FRC 2383 Ninjineers | 2025 Build Thread | Open Alliance

[HenryLeC]

FRC 2383 Ninjineers Open Alliance 2025 Build Thread

FRC Team 2383 Ninjineers is excited to join the Open Alliance for the 2025 season!

Who are the Ninjineers?

Ninjineers: FRC Team 2383, was founded in 2008 at American Heritage School Broward Campus in Plantation, Florida. We are excited to be joining Open Alliance this season and can’t wait for kickoff. We have had a packed offseason and will be posting some of our takeaways soon. We also have an FTC which we use to train new members for FRC (sneak peek for some of our offseason projects).

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Links

• Ninjineers-2383 · GitHub
• https://www.youtube.com/ninjineers2383
• https://www.instagram.com/ninjineers2383
• Ninjineers - Team 2383 - The Blue Alliance

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Team Structure

Departments:

• Mechanical (4 Directors)
  • CAD + Design
  • Manufacturing
  • Assembly
  • Ninjassist
  • Safety
• Electrical (3 Directors)
  • Software
  • Hardware
  • Control
  • Ninjassist
  • Safety
• Team Management (3 Directors)
  • Impact
  • Strategy
• Public Relations (2 Directors)
  • Media
  • Team Image

We divide our students into different departments, each director is responsible for one or more subcategories of their department and training their respective officers. These subcategories ensure that accountability for all aspects of our team is maximized. During the off-season, directors and officers are expected to host workshops to train the general members of our team.

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Director Introductions

Mechanical

Hey guys I’m Galen. I’m the CAD and Design director, I’m responsible for overseeing the design process of our robot and modeling it on Onshape. I love CADing outside of robotics as well, primarily on Onshape, but am also learning Blender.

Hi, I’m Max. I’m the Mechanical Manufacturing director, I’m responsible for toolpathing and manufacturing all components of the robot utilizing our CNC mill, bandsaws, and all other tools in our machine shop. I also enjoy helping out in assembly of the bot and coming up with new innovative ways to speed up our processes.

Hi, I’m Andy. I am the Assembly director, responsible for overseeing the final assembly of the robot after it has been designed and manufactured. I also CAD the robot during on season and I love bringing new techniques to the team.

Hello, I’m Quentin. I’m the Ninjassist director, I’m responsible for running our Ninjassist program while at competitions. During the Build season, I work primarily on manufacturing the Robot.

Electrical

Hi, I’m Henry (I posted this thread), I’m the Electrical Software director. I’m a senior this year and passionate about software and controls. My favorite part of FRC programming is vision. I have been experimenting with different vision pipelines and think we will use our rewrite of Northstar and GTSAM (oooh exciting). I also presented Impact last season and was the operator for the past two seasons.

Hey, I’m Arya! I’m the Electrical Hardware director this year and I focus on the electrical hardware on the robot. During onseason, you can find me in the pits (whether in our own or helping Ninjassist). Last year I was able to work to help teams pass electrical inspection and I plan to continue making an impact at home and at competitions!

Hi, I’m Victor! I’m the Electrical Ninjassist director, which means I handle the bulk programming and wiring in our Ninjassist program. I enjoy teaching and helping others, whether it’s someone on our team, or another team at competition. I’m looking forward to maintaining our Ninjassist program and meeting many new people throughout this upcoming season!

Team Management

Hi, I’m Ethan and I run the strategy subsection of the team management department. I’m a junior this year and work heavily in our automated scouting system, AutoScout. I was a director for two years on the FTC team that we mentor, Team 16391 The Rising Ninjas. I was the driver of our robot during offseason this year.

Hi, I’m Ella and I’m a senior this year. I work on impact, strategy, and team organizing within the team management department. I joined robotics sophomore year. I was a director for a year for FTC Team 16391, The Rising Ninjas.

Hi, I’m Ian and I lead all our awards and outreach efforts for the team. I am deeply interested in work on and off the robot, as I was a Mechanical Director for FTC and a Mechanical Officer in FRC before reaching Team Management. I specialize in presentation skills for Impact/EI and organizing events for underrepresented communities through our outreach efforts. Over the years I have had experience in robot assembly, Impact presentation, and Coach which I hope to continue this season.

