Hello! Welcome to the 1155 SciBorgs Open Alliance Build Thread for the 2025 season. We had a great time sharing our experiences on Open Alliance during the 2024 season, and we’re excited to continue with Open Alliance in 2025!
About Us
The Sciborgs are one of two FRC teams at the Bronx High School of Science, the other being our sister team 2265 The FeMaidens. We have 44 students, 4 mentors, and 7 hands-off school advisors. Founded in 2003, this year will be our 22nd year competing with FIRST.
Team Structure
This year, we’ve made some changes to our team structure aimed at spreading work more evenly and optimizing outreach. Instead of having a dedicated marketing/communications department, all team members are split into different “focuses”, which include impact, local outreach, international outreach, media, and FIRST volunteering. We’re hoping that these changes will result in improvements to the organization of our outreach initiatives and the quality of our awards submissions.
After NYCR, we identified several areas on our robot that need to be addressed, mainly electrically. Here are some of the fixes and updates we made:
Fully redid all CAN connections using these lever nuts due to concerns regarding intermittent CAN disconnects during day 1 of NYC. We suspect that badly inserted or short wires were leading to uneven connections that were not visually detectable. After this fix, we experienced no issues with these, but we’re switching away from those connectors this year.
Example of a bad connection.
Redid power wire paths to the shooter and conveyor motors to reduce strain in moving components.
Re-labeled all power wires at the PDH.
Removed and re-did hot glue on all ethernet, USB, JST, and PWM connections. After this fix, we experienced no issues with any of these connections at DoD or RR.
Re-tuned pivot and shooter PID.
Adjusted auto paths
Due to traveling with a smaller team for DoD, we ended up not doing formal scouting for this event. Instead, we prepared a picklist the night before using prior events and had 3 super scouts in the stands during the morning to adjust as needed.
Event day:
After some issues in quals and unlucky circumstances with our alliance partners, we finished quals rank 15, and ended the event in 4th place as the first pick of alliance 5, alongside 1218 and 8714. It was a great experience playing alongside teams we don’t normally see from FMA, and we look forward to attending DoD again in the future.
Mechanical:
Early in quals, one of our intake beam-brakes got cut by an opponent robot. We ended up re-soldering the connection, which was mostly effective for the remainder of the event, but we had to run one match by manually running and stopping the intake due to the tight turnaround in quals.
Late in quals, we began experiencing an issue where our shooter got stuck upwards, catching on one of our climb plates. The temporary fix at DoD was to bend the climb plate out of the way and bend the shooter slightly in the other direction, mostly fixing the problem for the rest of the event.
Our amp angle was faulty, and the practice field amp wasn’t consistent with the one on the field, so we were unable to consistently and smoothly score in the amp. We were able to improve things slightly by adjusting angles between matches, but only slightly. We ended up mostly feeding during playoffs and never really resolved the issue.
Summer/early fall:
Over the summer, we had very limited access to the robot, but we made several minor changes in anticipation of a fall off-season.
Rewired Intake beam break sensors with Molex SL connectors. This worked great, and we’re planning on switching to Molex SL for all PWM and CAN connections in 2025.
Redid power wiring for our RoboRio, radio, ethernet switch, and orange pi to remove tension on the PDH side.
RoboReplay
Pre-event:
Added 3D-printed shields around our shooter flywheels to prevent note jams while amping.
Event day:
RoboReplay was truly an endurance event. 15 qualification matches (on a shortened schedule due to delays on Saturday morning) combined with the long walk to our pit meant we basically didn’t leave the queue, testing the limits of our robot, drive team, and pit crew. We ended quals rank 5 and captained alliance 4 alongside 2869 and 9993, 333’s 2nd bot. Despite the breakneck schedule, we loved the 2-day event structure, and we’re looking forward to attending Roboreplay in the future.
Mechanical:
Intake beam break died early in quals, but took ~3 minutes to swap compared to around ~30 minutes when it was soldered. Great change!
Intake roller underwent a rapid unscheduled disassembly after a hard hit in quals 3. The quick fix was to drill out the end of the shaft and re-tap for ¼-20, which held for the rest of the event. After the event, we swapped the shaft.
Amp angle still needed some work, but we got it to the point where we could consistently score in amp, albeit slower than we could at NYC.
We discovered an issue with one of our camera mounts late on day 2, which was likely the cause of our shooting issues at DoD and occasionally at Roboreplay. After fixing the slight bend, we stopped missing shots!!
One of our climb-lock hooks broke in quals 30, but we still successfully climbed. Easy swap to a spare.
In our last 2 playoff matches, we encountered an issue with comms randomly dropping and returning to the robot throughout the match. Despite not fixing anything, the robot began working perfectly after we were eliminated, and the issue hasn’t shown up since.
The top flywheel motor wire got cut after our 2nd playoff match. Didn’t have time to replace the motor, so we patched the connection with a lever nut. Good quick fix.
Programming:
Our shots have been losing accuracy since after HVR, and we assumed it was due to mechanical slop on the pivot, but the new running theory is that our camera was just becoming progressively looser, and our pose estimation was suffering for it. At RR, it finally got bad enough that we noticed and fixed it, and once we did, we didn’t miss a single shot (until our whole robot started killing itself at the end of quals)!
Our autons were also working (relatively) well for this competition. We actually made our entire center 5 note! The improved pose estimation from fixing the cameras probably contributed, but we don’t think it explains all of it, and honestly, we’re not sure what does. Our autons were also, for the record, not that good at RR. They were just better than they were for the rest of the season, and all the other teams’ autons were super broken. Anyway, we won the autonomous award!
Today, @infinite_arity and I gave presentations at Hawk Talks, an annual event hosted by 2601. I talked about strategic design and how 1155 approaches the kickoff process, and Siggy dived into the derivation and implementation for SOTM with a swerve drive. Here are the slides:
If you’re interested in SOTM, the presentation doesn’t have many words but here is another post about SOTM by Siggy from last year, and a link to our 2024 code:
