2582 PantherBots Build Blog | Open Alliance | 2025

[chadr03]

San Antonio Failures and Fixes:

Missing bolts on swerve fork

During a systems check before match 51 we found some missing bolts in one of the forks of a swerve module. We put in some Loctite and new bolts but found that the wheel would lock up and not turn. After further inspection we found the bevel pinion on the swerve module had been damaged due to running with missing bolts.

We were being called to que when we found this out so we popped in our omni wheel and ran match 51 on three swerve modules. If you are a swerve team and don’t have an omni in your tool kit get one. It is the difference between 85% effective and sitting out the match.

We scored the following on 3 swerve modules and an omni:

Auto:
1 - L2 (ran out of time for the comeback L4)
Tele:
8 - L4 (with defense being played against us for most of the match)
End:
Deep climb

Match Video:

2025 FIT District San Antonio Event Qualification Match 51 of 84.mp4

No way we win that match without the omni.

After match 51 we swapped out the damaged bevel gear with one from our spare swerve module before match 57.

Elevator Belts Falling Off Track After Eating Algae

In Match 1 of the playoff bracket we had an algae enter our bot and get jammed in our elevator in an unusual manner that caused the belts to come off track and get jammed between the side plates and pulleys (where the yellow arrow is in the pic below). This caused our elevator to be out of commission for most of the match.

We un-tensioned the belts and re-routed them on the pulleys, then re-tensioned the belts and were good for the rest of the competition.

We are going to make pulleys with larger flanges to try to keep this from possibly happening again.

[Weldingrod1]

I totally agree on having a crazy wheel ready to go!
FYI, the SDS swerve needs the single row omni; I could not get the 4" double row style to fit, despite LOTS of trying.
You can also make a crazy wheel out of slippery plastic. We loaned both of our crazy wheels to a team at the Robot Remix off season. The steel mounting plates for the field parts broke multiple rollers off the omnis. I’ve made a Teflon one for the next try; it should be tougher

Swerve crazy wheel

I built our team a crazy wheel that fits the SDS MK4 modules. The idea is that when you fail -something- on your swerve module and need it working in a big hurry, you pull off the wheel and substitute this thing! Its a 4" Omni wheel with bearings in it, so it rolls any way you want, irrespective of what the swerve module is doing (steer OR drive)! I recently made some updates so that it uses the stock SDS bearings… Bore or drill out the hole in the AM-2948A Omni-wheel to anything over 1/2". …

MK4i 3d-printed model with swivel casters

And my latest version: [image]

[philso]

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you for sharing the crazy wheel with us last year!

Your crazy wheel saved our hides at our first event last year. We ran something like 5-6 matches on a crazy wheel until we had a long enough gap between matches to be able to swap our swerve module. It was pretty much destroyed when we took it off but we won some of those matches.

[Jason_p]

Ways to improve our autonomous:
Our at-home reef

An issue we’ve been running into while trying to improve our auto is our full size reef seems to have slight inconsistencies throughout; Our practice reef has taken some beating which caused the spacing between the branches and the homemade branches themselves to be untrue to a competition field, which makes it pretty hard to tune our autos but we’re making do.

This auto successfully makes the first 2 L4’s within about 12 seconds but the whole auto is about 18 seconds total.

An oopsies we made today…

Gotta break it before you can fix it! (sorry chad)

Something else we are struggling with is cutting time withing our autos. We’ve been reducing timeouts in code here and there and making parallel groups where we can but we are just barely too slow for a triple L4 auto. The sooner we can hone our autos before DCMP, the better.

Any tips and tricks to improve this would be great!

[Krypto_Rex]

Are yall too unstable if you try to extend while driving towards the reef? Maybe you can save a couple seconds there.

[chadr03]

Me watching it slam into the barge with the elevator up:

@Krypto_Rex

Are yall too unstable

Me thinking about it after it didn’t flop over:

We likely could be more aggressive and get some time there. We are pretty stable going forwards and backwards. A little tippy sideways when the elevator is extended.

[Jason_p]

Auton Improvement

Tonight we continued refining our autos after a few of us spent the weekend brainstorming and studying other team’s autos get things just right.

We’ve successfully ran our first triple L4 auto! (about 13 seconds)

We took out our april tag auto-aim because it would add a whole second per cycle. It would often cause the wheels to come off the ground while the elevator was up which made us consistently miss.

After some tinkering with the elevator during our path, we decided to turn towards the reef much earlier and also raise the elevator beforehand and managed to save a good chunk of time without tipping (thanks @Krypto_Rex )

Before DCMP in less than 10 days, we’d like to get our right side version of this auto working. During San Antonio, we primarily did autos on the right side due to our accuracy being better there so hopefully it shouldn’t be too difficult.

