Making robust LED strip lights

LED strip lights look great on your robot, and can be used to communicate robot state to your drivers, so they never need to look away from the bot. But, the strips are vulnerable to battle damage, and the wire to strip connections are fragile. Our friends at team 1610 introduced us to these LED strip light diffusion channels that make LED strip lights on your robot way more robust. Plus, the strip light units can be made on the bench away from the robot in just minutes. Here is the process for building one of these light strip units, from start to finish.

Build guide [pdf]

2363 builds a drivetrain

When we recruit new students, one of our favorite lines is, “Nobody who joins the team knows how to build a robot. We’ll teach you.” As an established team, we go to competitions and see younger teams, some of whom don’t have engineering mentors, struggling to learn lessons we have learned the hard way. We see our role in growing FRC as helping those struggling teams become better more quickly, so they remain inspired, and don’t fold.

Last fall our students came up with the idea of producing a series of instructional videos. These would teach our incoming rookies the skills they would need to be productive robot builders. We see this video series, and the ones which will follow, as a tool which can help educate inexperienced students on our own team as well as other teams across FRC.

Video series

Chief Delphi post

Making a Triple Helix style climbing rope

During the quarter-finals of our last competition, our Pilot looked out over the field and noted that 3 of the teams of the field were using our climbing ropes, one of which was on the opposing alliance. After seeing so many posts about ropes failing in competition, 2363 has decided to share our method for making ropes with the FRC community.

Instructional video

Chief Delphi post