Public Relations

Hi, I’m Sofia and I help run the media collection side of the robotics team. I focus on lab footage of our FTC/ FRC teams and design/ produce merchandise. Keep an eye out for our new videos on our socials and look for us repping our ninja gear on the field.

[HenryLeC]

Ninjineers Robot In 3 Days

Ninjineers Alumni have had varying levels of involvement within the FRC community over the past few years. Alumni engagement is important to all of us, so we are hosting a robot in 3 days build with our Alumni to keep them engaged.

What will this look like for the Ninjineers?

Ninjineers senior directors and alumni will build a robot on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday after kickoff.

What will this look like for the community as a whole?

We plan on posting to our Open Alliance thread on Sunday and Monday nights detailing what happened that day and what we learned about the game. This will also push us further ahead in the weeks after kickoff, making our Open Alliance contributions as impactful as possible.

Will the code be public?

Yes, it already is GitHub - Ninjineers-2383/2025_Ri3D.

[HenryLeC]

Ninjineers Robot Control Generator GUI

Rationale

In conjunction with our 2025 base robot project we are hard at work developing a GUI editor for arbitrary command groups. Inspired by pathplanner and the dream that someone without years of programming experience can functionally program an entire robot (or at least edit it effectively) RobotControlLib was born.

How it works

Similar to pathplannner a reorderable list based command GUI allows creation of command groups. Adding a named command adds the accompanying parameter options. In robot code when the command group is created it will create all the named commands passing the parameters to the command constructor allowing for less robot code and more advanced command reuse.

Can I use it?

Right now, I wouldn’t recommend it. But, if you are ready for a project, please be my guest.

What is coming soon?

• A README file

• A fully downloadable release for other teams to use.

• Ability to map commands to controller buttons in GUI.

• Hot reload on command groups

• LoggedTunableNumbers for all tunable constants

I will continue to update the repo and our Open Alliance thread with new information on the project.

GitHub - Ninjineers-2383/robot_control_gen

[HenryLeC]

Ninjineers Robot in 3 Days Recaps

Daily recaps for our Robot in 3 Days are being posted on a separate thread!

Ninjineers REEFSCAPE Robot in Three Days

Ninjineers Robot in 3 Days Ninjineers and alumni have been working hard designing a robot to play REEFSCAPE! Our take on the RI3D challenge will be one that honors the spirit of RI3D while adhering to the schedule imposed by our high school. Keeping hours roughly between 8-8 (12 hrs), the challenge will be completed over three calendar days (Saturday, Sunday & Monday). However, with the help of over 30+ participants, we are hopeful we will have enough manhours on the robot! We are extremely gra…

[MARS_James]

Is the current plan for the actual robot to work off the Ri3D and continue to improve it or will the actual robot be a completely different design?

[MilkDud473]

We plan on testing our Ri3D robot to identify what designs we should incorporate or improve with our new robot design. Our next step will depend on how well the Ri3D robot performs

[ewuifwiuefn]

Will your Cad be available to the public or no?

[HenryLeC]

Yes, the CAD is currently public for Ri3D here

Ninjineers REEFSCAPE Robot in Three Days

CAD Release Main Assembly & Master Sketch Chassis Feeder Elevator Elevator Carriage End Effector Climb

We will be releasing our competition robot CAD in about a week

[HenryLeC]

Ri3D Robot Reveal: α

Ninjineers REEFSCAPE Robot in Three Days

Ninjineers Ri3D Robot Reveal: α [ - YouTube]

[HenryLeC]

Build Season Week 1 Recap

After an exciting week one of build season we are excited to post our first recap this season. Week one has been extremely busy, but we are all excited for the coming weeks.

Robot in Three Days

The beginning of this week started with building our robot in three days with our alumni. We are extremely grateful for all the alumni that came out and helped us with out Ri3D bot. For more information on our Ri3D bot please refer to this thread.

Ninjineers REEFSCAPE Robot in Three Days

Ninjineers Robot in 3 Days Ninjineers and alumni have been working hard designing a robot to play REEFSCAPE! Our take on the RI3D challenge will be one that honors the spirit of RI3D while adhering to the schedule imposed by our high school. Keeping hours roughly between 8-8 (12 hrs), the challenge will be completed over three calendar days (Saturday, Sunday & Monday). However, with the help of over 30+ participants, we are hopeful we will have enough manhours on the robot! We are extremely gra…

Rethinking our Ri3D Decisions

After building out and testing our Ri3D bot we realized this game is going to be extremely optimization-heavy. Looking back at 2023, the teams that were great weren’t the teams with the most elegant bots or had the best mechanism design but the ones with the drivers that could most efficiently cycle cones and cubes across the field. We are building on this experience by designing our competition robot around being as efficient as possible. We are starting this efficiency push by dropping our ground intake in favor of a human-player funnel.

