basically delegates those tasks to the different subsystems through enum wanted states and then each subsystem takes that wanted state and then you know controls the motors and knows exactly what to do. For example, when we shoot there's a lot of things happening here. the intake goes up uh the intake basically retracts all the way right and then the hood goes the hood goes up to the pre-calculated [music] uh uh angle and RPM and I'll I'll also talk a little bit more about our vision solution um we don't use mega tag like a lot of teams do here it's something we did try out and we found out that it's reliable yes but our simple solution of just using the tag corners that we get from the uh network tables and Calculating the tag height works [music] incredibly well. So last year we basically just took the tag corners from each of the four corners and then calculated the tag height.

[00:15:08][music] And with that with the number of pixels like the pixel height of the tag, [music] we have a distance interpolation table. And then yeah, but an a very interesting problem that we ran into [music] was we had quite a bit of distortion while looking at the hub tags from an angle, right? So it was basically it was looking like I don't know like a rhombus right and the the we just essentially picked one side to calculate the height of but that didn't necessarily work [music] because it was smaller on one side and larger on the other so instead we basically took the middle of the tag height getting the average of them and [music] that ended up working really well and we have really good um relocization with our tags. If you look at our autos for example, um we in the center line, there's a like when you go into the neutral zone, there's quite a lot of collisions that happen, right? But we're able to recover pretty quickly [music] because we um purposely have this rotation for the lime [music] light to look at the back back hub tags and be localized real quick before we come over the bump to shoot. And that's very [music] important because we don't want to like lose a whole hopper full of balls and auto. Yeah. So that's basically like our vision side of stuff.

[00:16:20]And >> does I gota ask u from your localization does that also happen like if you end up beach or something like that over are you immediately then just localizing and you're able to almost get off being beach from that?

[00:16:30]>> Um not necessarily from being off beach but say like our odometry gets messed up and we're beach right?

[00:16:36]>> Sure.

[00:16:36]>> Um so once like we have this thing where we like uh retract the intake up and down to get off the balls. Right. And then so our odometry is messed up at this point. But the second we look at a valid [music] hub tag um the the code knows like to relocize and set the odometry to that point.

[00:16:53]>> Yeah.

[00:16:53]>> Perfect. David, there's a lot of optimizations your team has made uh [music] for this robot especially getting ready for champs as well too as I'm sure uh you know we saw this robot debut at your district championships but not a lot of time between to get ready for the first championship. So talk to me about some of those optimizations your team has gone through.

[00:17:10]>> Right. So our bring up for this robot I think was a new programming record. It took only about 2 hours to get basic functionality. And part of that was base subs which is like a template that we used to automate a lot of the low-level motor IO's. And an IO is just input output. You're giving the motor something and you're getting these log values. And a lot of that is very tedious. You're just writing the same methods with these same systems for these same motors and getting those same values for everything, right? So we decided to automate this in our codebase. And all you have to do really is provide the motor and its limits and some of the ranges and like if it's a if it's an intake, right? The motor we use for the intake, you provide the limit of it only go from this degree to that degree. And it allows us to basically by just putting in some info, we get all of these methods without having to retype them out. And we get all these log values automatically. An advantage of that also is we can give it like a unit conversion. And for every method now, it'll reason in mechanism units. We don't have to think how many motor rotations. we can just say intake to this degree to that degree and it makes everything a lot easier, a lot faster and that's what allowed us to get done in two hours.

[00:18:16]>> Overall, Jack in the first off congratulations on a impressive season got through for PMW champions as well too as we didn't mention and here uh it's been really cool to see this robot compete so far. So, we wish you best of luck here. Thank you for uh being a great inspiration to other teams as well too to showcase any team can go through iterations and rebuild and make it happen and be successful [music] as well. So, wish you the best here at First Championships. Thanks a lot.

[00:18:39]>> Thanks for watching. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and click the bell to stay uptodate on future fun videos.

[00:18:44]Build your alliance with so many other first alumni who go to Ketarine University. Every student at Ketaring experiences her cutting edge co-op programs that seamlessly blend the professional and academic worlds.

[00:18:54]Ketarine Co-ops are a fully immersive working experience at the leading edge of industry. Head on over to ketaring.edu/first to learn more about their incredible programs and to get more information. F FRCT's managed store program is an easy and profitable way to fundra for your team or offseason event. FRCTS will handle everything from production, packaging, bulk or drop shipping, payment collection, [music] and accounting. Teams can set their own prices and FRCTS will take care of the rest. Fill out a quote request or get more information when you schedule a call back at >> frcts.com.