FRC 2022 Hopper | Micah Hsu Portfolio

This was my first time touching SolidWorks! In high school, I was part of an award winning FIRST Robotics Competition team, Team 3476: Code Orange. In the 2022 season, I designed a “hopper” that delivered balls from the bottom of the robot to a shooter at the top using polycord.

Here’s our reveal video from that year:

Prototyping

After determining a basic robot concept and napkin sketch for the hopper, we prototyed the hopper. Here’s an image I found buried within the team Slack:

Design

Everything I learned from prototyping, including travel distance, travel speed, ideal compression, and design concept, I carried into the design phase. This was my first time using SolidWorks, so I spent hundreds of hours crunching out the design in the first few weeks of the build season. Nevertheless, it was tons of fun.

This layout sketch helped me map out the hopper.

Central to the design were polycarbonate rollers with polyurethane cords that acted as belts to drive all the rollers in the system. They were held in place by rubber tubing.

I also experimented with making an exploded view for my design:

Manufacturing

During the manufacturing phase, I managed a parts tracker and learned how to make drawings for the manufacturing team. Once all the parts had been fabricated, I led the assembly for the subsystem!

We had the side plates outsourced for waterjetting.

Here are a few pictures of the beginning of the assembly:

Here are a few pictures of the final build:

And a video of it working!

Competition

After our first regional competition (which we won!), we had a problem: balls were flying out of the hopper when we didn’t want them to. And sometimes, we would intake the wrong color ball (there are two colors of balls on the field, and we were only supposed to shoot one color). The problem is pictured below:

I revised the design so that we could eject balls we didn’t want, and make sure we were holding on to the ones we did want. This is what I came up with:

And here it is working!

With this and many other improvements, we won our next regional, advancing to the world championship and placing high in our division.