Welcome to FRC #10396 Team Mostra 2025 Build Thread!
Who are we?
Team Mostra is new to FRC, but we have been around for a while.
Our journey started in 2020 with five high school students passionate about robotics and technology. Over the years, we’ve grown into a thriving community of 35 high school students, 20 university students, and 8 dedicated mentors, working together at Istanbul Technical University.
For the past four years, we’ve been competing in TEKNOFEST Efficiency Challenge (EC), a local technology competition. (I guess the closest U.S. equivalent would be FSAE.) We are well established in Teknofest EC and we are taking on FRC as well beginning from this season and onwards!
The Shop
We are extremely lucky to have our own building thanks to our sponsor’s and Istanbul Technical University! I will let the photos speak for themselves.
Regionals
For the 2025 season, we are going to be competing in the following regionals:| Event Name | Dates |
|---|---|
| İstanbul Regional | March 4–6, 2025 |
| Haliç Regional | March 7–9, 2025 |
We will have more information about our season planning and goals soon.
Mentorship Structure
Me personally being a proud 6838 alumni, I know the benefit of a student-designed and student-built robot program. So, our goal is try to create a student led team while facilitating its sustainability. The current mentors and roles are as follows:| Mentor | Role |
|---|---|
| Ali Talip | Lead Mentor |
| Mehmet | Administrative Mentor |
| Burak | Lead Mentor |
| Engin | Mechanical Mentor |
| Deniz | Programming Mentor |
| Tamer | Programming Mentor |
| Kadir | Manufacturing Mentor |
Off-Season Project
While we are trying to find sponsors and source our COTS parts for the season, with lent parts from teams, we started on a simple training robot. I do not want to reveal too much in this post, we will have the physical update status on the robot in an upcoming post!
COTS Sourcing
Sourcing parts internationally has always been hard, but sourcing parts from the ground up in your rookie year is especially hard! I, and others, will be writing more about our sourcing plans. For now, don't be fooled by the KOP chassis of the bot above, here is just a small sneak peek:
Manufacturing
On the manufacturing side, it is the most crucial task of pre-season to be prepared to manufacture what you design and also be able to design something that is manufacturable. So, we have come up with some solutions to make the season easier on us and let the kids design systems easily and trim down the turnaround time for parts. Here are some of the things in the works right now by the CAD team:Metric & Imperial Cross Compatible Hole Pattern
One of the biggest problems with being a metric team and using hole patterns is the lack of standart. We are trying to find the sweet spot in compromise by using a 25.5mm hole pattern which is 1.004". So, it is not like the 25mm hole pattern that some other metrics teams are using but it is also not really an inch. This should still make it less annoying to have some portions of the tube 1 in apart and some 25mm apart which was a problem we faced when I was a student at 6838. We will be manufacturing these with 2m (≈6.5ft) intervals and stock them for the season.
Swerve Nut Strips
These are just small aluminum blocks that thread onto the unused #10-32 tapped holes on the swerve modules and gives us 5 M5 tapped holes for fastening side plates more robustly. We saw the problems UTB teams faced this season with basically a long cantilevered weight hanging from the chassis only held by rivets, so we want to take some precautions in case we need a similar solution. Also, a fastener that we can remove easily should make prototyping and servicing systems much easier anyways.
Configurable Bumper
This was designed before the changes in bumper rules, but we designed a configurable bumper as practice which uses 1678 style fasteners and 8033's approach seen here . We are not sure how this will take shape regarding the new rules and everyone's testing. We will keep you updated about this.
The CAD says this should weigh 5.93 kg. It has mass properties attached to everything other than the fabric. (The foam density is approximated through Andymark’s listings dimensions and weight.)
3D Printing
We luckily sourced a Bambu Lab P1P through our sponsors! You can see it printing the spacers for the off season bot below!We are still searching for manufacturing sponsors in terms of manual and CNC machining for the season. Hopefully, we will have a lot more to tell about that in the near future.
