FRC 10011 Gem City Gridrunners | 2025 Rookie Build Thread

FIRST FRC Open Alliance
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Welcome to the 10011 Gem City Gridrunners 2025 Build Thread

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Welcome to our Build Thread, here we’re going to document our team’s progress as we navigate our first season of FRC and the Reefscape game.

Social Medias

Instagram | LinkedIn

CAD and GitHub Directory coming eventually

About Us

We’re a rookie team from Dayton, Ohio, based out of the Dayton Regional STEM School. Our school serves high school students across the greater Dayton region.

Our team consists of almost 50 students all of whom have never competed in FRC. A small percentage of our students have done FTC at our school in past seasons, however we are all new to FRC and excited to learn all of the new things and join the community.

Our teams mission statement that we wrote to guide our season is: We are a student-led FIRST robotics team where students inspire and empower themselves and the community to excel in STEM fields and beyond.

History

Our school has had a FIRST robotics program for over 10 years, which consisted at first as FTC and FLL teams. In the past three years, we sort of settled into a program of two FLL teams, and two FTC teams, one for middle school students, and one for high school students.

However, in the past few years, our school has begun integrating FIRST into the classroom, which increased student interest in our after-school programs. Since we do not have the space at our school to host the amount of FTC teams we would need to meet demand, we made the decision last spring to convert our high school FTC team (formerly #4537 DRSS Enterprise), into an FRC team.

Team Goals

Open Alliance Goals

As a rookie team with limited FIRST experience, we feel we provide a unique perspective on a rookie’s experience in FRC. We want to highlight the experience of students shifting from FTC to FRC, and what it is like being a true rookie student (which the majority of our team is). We want this to be a good resource for future rookies. Our goals this year are the following:

  • Post once a week

  • Cover our design process, and progress towards our season goals

  • Highlight our successes and failures to learn from

  • Create a thread to help future rookies!

Team Goals

  • Create a good foundation of knowledge, skills, mentors, outreach, and budget for future years

  • Reconnect with our school’s FIRST alumni

  • Connect with our local FRC community

  • Build the Kit Bot

  • Modify the Kit Bot for a swerve drive base

  • Bring a working robot (and hopefully keep it that way) to both of our regionals

  • Hoping to win Rookie All Star (we will see)

  • Fundraise the cost to attend tournaments so individual students don’t have to pay travel costs

@thertenstein @micahL

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Kickoff Recap!

This is our first Kickoff, but luckily we have some coaches and mentors with FRC experience, so they helped us come up with a plan. We split our team into two groups: one went to a local kickoff event to go pick up our season materials and Kit Bot, and the rest of us met at the school to watch the broadcast and do some brainstorming.

11:30-12:00 Arrive and set up for watching the broadcast

12:00-12:30 Watch the broadcast

12:30-1:30 Read the manual in small group, each focusing on one sub-section and pulling important details to share with the team

1:30-2:00 Compile our findings from reading the manual and start strategizing (our people who went to the local kickoff event came back at this point and rejoined the main group)

In preparation for the season…

Here’s what we’ve been able to accomplish (robot wise) since May when we made the decision to convert to FRC:

  • During the off-season, we were able to assemble a swerve drive using SwerveX2 modules from WCP. However we have been unable to test our chassis, because we are missing encoders. We should be able to test later this week, and will make a decision later on whether or not we use this swerve base for competition

  • We also got some limited parts from another Ohio team to begin assembling a kit-bot drive base. Sadly, we were missing enough of the parts that we were unable to finish building that chassis, but we did get some cool electrical components and motors, so that was nice.

Since kick off, we’ve secured the space, carpet and enough parent volunteers to help us build roughly a half field in our workspace. We’ve had several snow days, so we haven’t had a chance to visit our workshop and get any pictures yet.

Preliminary Strategy:

Since we’ve had no chance to have in person practice since the Kickoff broadcast, we haven’t been able to do a lot robot wise, so we’ve been using our time to make some strategy decisions. Here’s what we’re planning right now:
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We plan to take the Kitbot’s mechanism as a starting point, modifying it to fit onto the swerve drive base that we’ve already built. From there, we want to slide some sort of algae mechanism in here:
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Space for an algae intake/outtake mechanism

Some other criteria we are trying to design for include:

  • Durability

  • Robustness

  • Low center of gravity

  • Reliability

  • Consistency

  • Good vision system for our programmers/drivers

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