One of our first attempts of the right side version

Definitely going to fine tune things first thing tomorrow as much as we can. With today being our last day before Chad heads to Amarillo to volunteer at the district event, hopefully we don’t run into too many issues before he gets back. fingers crossed

[RicDV]

We can trade…LOL

[chadr03]

FiT District Championships

This week, we competed in FIRST in the Texas District Championship Mercury Division. We had the opportunity to compete with and against the best robots in the state. In qualifications, we had a record of 6-6 and ranked 19th. We were thrilled to be selected by the number eight seed alliance comprising 2689 Alpha and 4641 TALON Inc. We had a great time and put up a good effort but were knocked out of the bracket in two matches.

We ended our season ranked 25 in the FiT District, which just missed out on qualification for the FIRST Championship.

Congratulations to all of the teams that qualified. There are so many that are truly inspirational. We will be rooting you on.

I want to thank our seniors. They have taken this program to a different level. This crew of nearly 30 came onto a very small team after the COVID years and built this into a solid contender year after year. They have been driven to keep learning, innovating, teaching, iterating, improving, and having fun.

2022

2023

2024

2025

In their time on the team, we have hit the following milestones:

1 Trip to Einstein
2 Blue Banners
4 Finalist Appearances
3 Spirit Awards
2 Innovation and Control Awards
2 Quality Awards
1 Judges’ Award
1 Industrial Design Award
1 Gracious Professionalism Award
4 District Championship Qualifications
3 Trips to FIRST Championship
3 Years on Open Alliance

I look forward to seeing what their futures hold.

[lewislongbottom]

Pantherbots were very impressive this year, I think its understated the impact you had on robot designs this year through OA. I enjoyed being able to see you guys compete this year at San Antonio and TXDCMP.

[quickgivemememes]

Massive thanks to you guys for inspiring our climb mechanism this year. The concept’s mechanical simplicity and reliability are top-notch and had a huge positive impact on our season. Shame y’all didn’t qualify for worlds this year; you guys had an amazing season and I can’t wait to see what you cook up in 2026.

[CharlesG]

It was nice visiting with you at Amarillo and DCMP. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to have our teams team up together this year, but hopefully next year. Great season, and amazing 4 year performance from your seniors!

[chadr03]

@lewislongbottom

impact you had on robot designs

@quickgivemememes

inspiring our climb mechanism

Thank you for the feedback please give us more. Let us know what was useful to your team. Use this link to a short Google form, or just post on this thread. It will help direct or content in future OA posts.

[chadr03]

TRI Recap

The way our team approaches off-season events is that they are training events. We expose new people to new positions to better prepare them for in season events. We have found that off-season events are great for this. They are typically more relaxed and laid-back compared to district events. This year, we had a large number of experienced seniors graduate from our team. Our entire drive team, which has mostly the same students for three seasons, will be new next year. Our drive coach, who has been behind the glass in some capacity for us since 2019, will be moving on next year. The vast majority of our pit crew will be new next year. There will be changes in our school administration that had very close ties to the team. So, lots of change.

We entered this event knowing that we would face challenges and have a lot to learn.

We ended up ranked 20th after qualification matches with a record of 5-4. We were the second pick of the number one alliance, which consisted of 118 Robonauts, 8044 Denham Venom, and 10014 REBELLION. Our alliance won the event, and we also received the Professionalism Award.

We traveled very light to this event with only 11 students. We typically travel with 32-35 during the season. Throughout the qualification matches, we swapped drivers, operators, human players, pit crew members, and strategists to give them all a feel for each position. Once we reached the playoffs, we selected a drive team that we felt would play well (We plan to post more on our drive team selection process in a later post). All the students who were able to attend learned a great deal and gained valuable experience.

The robot performed well throughout the event, requiring only minor repairs, including a change of treads and routine cleanouts.

Changes and Lessons Learned

We made some significant modifications to our autonomous code from the season.

During the season, we attempted to run a PathPlanner code that utilized the Limelight to add vision measurements and update the global robot pose. This worked well on our home field, but worked very poorly in competition. We struggled a lot during the season and never really figured out why it did not work well at competitions.

After reading 2056’s technical binder and learning they used a 2D April Tag target for alignment with the reef, we decided to try it.

This event our auto used PathPlanner to drive to a position that was about 1 meter away from the scoring position. We used the global robot pose to determine roughly where we were on the field and what reef face we were closest to get the desired heading that the robot needed to be facing to score. Then it switched to a 2D April Tag pipeline that had the camera crosshairs set up for that reef post (left or right). The drive command switched to a robot centric facing angle and used the limelight t_x as feedback to move left and right and the t_a to move forward and backward. We had significantly more success with this method than anything we tried all season.

I want to thank Spectrum for hosting this event, the Volunteers for making such a fun event possible, and our alliance partners 118, 8044, and 10014. It was a ton of fun.