1466 Build Thread: Pre-Season
With less than a week until kickoff, we want to share what we’ve done in terms of pre-season preparation and share what everyone can expect from us in terms of our robot build plans. We made lots of progress in our summer/fall pre-season. We participated in three events, WVROX, Robo Rodeo, and GRITS. For all of our fall events, we used our 2024 Crescendo robot, for which CAD and code are available.
Pre-Season
For the past two years, we’ve scheduled 3 pre-season events with each event having a slightly different focus for our team. In 2024, our first pre-season event was WVROX in August where we focused on training new team leads/upperclassmen for their 2025 season roles. WVROX was a bucket list event for us for many years, and the scheduling finally worked out in our favor this year. We really put our robot through the ringer, which was great training for new and backup drive team roles and pit crew. The event was a fantastic experience for our team, and an opportunity to meet many teams we don’t often see at our regionals. We hope to return to WVROX in 2026.
In September, we attended our local RoboRodeo event in Knoxville. At this event, we focused on getting as many new team members as possible to attend, drive the robot, and work as part of the pit crew. We often find that local events are toughest for getting a consistent crew, so we had many new people moving in and out of this event, ultimately a net positive for the team.
In October, we attended GRITS in Dalton, GA. Our goal at this event was to run our drive team, pit crew, pit judging, and scouting as close to 2025 regional status as possible. We had only 14 team members attending, but this two-day event really allowed us to get into a rhythm with our new team structure. We also got a chance to experience the updated alliance selection process before a 2025 regional.
Mock Kickoff
We hosted a mock kickoff in November to practice reading the rules and analyzing the strategy of the 2018 FRC game, Power Up. Unlike previous years, we held the Mock Kickoff during two different regularly scheduled lab sessions. This led to increased participation and gave team members time to think about the game in between the two meetings. Team leadership split up into groups of 4-5 students and discussed strategy– doing our best to suppress conversations about robot mechanisms and focusing on possible gameplay actions. We explained our drive team expectations to new and veteran team members. Here’s our Mock Kickoff slides, with a game analysis process and some representative robots archetypes from 2018.
Controls
Our code team has brought on four new members, and is now the largest it has been in ten years. With the influx of students, teaching has become a major priority. New members were taught Basics of Java and WPIlib and PID Theory through slideshow presentations, accompanied by exercises. In November, the new members coded a swerve drive robot using YAGSL by themselves. For our libraries this year, we plan to use Northstar for vision, Choreo for pathing, and YAGSL for swerve drive. On the electrical side, our 2024 robot had a random shutdown issue that plagued us for some time. As our code got more complex (and remained unoptimized) we needed more memory, and thus purchased a RoboRio 2.0 to try to address the issue. So far, we seem to have resolved the electrical issues we saw mid-season in 2024, though we’ve unsure if the issue was at its core related to our roborio, network switch, CAN wiring, or something else. We also got lots of soldering practice, as we plan on soldering all CAN wires for our robot again next year.
Composites
Over the summer, we received a grant from SAMPE Foundation to develop educational materials for FIRST teams about composites. This partnership with SAMPE arose from materials science experience within our mentor group and also an existing materials science curriculum at our school. A primary goal with SAMPE over the next 2 years is to create between four and eight sets of supplementary videos, lesson kits, and instructions for FIRST teams to incorporate composites and materials science concepts into robot design. We are hoping that our 2025 robot design will allow us to reasonably include some custom carbon fiber parts into our build alongside our other composites education goals. Our first order of business was to learn how to make carbon fiber parts and teach the process within our team. We created a Standard Operating Procedure document after several rounds of practice and training with vacuum infusion.
This fall, we trained the majority of our team on what composite materials are and how to manufacture carbon fiber plates using a vacuum resin infusion process. As part of this larger composites materials project, we’ve secured numerous donations of composites manufacturing materials that we will eventually distribute to other FIRST teams. We’ve started presenting workshops on composites for FIRST teams, including a workshop at our FTC Kickoff event in September and upcoming FRC kickoff workshops, both for East TN teams. Our FTC kickoff composites workshop can be found here.
We recently designed a belt cover for our 2024 Crescendo robot to test out our processes for composite manufacturing. Our CAD team designed the geometry of a belt and pulley cover for our Crescendo robot, we 3D printed a mold, then we did a wet layup process using Kevlar/epoxy to make the part. Several mechanical team members are completing an online training through ACE Manufacturing on machining with carbon fiber.
Starting the 2025 Season
Our kickoff plan will be very similar to the previous couple years: we’ll join other East TN teams for a local kickoff event, present and attend several workshops for teams, watch the game reveal, then return to our lab for 2 days of rules reading and strategy analysis. We’ll work through the game manual in small groups for a few hours in the afternoon following kickoff.
We’ve found that structured, full-team rules discussions involving heavy facilitation from team leads and mentors works best for us. We split into groups of 4-6 team members and start reading. After about an hour, we re-group for a larger discussion about overall game observations. Next, we move to a World Cafe style discussion. We have 5 main discussion rooms: Robot Rules, Arena Layout, Autonomous/End Game, Scoring and Penalties, and Tournament Structure. Each discussion topic has a student lead coordinating and taking notes. All other team members will rotate through each topic in ~20 minute blocks, answering topic questions and finding details within the game rules to add to our notes. After 5 rotations, we again regroup as a full team and present our findings from each topic. Our focus on day one is only on the gameplay and game structure, not on robot designs, mechanisms, archetypes, etc.
In the evening, team members are encouraged to continue reviewing rules, discuss topics through our team Discord, and complete the Citrus Circuits rules test. Day two is focused on potential robot actions and strategies. By the end of the day of Sunday, we anticipate having a tentative ranking of gameplay actions and robot attributes, listing them as Demand, Prefer, Wish, or Not Attempting. We’ll share that list here on January 5th. For us, defining the “not attempting” list is very important and one of the earliest decisions made. Our priority list may still shift a bit in the first 7-10 days of build season, but will guide our prototyping in week 1 of build season. Our goal is to have a robot fully assembled and functional by February 1st.
We are competing at two regionals in 2025:
Magnolia Regional (Week 3)
Smoky Mountains Regional (Week 6)
