FRC 1418 Vae Victis Build Blog 2025 | Open Alliance

FIRST FRC Open Alliance
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Hello All!

Welcome to the 1418 Build Blog for the 2025 Reefscape season! On here we will post weekly photos of our progress and explanation for our designs. The purpose of this post is to serve the general public and connect with the robotics community.

Who are we?

1418 has been competing with FIRST since 2004. Our team has our good and bad years but we pride ourselves in improving with skill, knowledge, outreach, and team diversity each year. We have made it to four FIRST World Championships: in St. Louis, Missouri (2016 and 2017) and Detroit, Michigan (2018 and 2019). COVID hit us hard but we are building ourselves back up! 2023 season saw 1418 at the CHS District Championship Alexandria, VA. That same year we won Gracious Professionalism at each event we attended. We are a school-based team located at MHS in Falls Church, VA.

Mya T - Team Captian
Ben B - Programming Lead
Ian B - Mechanics Lead
Nina M - Electronics Lead (+ mechanics)

Competitions

This year we will be attending 2 regional events.
Pasadena, MD (Week 2)
Alexandria, VA (Week 4)

Goals set for 2025 Reefscape season (robot and other)

  • Go to Districts & Qualify for worlds!
  • CAD all Robot designs
  • Deep Cage
  • Level 4 coral
  • Get algae off reef

Recap of 2024 off-season

Robotics started once our school opened, and we spent much of our pre-season training first years, working on outreach (such as STEAM presentations for the school club fair, a neighboring Elementary school, the local library, and more), fundraising, and building a test-bot for our programmers to get a head start on different drive train swerve drive functions!

1418 Website

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Kick Off!

Our team gathered together at our meeting place to watch the kickoff. After a short recess of Lunch we split into groups and started planning strategy. We decided it was important to get down what goals we wanted to aim for in this game. After we decided our strategy, students worked together to find solution to transporting the Coral, the Algae, and being able to haneg from the reef. We made sure that each small team had one of the leads or fourth year students to help direct the conversation and give every student an equal chance to input their design ideas. One of the main issues we worked through as a team was deciding which “higher level” point getting system we would score for, Level four coral or the deep cage.

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After our long day on Saturday ended, we met Sunday and tried to finalize the rough ideas and plans for robot design. We broke into three groups, one working on cage design, one on coral and algae ‘pick-up’ attachments, and the last on elevator design. Designing a chassis, building rough prototypes for proof of concept, and sketching out designs, it was a busy day! One of our Alumni mentors helped in building the reef game element. There is more CADing and Prototyping to do throughout the rest of the week!

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Our conclusions as the first weekend for Robotics comes to a close are:

  • Use a box-funnel for collecting and placing Coral
  • Use a 3-step elevator to reach top of Reef
  • Integrate a hole in the robot for the deep cage design
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