Welcome to the 2025 Walton Robotics Build Blog! Here we’ll share our code, CAD, and progress throughout the season. We’re registering as an Open Alliance team this year and we plan to give updates once or twice a week during the build season.
For more info about the team, last year’s build blog is linked here.
Our GitHub for this year, previous years, and off season projects is here.
We’ll be at PCH Events in Dalton in week 2 and Statesboro in week 4. Looking forward to the season!
Today we hosted kickoff with 1002 Circuit Runners and 1261 RoboLions and got a great start on understanding the rules, beginning to prioritize robot needs, and brainstorming. Below is our slideshow walking through each step of our kickoff process, as well as the worksheet template we used to gather rules and beginning strategy possibilities and robot requirements with 1002 and 1261. Mid-week we’ll post more about our robot requirements/decision matrix after meeting more. Looking forward to an awesome Reefscape season!
Slideshow:
Kickoff worksheet template:
Yesterday we finalised our robot requirement rankings and decision matrices for the different subsystems that might fit those goals. Below, the requirements listed in red are what we think must be on our robot by our first event in week 2. The blue is what we will work on once we know the red requirements will be satisfied, either for the first event or later, and blue number 1 (deep climb) has the highest priority of the blue requirements. The white is things that would be convenient to have, and we’ll work toward them if they seem within reach based on the mechanisms we build, but we aren’t going to consciously base subsystems off of them.
Robot requirements:
Until now, our team has been sketching possible robot designs to brainstorm which possible mechanisms could be useful, and we narrowed down what we’re going to do preliminary CADs/prototypes of to the top three highest valued coral intakes of our decision matrix (OTB, Y-Shaped, Expanding U-Shaped) and the number one algae intake idea, based off of our own 2019 intake.
Coral Decision Matrix:
Algae Decision Matrix:
We’re going to create a prototype of an adjustable width algae intake like our Deep Space one shown below mostly to test what different compression levels work best for the algae, since last night we were able to hook a battery box to our old robot and try out the algae in that intake a few times and saw that it might be able to outtake it best under slightly tighter compression than what our old robot (and Banks pressing the intake together) could provide.
We know we want to deep climb, but we determined that the coral mechanism is the most important thing for us to work on right now given the upcoming snow day and probably closure of our build site for the weekend, so we’re preparing to prototype as much as we can for coral on Thursday and saving the climber prototype(s) for post-snow.
Climber Decision Matrix:
Other ideas that we really liked but don’t necessarily fit into one of those three decision matrices were the Unqualified Quokkas Ri3D double sided intake concept based on their 2019 robot and having a pivoting elevator like our own in 2023 as ways to get the intake(s) for coral/algae to different levels while fitting in the extension rules, but that will get discussed more once we’re closer to the mechanisms that will come from the intake prototypes.
this is great. do you have your build season process documented anywhere else, or does this slideshow pretty much cover it all?
The slideshow is a pretty accurate overview. Once we get into the season, we also use ClickUp (which has a good free version) to keep everything scheduled and list individual parts from subsystems, etc. to assign to people and check off when CADs are done and make sure every piece gets manufactured by due dates. Here’s an example of what it would look like from our shooter from last year.
We are planning on documenting our season process here. I not sure how much of internal lab notes we plan to share. We start them with good intentions, but the goal is to build a robot. The documentation is secondary. Safety third. 
We reviewed our initial CAD prototypes, and were able to both critique and give helpful feedback to our peers. Each of our ideas showed potential, however a couple have passed judgement and we have begun physically prototyping them.
Y-Shape Intake - This Coral intake idea was our most successful CAD design, as the compliant star rollers allow for a quick intake, quick reorientation, and tight hold on the Coral. We plan to prototype this as soon as possible, but first we’re working on a slotted compression tester to determine the width of each part of the intake we’d like to prototype and the wheels that should go with it.
U-Shape Intake - This Coral intake design showed a key error in the pickup of the PVC coral game piece: the orientation of the game piece itself. While intaking from a human player station in either the horizontal and vertical orientation would be reliable, picking up a game piece from the ground would be difficult to obtain without a potential jam in the pivot or a misalignment of the coral relative to the center of the intake.
