This year, we voted to make a robot that could achieve all scoring options in the Charged Up game. Our team was unsure if we could successfully build an elevator mechanism, so we chose to use a double-arm design for scoring on the top nodes. The double-arm was to be supported by a set of A-frames.

Our chassis this year was the AndyMark AM14U5 again, but our team wanted to branch out a little bit, so we decided to test out an 8 wheel configuration, using new performance wheels with track. For our end game strategy, we chose to decrease the kit chassis width from 30in to 23in, hoping it would help more alliance members fit on the charging station.

Though we had our double-arm & claw built before the competition, we were still experiencing what we now know were PWM wiring & programming errors. This caused the team to pause work on the arm, in order to focus only on the tasks necessary to qualify for competition at all. 

We failed to identify the issue that was stopping Aphelion from driving properly until the 1st day of competition. We ended up missing a qualification match but we kept working. Students and mentors from teams High Tide, Hawaiian Kids & Element supported us with guidance and even spare hardware all day. We had to rip out our entire PWM system & wire Aphelion from scratch with CAN.

In the end, we were able to score in autonomous mode, score in tele-operated mode, and balance on the charging station.

Where will Aphelion go next? We aren’t sure yet, but we definitely plan to attend off-season events, including Team 4414’s “Tidal Tumble” in Ventura, California! We plan to enter 2 robots, now that we can confidently say that Aphelion works.

Teams High Tide (4414), Hawaiian Kids (359), Element (4) and Eagle Robotics (1138) taught our students and mentors everything we needed to know about CAN wiring and programming to get our robot moving. We want to thank these teams & the other friendly faces at the Ventura County Regional that took time out of their weekend to support us. Thank you!

This year’s off-season will also see us reward Gene Haas Foundation grants for our graduating seniors. Thank you to the Gene Haas Foundation for their commitment to the FIRST community!

For the Rapid React game, we aimed to be able to pickup game elements from our human player, shoot them in the highest scoring area, and climb the monkey bars for the endgame.

To achieve these three goals, we built the standard FRC “kit of parts” 6 wheel, drop center chassis (sold by AndyMark), attached our own, custom-designed set of shooter wheels & plastic sheet intake system, and rounded it out with FRC Team 118’s Everybot passive hanger kit (also sold by AndyMark).

At the competition, Perihelion failed inspection due to the illegal frame overhang of the motors on the shooting mechanism. FIRST volunteers & members of other FRC teams helped us remove the shooter & prepare to remount it in a legal location, but we ran out of time. 

Having no ability to shoot balls into the higher scoring locations, we chose to focus on defensive playing. We struggled with electrical errors including battery disconnection due to robot-to-robot contact, and what we now know were PWM coding faults. Despite our challenges, we were able to play effective defense in a few matches, and we achieved the end game in one of our matches!

When the team returned from the competition, we immediately began work on rebuilding Perihelion. We planned to build an intake & indexing system that would be located underneath our original shooter. To achieve this, we remounted the original shooter in a higher location, with no frame overhang. We also started researching other FRC indexing systems and drew some basic paper designs for Peri. We ended up running out of time at the end of the 2021-2022 school year, so Peri never got its indexing system.

Though it never successfully operated how we wanted it to, Perihelion served as a great asset for recruitment purposes, during the 2022 off-season. Our team used Peri to demonstrate our key successes & failures to rookie team members in the class room, and potential new team members at Rancho Campana’s ‘club rush’ event.