Welcome to the FRC Team 10349 - Pontiac Firebirds 2025 Build Thread (Presented by Team 51)
Who are the Pontiac Firebirds?
In 2009, due to a shrinking district and the closures of Pontiac Central and Pontiac Northern High Schools, FRC Team 47 - Chief Delphi and Team 65 - Huskie Brigade merged to form the new Team 51 - Wings of Fire. For the past 15 years, the Wings of Fire have represented Pontiac High School and International Technology Academy, building upon our storied pasts. As we enter into our 30th season, Team 10349 represents our first major expansion of the FRC Program within the Pontiac School District since our merger.
The Pontiac Firebirds are a Rookie team that will be sponsored and mentored by Team 51 for the upcoming 2025 FRC Season. We will be sharing a build space, mentors, and resources for this season with a long term goal of the Pontiac Firebirds becoming their own self sustaining team.
What should I expect from this Blog?
Last season, our team “unofficially” piloted a rookie team that did not officially compete in the 2024 season, but participated in some off-season events. The goal of that pilot was to experiment with the 2024 Kitbot design and iterate and improve upon it. As the season progressed, we noticed that there was a lot of interest in Kitbot design enhancements, so we posted a summary of some of the changes that we implemented. It was awesome to hear from some of the other teams from around the world who implemented our design as well and we wanted to expand on that for the 2025 season!
For the 2025 season, we will be again starting with the provided Kitbot design and iterating on and improving the design while sharing our findings along the way! While we already have an idea of some of the type of changes we would like to implement, we want to make them as consumable as possible for other teams to follow along and make improvements to their own robots!
Shortly after kickoff, we will be posting our thoughts on the game and Kitbot design, a detailed analysis of what capabilities the Kitbot has and what changes we plan on implementing. For each change, we will detail out:
- What the change is that we want to make
- Why we want to make the change / What competitive advantage will the change provide
- Once a design is finalized:
- A step-by-step guide for implementing the change
- An analysis of how difficult would it be for other teams to implement the change
To keep everything as consumable as possible, all of our proposed changes will be “scored” using the following rubric:
The goal is for that each of our proposed changes to be fully compatible with the provided Kitbot design, and can be implemented individually.
Game permitting, the first change that we plan on implementing is adapting the Kitbot design to a swerve chassis (the components of which have been donated by Team 51). Our first post on this thread will detail out those changes and score them on the rubric above as an example. However, all other proposed changes to the Kitbot design will also be fully compatible with the standard Kitbot chassis.
Useful Links
- Google Drive Folder
- OnShape - Coming Soon
- GitHub - Coming Soon
More to come soon! Best of luck this year to all teams!