How we shipped our pit to the FIRST Championship

The 2023 FIRST Championship in Houston, Texas featured 619 FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) teams from around the world, or approximately 18% of all active FRC teams. Attending the event as a competitor is a difficult, stressful endeavor for FRC team administrators and trip planners. This year, Triple Helix Robotics found a winning solution to the logistics challenge presented by the FIRST Championship. This writeup serves to summarize our unique approach to shipping our robot and pit equipment to and from the event.

Article (2,226 words, 11 minute estimated read time)

2023 IRI application

Triple Helix students have proudly submitted the following application to the 2023 Indiana Robotics Invitational, a competitive and prestigious annual offseason FRC tournament in the Indianapolis area.

What competitions did you attend in 2023?

What was your best performance of 2023?

At the Chesapeake District Championship, we were ranked 2nd after qualifications and formed an unbeatable alliance, emerging with a 5-0-0 record in the playoffs. This achievement marked our seventh consecutive win in the FIRST Chesapeake District over two seasons. Closing out this extraordinary season, we finished rank #30 in the USA and #34 worldwide (statbotics.io).

Do you have any special circumstances?

In addition to our on-field success, we have maintained a large reach in the FRC community through our presence on YouTube and our website publications. We accumulated over 31,000 views this year for our reveal and prototyping videos, and have over 350,000 lifetime views. Many innovations we’ve shared during the season have been adopted by other teams across the country, including our autonomous path planning optimization software, our auto camera LED alignment system, our two wheel intake design, and our simultaneous three-camera custom vision system. Joel Noble of FRC 1339 stated “I’ve personally benefited the most over many years from 95 and 2363 content, both of which continue to be a model for open development and design.”

Standard software suite for team laptops

When setting up new laptops for the team, Triple Helix installs the following suite of programs.

All laptops

FRC driver station laptops

Triple Helix strongly endorses WPILib’s Driver Station Best Practices guide for driver station laptops.

FRC software development laptops

All software required for an FRC driver station laptop, plus:

FRC mechanical design / CAD laptops

TORC development laptops

2022 IRI application

Triple Helix students have proudly submitted the following application to the 2022 Indiana Robotics Invitational, a competitive and prestigious annual offseason FRC tournament in the Indianapolis area.

What competitions did you attend in 2022?

What was your best performance this year?

Triple Helix won our District Championship as the first overall pick of the event, and with a first-time robot driver. Over the season, we accumulated a 55-4-3 W/L/T record including a 27 match win streak and having gone undefeated at one district event.

Are there any special circumstances we need to know about?

Working with limited membership due to COVID, we focused on building the fastest possible Cargo cycling robot. With a simple robot design, and by devoting remaining time to practice and tuning, this strategy led to competitive success unprecedented for our team. We prioritized Cargo cycling to maximize points during teleop even during the last 30s; by ending matches with a buzzerbeater climb using an improved Everybot climber, we were able to rival Traversal climbers representing far greater resource investment and mechanical complexity.

During competition season, we selected and trained a new driver ~1 week prior to the DCMP due to an injury on the drive team. Triple Helix declined our invitation to the FIRST Championship due to travel restrictions by the school system.

Link to a team video, if you would like to share one.

Genome Nu (2022) pre-match checklist

Triple Helix’s pit crew ensured that our 2022 robot, Genome Nu, was ready for each match by working through the following checklist.

  • Periodically inspect all wire connections
    • Power: battery->breaker->PDP->Controller->Motor
    • CAN: RIO->can devices->PDP
  • Inspect each swerve module
    • Clean movement
    • Carpet fuzz
  • Inspect belts for wear
  • Inspect shooter wheel tread for wear
  • Inspect climbing hooks for smooth operation after use
  • Clean intake flaps with alcohol when needed
  • Charge pneumatic system (with old battery)
  • Log and install a new battery. Secure loose battery cables with zip-tie.
  • Check proper auto switch setting
  • Push the hood all the way down to the lowest position