The Kings and Queens FTC Team 4625

We robotics teams have a lot of skill to do this kind of work. Can we use our talents to help during this crisis? Lots of parts are going to be in short supply as the virus's impact unfolds.

[Updating] Italian hospital saves Covid-19 patients lives by 3D printing valves for reanimation devices Many have been asking what the implications of the current Covid-19 pandemic are going to be on additive manufacturing as an industry. The relationship between coronavirus and 3D printing is not entirely clear, mostly because we are very far from understanding what the long, medium and even short te...

We are sad to relay the news that FIRST has announced the suspension of all remaining competitions and events for the 2019-2020 season including both World Championships.

We offer our condolences to our fellow FTC teams that qualified to advance to Worlds who will not have the opportunity this year to have that experience.

"Update 3/12/20

Dear friends, colleagues & partners,

It is with deep disappointment that I share an update on the immediate suspension of the current FIRST season and the cancellation of both Championship events. This decision has been made based on guidance from the World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and state and local health officials, as well as the declaration of states of emergency across many states/countries, the ever-expanding travel restrictions for schools, and in light of developments over the past 24 hours. The health and safety of our community is our top priority, so we have decided to suspend all season play across all Programs worldwide, effective immediately, including the cancellation of both FIRST Championship events. Please know that FIRST Championship registration fees will be refunded.

This difficult decision was grounded in FIRST’s commitment to put the health and safety of our community above all else. During this challenging time, we have been working closely with our program delivery partners (PDPs) and event organizers around the world to navigate and mitigate the risks to our community due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). As a result, many of our events in the United States and around the world have been canceled or postponed, including more than half of all future FIRST Robotics Competition events. We acknowledge and appreciate the thousands of teams, parents, mentors, coaches and volunteers who have poured their hearts and souls into this season, and we share your disappointment.

The mission of FIRST has always been to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders and innovators, and we continue to be deeply committed to this mission. We know that you will have questions, and we will provide answers in the following days and weeks as we navigate what has been an unprecedented time.

Sincerely,

Larry Cohen, President of FIRST"

COVID-19 Impact on FIRST Events (Updated March 12, 2020) Update 3/12/20 Dear friends, colleagues & partners,

And we would like to offer a big HUZZAH! of thanks to Poke Bar of Monrovia for being a sponsor of our robot this season. Poke Bar is a new business in town located in the Sprouts shopping center and we are glad they stepped up to support us. Please stop by and thank them for us. Poke Bar Monrovia

We would like to shout out a big thank you HUZZAH! to Nicomite Termite & Pest Control for signing on as a sponsor of our community outreach program. Nicomite was a sponsor of our competition robot last season and we are very grateful that they have returned this year and expanded their sponsorship. Nicomite Termite Control, Inc.

We would like to shout out a big thank you HUZZAH! to Dr. Q Dental for signing on as a sponsor of our community outreach program. Dr. Q was a sponsor of our trip the the FTC Robotics World Championship in Houston last year, and we are very grateful that she has continued to sponsor our team this season.

For our display board we took some glamour photos of Sir Bors. We share them here with you.

9881 Golden Gears
4625 Kings and Queens
4628 Suit Bots

Wow! What an alliance. A Winning Alliance!
More details later, but here was the result of the best match of the day with us stacking and Suit Bots delivering stones to us.

We would like to shout out a big thank you HUZZAH! to Donna Baker for signing on again as a sponsor of our community outreach program. Donna has been a sponsor of our outreach program of bringing robotics out into the community to schools and civics events for three years. She has also been a sponsor of our competition robots for 6 years, and a sponsor of all three of our trips to the FIRST Tech Challenge world championships! It takes a village to support a school robotics program and we are proud and thankful that Donna Baker is part of our village.

Finally, the most exciting addition to Sir Bors came as the result of an offhand suggestion from one of our newest team members. We were discussing the time we wasted in each match getting our capstone out of the robot at the beginning of teleop, picking it back up again at the start of endgame, and lifting it to the top of the skyscraper, averaging 10-12 seconds in all. The suggestion was "wouldn't it be great if our grabber was also our capstone and we could somehow just detach it and leave it on top of the last stone we stack." We kind of laughed, and said there was no way. But then we thought about it. We took some measurements. We consulted the internet for ideas on how payloads are dropped in aerospace. And we realized there was a way!

And we did it. We proudly unveil our new secret weapon, the detaching grabber/capstone! The circled area in the grabber became our capstone! It is held in place by a servo mechanism until we are finished stacking, and then we just press a button and it detaches and stays on top of the stone as we lift off it. With this every skyscraper we stack we can cap with no time or effort! Proving that no idea is too far out to at least deserve consideration.

We aren't going to tell you more about how it works except to say, it does work very well!

Another change we made to the robot was deceptively simple, but made a huge difference in how fast we can intake a stone and latch on to it. Originally our grabber was orientated with the vertical stop pad on the intake side of the robot. That meant that every time we wanted to intake a stone we had to raise the lift so the stone could pass under the stop pad. As part of our improvement process we realized that if we reversed the alignment of the grabber so the stop pad was away from the intake side, the stone would slide right into the latching position without needing to raise the intake. Small change, but big payoff in increased speed, less positioning worry for the drivers, and less issues trying to get under the skybridge with the slide partly raised. This change cost us about 5 inches of forward extension, but we have yet to need that extra capacity so it was a good tradeoff.

The biggest change we made to our robot was to remove our chunky 80-20 lift slides and replace them with smaller and lighter REV 15mm extrusion slides. The 80-20 slides were absolutely solid and reliable, but they were just too heavy. At our Meet 3 we only barely made the 42 pound weight limit.

The new REV slides weigh almost 4 pounds less, and because they are physically smaller we were able to add two more sections in the same space giving us the capacity to stack 3 stones higher than before. The lighter weight allowed us to use larger pulleys on the strings which makes the lift go up and down 20% faster. We also put Sir Bors on a strict diet and removed all unnecessary weight including our stack grabber paddles which we decided were not necessary to our game strategy now that we can lift higher. We're now eagerly awaiting the delivery of faster Gobilda motors to see if we can increase the speed of the slide even more.