Introduction
Welcome to the official build thread for FRC Team 157, The Aztechs, as part of the Open Alliance for the 2025 season! We are thrilled to document and share our journey through this year’s challenges and opportunities. This blog will showcase our design process, prototyping, and robot development while fostering collaboration and inspiration across the FRC community. This is our first year creating an official build blog, but we are definitely not new to sharing ideas and working together with other teams.
About Us
Team Name: The Aztechs
Location: Marlborough, MA
Years Competing: 33 years (Original and Sustaining)
Team Motto: One Team One Mission
Website
Season Goals
- Set realistic deadlines and hold to those deadlines set
- Improve inter-departmental communications
- Finish outfitting our pit road cases for competitions
- Continue to design modularity of subsystems for ease of repair
- Improve our post match analysis and modeling of the robot
- Gain more effective control over the robot’s movement in auto and teleop
- Improve programming feedback to the drive team in match
- Keep moving forward!
Build Blog Overview
This blog will feature:
- Weekly updates documenting our progress.
- Insights into our design iterations and strategic decisions.
- showcase of our prototypes, CAD designs, and the finished robot.
- Reflections on challenges, solutions, and lessons learned throughout the season.
We look forward to sharing our journey and engaging with the Open Alliance community. Questions, feedback, and collaboration are always welcome!
The Off-Season so far!
Mechanical Off Season Progress
We have been working on machining a few standard sized frame rails so that we can easily bolt together an alpha frame when we get to the build season so that we can easily prototype and finalize the actual year’s robot (Beta).
As a team we standardized our frame a few years ago when we started using Onshape. We developed a “Frame Module” as we called it which allows us to quickly enter a few parameters and we can a have a frame designed in a matter of minutes. The link is here.
Programming Off Season Progress
Our Programming team has been working hard on program a new fully CTRE electronic swerve drive using the CTRE Phenix Pro software. This is the first year we have all CTRE products for it and we wanted to get ahead of the game so we understand the library before the season begins.
They have also been developing our own data logging code. This will allow us to have better control over what and how we export data from our robot. One area we have designated as an issue is our post match analysis for troubleshooting and recreating issues found on the field.
FTC Off Season Progress
During the off-season some of our veteran and new students have been hard at work building our FTC bot, FTC 12566. They are two weeks away from competing in their first competition and they are almost ready to show off what they have created last few weeks.
We created a priority list on the game scoring and then a simple decision matrix to determine the system we wanted to make to achieve the priorities.
We started our journey by creating master sketch and teaching the students how to sketch out and figure out the math. Something we do for our FRC robot and want reinforce these skills before entering the FRC Season.
The last few years we have used ready made frame designs, last year’s being the REV Mecanum Drive-train Kit V2.
This our kids really wanted to make their frame from scratch, believing that they could make a better frame that could suit the needs of the robot sub-systems.
We used a Rack and Pinion design that was supported by bearings. But found the bearings were not supporting the rack at enough points to support the weight of the intake.
So we decided to switch to drawer slides as the “bearing” support and still drive and sense with a rack and pinion. Which we are still working on getting it all attached back onto the robot.
We are using GoBilda slides for the scoring and climbing. We are still working on staying balanced on the first bar to be able to climb to the second bar. More development to come!
