1218 SCH Robotics | Behind the Bumpers | FRC REBUILT Robot

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:08]What's going on everybody? My name is Jeff Bunky and I'm here with the at uh with the Fun Robotics Network at the First Mid-Atlantic District Championship event held at Lehigh University. I'm here with uh an amazing team, team 1218.

[00:00:21]Uh they're going to be going through their robot geode with us. I have Leo, Quinton, and Alex. Uh check it out here on Behind the Bumpers.

[00:00:29]All right, Leo, why don't you go ahead and get us started?

[00:00:32]>> Yeah. So, I can talk a little bit about our drive base. So, we're using the uh MK5NS from SDS with the L2 gear ratio. And something about this that we uh find really unique is the way that we keep these robust throughout the competition.

[00:00:46]So, we have two different systems for that. The first is using Molex and Powerpole crimps so that our entire uh swerve drive is completely hot swappable when we need to change it out if there's we ever see a problem with anything. Um we can swap out a swerve drive in around 5 minutes which is really nice. Another cool thing that we do is we have a um a donut roller that we can drop into any scorp drive that we need. In case of something goes wrong right before competition, right before a match, we can drop this in and be completely fine for the next match. Those are just two some two things that we do to stay really robust.

[00:01:23]>> Before we get to our next segment, we'd like to thank the following. True competitors know that every second counts. That's why Ketaring University challenges you to dive in right away as a firstear student. Participating in robotics programs helps Ketarine students secure a valuable co-op.

[00:01:37]Whatever your interests, Ketaring gives you more space to work faster and win faster. Learn more at ketarine.edu/first.

[00:01:44]Antimark is your one-stop shop for all things FTC. Teams who are looking for inspiration in decode can check out Andyark's robots core kit and FTC Starterbot, which are designed with usability and accessibility in mind, and check out some of their new components suitable for any FTC robot. Head on over to andark.com to find solutions that fit your team.

[00:02:04]>> Now, I'm going to pass it off to Alice to talk about the ground intake.

[00:02:08]>> So, this is our ground intake. From the very beginning of kickoff, we knew that we wanted an intake that would fold in on itself. So, we originally had a five bar mechanism. However, it was really complex and hard to repair. So, we switched to a much simpler four bar. Um, and then we have uh dead um dead axle rollers, dead axle sub rollers. Um, which meant that we don't have a axle going through the middle of it. So, we could put that weight that we cut out with the rollers to making our intake uh stronger. So, we have an 8 in uh crash bar, one by one crash bar here, um which helps protect our uh our rollers and anything behind it uh from getting hit.

[00:02:50]Um we also our kicker bar here is uh tall enough that it can go over the depot um while also uh being able to clear any balls in the spindexer.

[00:03:05]>> So, moving on to our spinexer. This is probably our most iterated on mechanism.

[00:03:09]We actually went into our first competition with an omni wheel in the middle. We still had the rotating plate um but we actually did a lot of iterations between our first two competitions to uh increase our balls per second. And eventually we landed on just the spinning plate with a cone design to start funneling them in. And then we added this 90° roller to our kicker which helped really center them and get them in much quicker. So moving on to our kicker. Our kickers run off of one X60 and it has this um 3in 4-in rotating 90 degree wheel and then 3-in rollers to help boost it up into our turret.

[00:03:43]>> So, was the the 90° roller was uh was that like a mid-season upgrade?

[00:03:48]>> Yeah. So, that was after our first competition once we switched from the Omni Wheel to the cone, we needed something else that was going to help it stay centered and get the balls in faster.

[00:03:57]>> So, moving on to our turret. Um the actual rotation mechanism is a 90 to 10 dp spurgeear that's run off of an X44 with a 37.5 to1 gear ratio. We use Chinese remainder theorem. Um and there is two encoders that are co-prime off of each other. Um one that is 9:1 and one that is 10:1. And this allows us to get the absolute position of our turret. So the next thing is our shooter. So we have about six pounds of mass on our shooter to really keep that rotational inertia up. This is run off of two X60s, um, which is really helpful to be able to keep our shots super consistent. Our next thing is our 3D printed hood. So, we use a herring bone gear that's ran off of an, uh, Neo 550. And then this is allows us to change our hood angle from 17.9° all the way up to 45°, which lets us get those really far shots from the neutral zone. with the Chinese remainder theorem. Uh I know a lot of teams have been using that for their hood zeroing or their hood positioning or I'm sorry turret positioning. Um did you guys run into any challenges with backlash uh when you were using it?

[00:05:05]>> No. So we've actually uh designed the system specifically for backlash which was really important. We actually ran a test um with a in the be during our season and found that we have about 0.5 degrees of backlash throughout this entire system from each encoder. So we didn't really run into a problem with that which was really nice. It's very cool. Another thing is our electrical system. So, we route our wires underneath our turret because we have a lifted turret and this allows us for this to have a tight wrap and get us 360° of rotation. I'm going to move it on move it on to Quinton to talk about a little bit about software.

[00:05:39]>> Yeah. So, speaking of software, um something super important this year has been the vision and we are running four cameras. These are like standard Ardu cams and each one is connected to an individual uh orange pi 5 which is running photon vision and those are housed under the belly pan right um and so when designing vision this year it was super important that we could see tags from wherever we would be when we're shooting. Um so we made sure to have sort of like almost a 360 view with these cameras here and then we have two on the back here as well. And um speaking of shooting, uh when we were thinking about how we wanted to shoot, we knew that shooting on the move would be super important. So um we've actually been running with a time offlight recursion method, which uh requires us to have a data map using time of flight and distance and shooter RPM and hood angle um and relating those things. And we we also decided not to go with a physics model because we felt that the data would better represent our mechanism especially with drag and things which makes the physics super complicated to to compute. Um and speaking of data, we've uh in the past to compute that or to find that time of flight, we've been taking videos of our shots into the hub. Um and we found that process to take a lot of time because you'd have to go back through those videos, count every frame and sort of figure out how long that was. And it was also very inaccurate looking from our statistics. So what we actually did was we created a Arduino sensor that's hooked up to a beam brake or a banner sensor that goes right in here to detect a ball coming through here. And then on the hub we have like a flat uh board that goes over the top of the hub. And we just connected our a vibration sensor to that that board. So when a ball comes out um and it hits that, we can calculate the difference between those two times. And we're able to get that data super quickly.

[00:07:34]>> All right. All right. Well, that's going to do it. Thanks again to SC Robotics team 1218. Thank you to Alex, Quentyn, and Leo for demonstrating a very, very impressive robot. Highly, highly competitive uh with an very very uh impressive iterative process. They put a lot of hard work into this machine and it's really showing on the field. If you did like this content, please like and subscribe. We'll catch you next time.

[00:07:58]>> Thanks for watching. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and click the bell to stay uptodate on future fun videos.

[00:08:03]Antieark is your one-stop shop for all things FTC. Teams who are looking for inspiration in decode can check out Andyark's robots core kit and FTC starterbot which are designed with usability and accessibility in mind and check out some of their new components suitable for any FTC robot. Head on over to annymark.com to find solutions that fit your team. True competitors know that every second counts. That's why Ketering University challenges you to dive in right away as a firstear student. Participating in robotics programs helps Ketaring students secure a valuable co-op. Whatever your interests, Ketarine gives you more space to work faster and win faster. Learn more at >> ketarine.edu/first.