FRC 10063 SCRAP Robotics | 2024 Build & Activities Thread | Open Alliance

FIRST FRC Open Alliance
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IS OPEN ALLIANCE READY TO CHANGE THE GAME?

Welcome to the FRC 10063 SCRAP Robotics thread!

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Welcome to SCRAP’s Build & Activities Thread for the 2025 season, “REEFSCAPE”! Our team is super excited to bring you a build thread that focuses on the day-to-day of a rookie FRC team.

Important Links

Instagram | Facebook | Website (current WIP!)

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About Us

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SCRAP (Student Community of Robotics and Programming), is a rookie FRC team Weymouth, MA. Our goal is to provide robotics to the Greater Boston community, focusing on making every opportunity accessible and fun!

Our team consists of 25 new students who have never participated in FIRST, and four mentors (two of which previously participated in the program).

History

Our club actually starts in 2012, from the founding of the school’s previous robotics team: FRC 4151 SCRAP. Their tenure ended in 2020 due to conflicts from the pandemic. Since then, our program has undergone significant changes such as a change of leadership, new space, and more. In 2023, our club was re-founded by a handful of students, and chose to create a team to participate in FRC. However, we chose to hold off our registration for a year to guarantee a sustainable foundation; including recruiting and training new students, performing outreach, fundraising, and re-establishing community ties.

While we retained the previous name, a handful of pink shirts, some past robots, and our school location, SCRAP has been completely rebuilt from the ground up.

Team Goals

Open Alliance Goals

As a rookie, we feel we provide a unique perspective on a rookie’s experience in FRC. While this blog will focus primarily on the season build and creation of the robot, we also want to post about business and imagery. Our goals this year are the following:

  • Post 1x a week, minimum
  • Cover various topics including design, build, imagery, and business
  • Possibly collaborate with other OA teams
  • Create a thread to help future rookies!

Team Goals

  • Participate at events with a consistent and reliable robot
  • Developing a sustainable base for future participation and growth of our program
  • Create resources and documentation to assist other teams
  • Create a stable online presence (including a website)
  • Aim for Rookie All Star at one of our events
  • Provide an experience that makes robotics more accessible in the Greater Boston area
  • Advancing as far as we can!
  • Having fun!
  • Making it pink!

Table of Contents

Will be updated as content is posted!

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wow, its been a long week, huh?!

KICKOFF RECAP

Welcome to Day 1 of SCRAP Robotics! After the game was released, we got to work analyzing the game manual, prioritizing game objectives, and the basics of our designs. This post will recap all of our ideas and testing from the past week.

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Our Initial Thoughts

  • Since we’re a rookie team and based on the game’s scoring this year, we decided to mostly focus on one game piece
  • Based on our kickoff analysis of the game, we decided CORAL should be the main focus of our game plan this year. These reasons included:
    • Algae is a much more limited resource than coral
    • To score algae we’re either placing reef algae or missed shots into the processor, which has low scoring potential (especially if the HP banks their shots)
    • Alternatively, we shoot into the barrage, which while scoring more consistently, is inhibited by not many algae on the field, and the potential for the barrage to get filled up, making it more difficult to score consecutive points
  • ALGAE creates problems that, if not dealt with, can lead to major congestion / inability to score points
  • Ground intake is not a major priority for us due to how difficult the game pieces are to pick up. Since we can largely stay on our own half of the field, we decided to focus on picking up coral from the human player station and the Algae off the reef.

Strategy

Priority It’s Cool Nice to Have Huh?
CORAL > ALGAE > CAGES > BARRAGE

Design SCRAPs

haha, get it?

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Our team has overall agreed to a design similar to “Mr. Krabs”, created by our programming and business students Jasraj and Benson. The core functions of the robot should perform as follows:

  • Builds upon the Kitbot Design to ensure function for competition
  • An elevator that can reach up to level four
  • Be able to intake both CORAL and ALGAE. The rough plan is:
    • Have a chute similar to the KitBot for intaking the coral
    • Have an end effector to outtake coral and pickup the algae
    • Modular design, making sure we can replace important components quickly and without too much effort
  • Planning on making the elevator single stage if possible
  • Leaning towards using either belts or strings to manage the elevator over chain
  • Potentially having the elevator start a few inches up from the base of the bot, as we could just drop algae in front of the processor for us to drive into

Ri3D IDEAS

This year, both the PennState and Cranberry Alarm RI3D teams created exceptional designs we’re looking forward to referencing. Both these designs have components that we are interested in.

  • Intake that outtakes CORAL and intake ALGAE at the same time
  • Modularity for a climber (if we choose to pursue this later in the season)
  • Builds off of the Kitbot design
  • Easy-to-access resources such as CAD, BOM, and more.

Until next time, weeeee…!!!
-LY

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Week 1 Recap

This week, our team spent a long time researching robot designs to help decide upon our final design.

We started researching robots from these years (in no particular order):

  • 2019
  • 2018
  • 2023

What we noted:

  • Rollers for CORAL are preferred for grip.
  • We might modify the Kitbot to have treads to influence CORAL intaking, instead of relying on force and gravity
  • ALGAE may be difficult to pick up from the ground level, which can cause issues if the robot is moving too fast
  • Our intake should have an ALGAE claw sitting at ground level, while CORAL should sit at least at Level 1

Tasks from this week

Mechanical:

  • Team organized various workstations and split off parts for a tank chassis, swerve chassis, and mechanism(s)
  • Reviewed Ri3D robots and identified potential design elements to take inspiration from for the intake and elevator mechanisms
  • CADded chassis holes for swerve to be used on our drill press
  • Performed cuts to the tank chassis “walls” for assembly, and polycarbonate plates for a temporary electrical board
  • Assessed and got a couple 3d printers up and running to start making printed parts for the robot
  • Sent a potential intake design to our school’s workshop to be made for testing

Electrical:

  • Tested NEOs and Spark MAXes donated to us by other teams (thank you 319, 1991, and 5459!)
  • Organized and began work on a temporary electrical board to develop prototypes
  • Identified potential 3d mounts we could use for mounting Spark MAXes

Programming:

  • Setup our two primary programming laptops for National Instruments, WPILib, and other yearly software suites
  • Created two github projects for robot code, one for our robot codebase and the second one for prototyping
  • Researched both the SmartDashboard and PhotonVision with WPILib in order to prepare for development of both Swerve and Vision
  • Reviewed multiple teams swerve code to determine how to structure ours

Business:

  • Continued working on our shirts
  • Started organizing our first initiative to support rookies
  • Designed a modular pit for our documentation and design

New goal: more pictures for next post!
-LY

hmm...

well, I guess all New Years Resolutions weren’t meant to be…

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