Over the Bumper Intake - This Coral intake design features another discrepancy that we overlooked when making our CAD, an outtake. This does not even feature a hint of this concept. As the game piece would be inserted into this design, the reorientation of the game piece would take place to place it in a vertical position, however the efficiency of this design is questionable and we will be doing a complete redesign of it to create a reliable idea to prototype.
Ground Intake - This intake starts with base wheels at bottom to create initial contact, and again has compliant star rollers to reorient the PVC into an advantageous position. The position of the actual stars is the problem along with the fact that we also don’t have an outtake on this design to actually score with this idea. This design will also be undergoing some more prototyping to perfect it.
This is our first Algae intake prototype. We based it heavily off our own 2019 intake, except this prototype will allow us to find the best compression for intake and outtake of algae rather than the 2019 game pieces. We laser cut slots into the bottom MDF pieces while the side arms will stay stable and let us get good measurements for when we turn this into on-robot CAD,
We have laser cut and begun building this design, we expect to have it finished by the end of this build week and begin testing with drills soon.
Our climber design is relatively simple, it features 2 round pegs attached to a pivot arm which is operated by a winch, just like the RustHOUNDS Ri3D design. We have also started physically modeling this prototype, and have cut/milled all parts excluding the winch, since we have our old winch climber modules from Shosty last year that we can bolt onto an old robot along with this assembly to help us test out climbing in some different places relative to the center of mass.
As the season goes on, we will continue to update this blog with the physical prototypes, our testing, and redone CAD of our other ideas.
What are the front wheels? I don’t think I’ve seen those before. Prototypes look good!
Love the progress so far!
Any potential news on when the DE field might be opening?
Although these wheels are labelled as 4’’ Flex Wheel 1/2’’ Bore in our CAD, those wheels were expanded from a 2’’ compliance wheel’s CAD just to have a 4’’ wheel diameter as a placeholder rather than being a specific wheel. Thanks!
Our amazing parent volunteers have been hard at work building our DE field, we are currently looking at a mid-February completion time, as we still have a lot of field elements shipping and being assembled. We’re looking forward to teams being able to practice on it as soon as possible!
nice. we are trying similar in Notion this year, but I want to keep improving our process.
Here are the results from testing our algae mechanism last night. We found that a wheel edge to wheel edge distance of 11 ⅞ inches gripped the algae well, so that’s what the mechanism is set at in all of the videos. We tried out intaking with the wheels both parallel and perpendicular to the ground and found that the top and bottom wheels rather than side to side were able to handle algae better without misalignment.
Side to side wheels:
Side to side wheels with algae bouncing/rolling:
Top and bottom wheels:
Top and bottom wheels with algae bouncing/rolling:
We also tried out shooting from the intake at a couple different angles to get an idea of the height/arc that the intake might be able to produce and were happy with the outcome.
Straight up:
Angled:
We’ve added motor mounts to the new plates we’ll cut on Saturday and are planning to test this with CIMs rather than just drills. We’re also adjusting the width of the plates to prevent the algae from getting stuck too far into the intake because it was able to outtake with more force when the algae was held in contact with both wheel sets, farther to the front of the intake.
The plates we tested last night:
The plates we’re cutting on Saturday:
Is this testing with clamshell or crosshatch algae? If crosshatch, is it internal or external ridges?
Those videos are all with crosshatch algae (if by external vs. internal you mean the ones with taller or shorter ridges like from the MA thread I think we have the shorter ridged or slightly smoother one? But I’ll have to check on Saturday). We also tested the outtaking with clamshell which performed pretty similarly, just went slightly shorter, but since the crosshatch is all that will be at competition we didn’t do much measurement with the clamshell.
How big is that ruler? Do you have data of how far you shot it? It’s hard to see exactly the dimensions from the video.
The ruler was 5 feet tall. we dont have exact data on how far it shot horizontally. we were planning on getting more specific data with our next iteration.
Internal ridges. (First version.) We have some clam shells. We should test too. (Hint M) 
What is the spacing between each pair of wheels attached to the same axle?