Our rationale for ditching ground intaking for the time being and exclusively intaking from the human player station is the efficiency gains by not wasting time thinking about where to feed the next piece of CORAL: the driver and operator always know they are going to the human player station.

End Effector Design

After showing off our end effector intaking ALGAE we realized there were two types of ALGAE and we unfortunately got the softer ALGAE allowing us to more easily intake it through a smaller end effector. We immediately started redesigning our end effector to intake the much harder crosshatch pattern ALGAE by adding a surgical tubing spring and shifting the compliant wheels out slightly. We also realized it would be beneficial to score CORAL by pushing it out of the end effector perpendicular to the ended effector so we could more quickly place it on BRANCHES. Below is a video demoing our new ended effector design.

New End Effector Design!

Low Cost Reef Branches

After looking at AndyMark’s eye-watering $295 per branch we decided we needed to make them ourselves. We want a full field to host other teams this season and over $7000 is most definitely outside of our budget. We started looking at Cyber Colonels’ 3d printed pipe fittings but weren’t sure these would be the most cost-effective or time-efficient so we looked elsewhere. Inspired by a mentor on 5472 Wyld Stallyns we ended up cutting them on our CNC router. They are machined out of two sheets of 3/4" plywood stacked and screwed together. We were able to get 8 branches out of two full sheets. These also shouldn’t be too difficult to cut with a jigsaw.

[Connor_McBride]

any updates on this?

[SpencerS]

Do you have a CAD model for your end effector design that you’d be willing to share?

[HenryLeC]

Build Season Week 2 Recap

As the second week of our buildseason comes to a close we are looking back wondering where all the time has gone.

Changing our Archetype

Taking our Ri3D bot out on our practice field showed us lots of areas we can improve the design. We already touched upon dropping our CORAL ground intake last week and we are keeping with that decision. Next we realized our game piece transfer was going to be a bottleneck with the extremely short cycles this year. We need to transfer CORAL from a human player funnel into our end effector in one smooth motion (ie. no claw). We designed our V1 competition end effector with this goal in mind (the outtake wheel on the claw could intake CORAL sideways from a funnel continuously) but it didn’t give us a firm enough grip on the CORAL for our criteria.

Next, we started prototyping a Rembrandts style end effector (the innertaker as we affectionately called it) but it didnt allow us to intake and outake in different directions (this was a criteria we added after deciding we wanted to get rid of our arm and pivot entirely).
After realizing what we really wanted was similar to Cranberry Alarm (minus moving game pieces through our elevator) we started on a robot CAD without an arm and a new end effector. This prototype was cut and assembled during our yearly overnight Ninj@Night.

Ninj@Night

Two years ago, our directors thought it would be fun to stay overnight in the robotics lab to kickstart our season at the end of week 3. This first Ninj@Night was not exactly the most productive day in the lab but it was very fun so we convinced our mentors to make it a yearly event. This year we moved it up to Week 2 with the goal of prototyping our first competition robot design. From 3:30 pm on Thursday to 6 pm on Friday we all worked diligently to finalize CAD, toolpath, machine, assemble, and wire a new robot. Our overnight was a success and we are excited to get it out on our field for testing and autos on Monday.

Field Progress

For the second year, Kenny has graciously sponsored our team with a wooden practice field. We are extremely grateful for his generous donation. Our practice field is almost done and should be operational early next week.

Pass Through End-Effector V2

We are already thinking about ways to improve out new end effector design to score on L1 and L4 with more continuous control over the CORAL. We are currently working on an end effector that pivots halfway, allowing us to flip the CORAL vertical for scoring on L4 or keep it at a 35-degree angle for L2 or L3.

CAD Release

Master Sketch
The rest of the documents will be uploaded on Tuesday

[Guaco]

Will the rest of the documents include the CAD for the innertaker?