862 Lightning Robotics | 2025 Open Alliance Build Blog

[gigawatt]

Welcome to Lightning Robotics 2025 Build Thread

This is our first season as an Open Alliance team. We are excited to ride the waves with everyone!

Who are we?

Lightning Robotics is a team from the Plymouth-Canton Educational Park in Canton, Michigan. We have quite the unique situation compared to the average high school. On one campus, we have three different schools - Canton, Plymouth, and Salem. There are approximately 6,000 students (bigger than some college campuses!) and we are 125 team members strong, with 25 dedicated mentors. Founded in 1999, we are ready to dive into our 26th season, Reefscape, with great anticipation.

Our team began when our lead advisor, Mr. Obsniuk (known affectionately by everyone as Mr. O), became inspired upon hearing about FIRST. As a teacher at South Lyon High School, he was invited to meet with the HOT team (FRC 67, Heroes of Tomorrow) and found the program intriguing. He thought it would be a fun way to engage students in STEM and had the intention of starting a team at South Lyon that year. However, he ended up switching districts to Plymouth-Canton Community Schools. The dream didn’t die with his move. He continued to pursue his goal of forming a robotics team and passionately worked with administrators.

A fun fact about Lightning Robotics is how we coined our name: in 2000, our students were debating if they should call the robot Zeus or Johnny 5 – consulting a thick notebook with every FLL, FTC, and FRC team name. Simultaneously, Mr. O was on the phone completing registration with FIRST and needed to declare a name. It was storming outside, so he thought if the robot was named Zeus, Lightning Robotics would fit perfectly – and the rest is history!

Structure

Our team is organized into 2 Operations, Business and Engineering, each led by a student Vice President, and our team President overseeing it all. These two sections are broken into smaller subgroups, each having a respective student lead. Our 4 Business Operations subgroups are: Animation, Awards, Marketing, and Outreach. There are also 3 coordinators within business: our Digital Media Coordinator, FIRST Programs Coordinator, and Sponsorship Coordinator. Our 5 Engineering Operations subgroups are: Design, Electrical, Fabrication, Programming, and Strategy. An Engineering Project Manager (EPM) and Prototyping Lead support the group as well. Student leadership works with their subgroup to facilitate communication, teamwork, and efficiency.

Lightnings Mission

Our mission is to provide opportunities for students to develop STEM and business skills, and to instill the Lightning Robotics values of STRIKE:

Student leadership,

Teamwork,

Resilience,

Inspiration,

Knowledge, and

Engagement

What to Expect From Us

Every Friday, with an occasional bonus post, we’ll give you a look into our team and our season’s progress. We are shore-ly excited to embark on this year’s voyage!

Table of Contents

1. Preseason
2. Kickoff Around the Corner
3. Strat Sunday Results
4. Drivetrain, and early prototypes
5. Coming Soon…

Quick Links

Inspired by

Team Rembrants 4481

[gigawatt]

Preseason Robot Build

Our preseason project was to build the 2024 West Coast Products Competitive Concept, after hosting our ‘Rookie Rotation’ – which is when interested students attend meetings and get a chance to test out all of our subgroups then choose their top two favorites. By the end of the process, which ends in early October, everyone was situated in their subgroups, ready to begin the preseason. Our first few meetings with the new rookies provided training opportunities and taught them what to expect from their subgroups going forward.

The idea of creating an off season robot was introduced by our Engineering Lead Mentor. Robot build began in October, with our goal to be finished about 2 weeks prior to the holiday break. We got to work right away with the early stages of refining the CAD and going straight into Fabrication, followed by Electrical, and wrapping up in Programming as we reached our deadline. In theme with Crescendo, we named our robot Showstopper. The build helped our Engineering leadership team develop new skills, get experience with task management, and improve communication by using Jira and having quick stand-up meetings throughout the process.

