8738 SLICE - 2025 Open Alliance Build Thread

FIRST FRC Open Alliance
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Welcome to the 8738 Slice Robotics openalliance build thread for the 2024 season! This will be our fourth season as a team, and our third year as a member of The Open Alliance. Our goal as a part of OA is to help other teams to improve by documenting our methods, mistakes, and innovations as we continue our journey as a team.

About Us

FRC 8738 is a student-led team operating out of Fuquay Varina High School in North Carolina. We currently have roughly 54 students and 10 mentors. We meet daily after school throughout the year, running until 3:30pm or later as needed. We will be competing at the Wake and Mecklenburg district events in weeks 3 and 4.

Our mission is to Serve our community by inspiring students to be science, technology and business Leaders and Innovators. With essential help from our local Community, we strive to develop well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, professionalism and pursuit of Excellence. It’s all in our name — SLICE.

Open Alliance Strategy

Unlike last year, we now have a team of members dedicated specifically to writing our Open Alliance posts, rather than putting the responsibility on each subteam leader. The hope is that this will promote more consistent posts particularly later into the build season.

On top of our regular deep dives into the work on each subteam, we also plan to have weekly recap videos which we will be posting on Youtube throughout the build season.

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Kickoff and Week 1 Recap

Kickoff

This year, we hosted team 3349 Static for the Reefscape kickoff. That morning, our team members presented their research on the different mechanisms they were assigned. Once the game came out, we spent the afternoon learning the rules through analysis and simulation, such as xRC Sim and a human recreation of the game.

Strategy Breakdown

Tuesday was our strategy decision day, and this is what we decided:

  • P0 (Critical Functionality)
    • Acquire Coral (either by ground or source intaking)
    • Score Coral on all levels
    • Knock Algae off the Reef
  • P1 (Very Important)
    • Deep Cage
    • Source Intaking
    • Processor Scoring
  • P2 (Important)
    • Ground Intake
  • P3 (Not Important)
    • Fit under the shallow cage
  • P4 (No intention of pursuing)
    • Barge Algae
    • Shallow Cage

We made these decisions based on maintaining the ability to get bonus ranking points without capable teammates (which happens frequently in District Events) and remaining competitive at the World Championship, which we intend to return to.

Build Progress

This week, our team cut a full reef of coral, built a processor, started a Coral Station, finished wiring our secondary swerve drive, and built a roller intake to test whether that would suffice or if we needed something more elaborate. Our tests indicate that a wide enough intake with centering flaps should suffice for most acquisition angles, and we will build a larger intake during week 2 to verify this.

Simple Roller Intake Test

Robot Concepts

We don’t finalize our robot archetype until “Demo Day” this upcoming Thursday, but we still have plenty of concepts floating around. Here are a few noteworthy designs:

Large pivot on a short elevator:

This design, inspired by 2583, is capable of scoring on L1, L2, and L3 using just the elevator or the arm; however, both must be used to reach L4. It would have utilized a Rusthounds Ri3D climber. This design was scrapped due to its high CoG, no room for a good Deep Climb mechanism, and inefficient acquisition from the ground intake.

Double-jointed arm:

This design is capable of scoring on all 4 levels but does not implement deep climb or algae control. A small group of members actively pursued this design until today before scrapping it due to the lack of space for a climber.

Small pivot on a tall elevator:

This design can score on all four levels and can intake both game pieces from the ground as well as coral from the station. It has a simple roller for pulling out algae and can fold up the coral indexer to make room for the deep cage to access a Penn State Ri3D Climber. This design is being pursued by a different group of students and it will be presented for consideration on demo day.

What’s Next

We have a detailed season plan that is regularly updated to account for what progress has been made and how we need to compensate. You can keep track here if you would like to.

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