Challenges We Faced

In the beginning, we faced two main challenges: one being our lack of time due to only meeting once a week and the other being veterans needing the discipline to slow down the process of work so rookies would have more opportunities to learn, understand, and build. As our preseason began, we casually met every week on Wednesdays, but as the process of Showstopper ramped up, so did our efforts to complete it in a timely fashion. We began to add more meetings as the deadline rapidly approached. We had identified Wednesday 12/11 as the target for the robot completion date, which we did achieve. The second challenge we faced was mainly directed towards the veterans, as they needed to take more time with the process so that rookies could get a better understanding of how things will be running during build season. Another thing that came up as a bottleneck at first was the limited number of students trained to run the CNC router and mill machines, but over time more people got a chance to get familiar with how the machines work and operate them safely. In the end, this will be better for the team as we have more students with the skills to make parts in the mill room and on the CNC machine.

Showstopper CAD and Our Reusable Drivetrain

We started this project with sustainability as a priority. We wanted to effectively use our materials, which means using the drivetrain from Showstopper as the upcoming build season’s practice bot, 'Triton’. Triton’s drivetrain will be used to build our successful prototyping components in the first iteration of a full robot solution. The team will then be able to test out how the components work together to collect and score game pieces, as well as begin training our drive team.

Our preseason designed drivetrain can be found here. An interesting thing about this CAD is that when we change one dimension, it adjusts how long every rail is and the location of the battery for the most optimal center of gravity.

Would We Do This Process Again?

The Strategy subgroup sent out a feedback form to gather responses from both rookies and veterans for their perspectives on how the Showstopper build went. We received some constructive ideas and thoughtful feedback. A rookie from Electrical said, “I really liked how the rookies could get a real learning experience in the preseason instead of just general training, because I think it made it way clearer on the process of how things are going to go during the season.”

The results showed that 78% learned new and useful skills to help prepare them for build season; 73% would like to do another project like this one next year; and 94% said they got a chance to work on the things they were interested in during the preseason. Based on the feedback, many people enjoyed this process because it helped them establish or enhance their skills, prepare them for the season, and participate in the process of an actual robot build.

[tjwolter]

Fun to see various perspectives on OA25. That of a large, long established team is interesting. Some of it won’t translate to the wider world of FRC, but there’s always a few tidbits to pick up…

[gigawatt]

Kickoff Around the Corner

As the Reefscape game announcement is rapidly approaching, our team is electrified for Kickoff! Saturday starts out by meeting to view the release of the game. While we can’t wait to find out this year’s challenge, we’d like to share a few things about what our team does for this exciting day.

How We Do Kickoff

Immediately after the stream ends, we divide into groups to focus on detailed parts of the rule book.

• Field Elements
• Game Pieces
• Scoring
• Robot Design Rules
• Drive Team & Venue Rules
• Penalties
• Match/Tournament/Advancement Rules
• Historical Game Comparisons

After each topic has been presented to the whole team, we continue with prototype discussions, testing game pieces to see how they interact with possible collector elements, and encourage students to sketch out ideas for component and/or robot designs.

‘Strat’ Sunday

The day after Kickoff, our student leadership, mentors, and strategy members meet to exchange ideas and create the team’s strategic priorities that will guide us through the season. We start the morning off with an exhaustive rule review to familiarize ourselves with all aspects of the new game challenge. Some of the topics we cover throughout the meeting include:

• Identify detailed elements of… Field Zones,Field Elements, Game Pieces, & Human Player Rules
• Compare & Contrast Auton, Teleoperated, and Endgame Tasks
• Match Points vs. Rank Points Analysis
• Robot Functionality Prioritization Table
• Strategic Priorities

Base Robot Development

This year we will have 3 drivetrains to work with progressively throughout the season. This allows us multiple platforms to further test and prove-out our concepts before coming to a final design. Having multiple drivetrains to prototype and build on also helps our team to advance through the robot iteration process more effectively.

Hurleybot

First, we start off with our prototyping drivetrain named Hurleybot (after a mentor who kindly donated some Falcon 500 motors and 4 SDS MK4 swerve modules). Our very first concepts that we want to see on a moving robot will be tested here.

Triton

Next up is our dev bot, Triton, which will have the same sized drivetrain as our competition robot. Acting as a stepping stone between Hurleybot and our Comp Bot, Triton will be used to test our favorite concepts before they’re fully innovated, showing us where we still need to improve.

Nautilus

Finally, we have our competition robot—Nautilus. It will consist of our most refined design concepts and highest performing features that we’re ready to take to the competition field.

Wishing everyone a great season and see you next week!

[gigawatt]

Strat Sunday Results

With the release of Reefscape, we dove right into the specifics to kickoff our build sea-son. Strat Sunday is an annual meeting the strategy subgroup leads to create strict strategic priorities for our robot. Engineering leadership, mentors, and strategy members met to discuss the rules, elements, priorities, and prototypes. These discussions were crucial for smooth sailing this build season.

Shown below is a PPUT list that helped us rank Nautilus’ potential tasks to perform throughout a match. Cycle times were established using an online simulator. These estimations helped to further create a tier list, which as a group we came up with subjective rankings after thoroughly discussing each item. This exercise gave us an idea of how mechanically and programmatically simple these actions would be to implement on the robot.

PPUT

Tier List

Goals and Dreams!

We then went on to discuss a ‘food for thought’ question, which was brought up by one of our mentors: “What do you realistically see our team achieving this season?” To get a fair decision we came up with…

Dreams

• Winning a District Competition
• Win a States field as a 1st pick
• Get picked on a World’s field
• Make it to Einstiens at the World Championship

Goals

• Building a consistent robot
• Don’t change any major mechanisms
• Have a consistent auton (fully created and tested before each comp)
• Build simple
• Build quick

The final dream we voted on was ‘Get Picked on a World’s Field’. Along with determining that, all of the goals were going to be something we strive for, but consistency would remain our top priority.

The Robot Will…

By the end of the Goals and Dreams discussion, we started to wrap up our meeting with one last topic to discuss – the ‘robot will’ statements. This is what we expect to have on our comp robot before our week one competition.

• Drive
• Deep Climb
• Score Coral all levels
  • Collect Coral Source
  • Algae Reef Removal
  • Auton score one Coral L1
• Score Algae in Processor
  • Ground Collect Algae

If time allows it before our first competition, some things we would like to add on would be:

• Ground collect coral
• Reef collect algae
• Auton collect from Source
• Auton score 1-3 Coral L2-L4

[gigawatt]

Drivetrain Specs

Our competition robot will be a 27"x27" swerve drivetrain with ⅛" thick rails, using MK4i modules with an L2 drive ratio. We’re reserving an 8"x11" opening on the polycarbonate belly pan in the middle of the drivetrain to assist with the deep climb. We intend on having the battery sitting upright towards the front of the robot for counterweight, placing our center of gravity closer to the middle of our final design.

Prototyping Progress

We entered our first build week full steam ahead working on our many different prototypes. Using our strategic priorities and CAD coming from our design team, we decided what mechanisms we wanted to create first. Some examples are…

Vertical Source Coral Collector

Horizontal Source Coral Collector

Horizontal Source Coral Passive Funnel

Ground Algae Collector

Deep Climb

[Prinkle]

Prototyping Update

I’m Team 862s Vice President of Engineering, I’m going to be making smaller form posts while our team account makes larger more in-depth posts, anyway. We have been hard at work this week with our prototypes for mechanisms like our Coral ,and Algae collectors ,and our Deep Cage Climb.

Archetype

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After a lot of careful consideration this is what are robot archetype will be. We went with the elevator because of its simplicity, We have made them in the past bit what's different from this year is that we will be making a "belt in" elevator. A good example of this would be Team 4414 Hightide 2023 robot, it will be made with a cascade rigging system to keep center of gravity low when not fully extended. Our climb is still being worked on between a climb like Penn State Ri3D and a donut climb with a elevator (see climb dropdown).

Vertical Collector Roller

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This is the collector that we are currently favoring due to the ease of mounting to a pivot (Wrist) on our elevator. It is probably the lightest considering we don't need an arm on our elevator for it.

More to come once we get them to YouTube.

Horizontal Rollers

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We are leaning away from this due to the fact that we would have to put a big arm on the carriage of our elevator. Along with the very little testing that we have done with it.

Algae Ground Collector

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This was our only prototype for this collector as it wasn't a high priority but we ended up have space to fit it on our drivetrain.

Climb

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One of our students from our Design subgroup had thought of this before seeing the Ri3D teams do it. These tests were done with a mini CIM motor on a 45:1 gear reduction. we are currently running with this. Our next step is to swap the motor to a Kraken X60 and refine the design more.

Test 1

Test 2 (shorter 2x4):

Test 3 (with offset weight):

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Written by: @Prinkle