FRC 3481 Bronc Botz | 2025 Build Thread

FIRST FRC Open Alliance
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Welcome to the 2025 Reefscape Build Blog for 3481 Bronc Botz! presented by openalliance

Who are Bronc Botz?
Bronc Botz is a fifteen-year community FRC team based in San Antonio, Texas, based out of Louis D. Brandeis High School. This is our third year doing a build blog of our progress throughout the season, and we plan to be bigger and better than ever! We’ve devoted a ton of time to training our rookies, to ensure that we only grow from last year.

Over the off-season, we dedicated time to building a stronger team culture than ever before, deciding on 6 team pillars to follow - Gracious Professionalism, Development, Excellence, Accessibility, Collaboration, and Innovation.

Season Goals

  • Set realistic deadlines and hold to the deadlines set
  • Improve inter-subteam communications
  • Finish designing our pit for competitions
  • 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 tele-op
  • Improve programming feedback to the drive team in match

Rookie Education
We have over 40 students registered this year (almost 200% growth from last year!), so we’ve spent a lot of time working on training our new students.

During the summer, our mechanical subteams focused on our resources documentation education curriculum consisting of tools education, and basic CAD education. Those resources can be found at resources.broncbotz.org .

Since the school year started, our rookie students focused on learning FTC design and assembly, which will help them with the transition to FRC in the coming years. We are also implementing a CAD “internship”, where rookie students will be able to shadow one of our CAD leads and learn about FRC CAD.

Our Controls subteam encompasses programming and electronics. We taught them basics of programming in Java (operators, variables, functions, etc.), how to use GitHub for version control, and focused on the implementation and public support of YAGSL (Yet Another Generic Swerve Library). YAGSL is the swerve library that our mentors built, currently being used by over 200 teams globally.

For Project Management, we settled on using Monday.com, and have built out a projected season schedule, which will help us set and maintain deadlines for this FRC season.

You can catch us at the following events in Reefscape:

  • FIT District San Antonio (Week Three)
  • FIT District Houston (Week Four)

Resources

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Strategy:
On kickoff day we read the Game manual and focused in on the most important parts featuring the scoring specific rules and any changes from last year’s standard rules. We decided that a primary choral, secondary algae robot that can hang deep would be the way to go. Scoring mostly in the L3 or L2 pipe, but being able to confidently score on L4 and L1. Because of the close proximity of the human players station and the reef, We need a robot that we will to cycle Coral quickly from an intake or transition state to our deployer so that we are able to score in the two seconds it would take to travel.

Jan 4:
Today, we started with making a priority list of mechanisms we needed to have in order to comply with the strategy list of scoring elements we made. These included elevator/arm, coral intake, algae intake, transition, climber, and transition. We ordered the thriftybot two stage elevator and I put it into the CAD. I also made our first official folder in our CAD which included our 28’ x 28’ drivetrain. The FRC core members met up after kickoff to further design, and our CAD lead and I got together and assigned subsystems.

Jan 5:
Today was a research and digestion day.

Jan 6:
Today, we did powder coating and started prototyping. We took a look at Ri3D and took some inspiration for algae designs. Tomorrow, we will have a shop day dedicated to prototyping.

Jan 7:
After much thought out prototyping, we have come up with a lot of intake designs. Being in charge of the arm, I have decided to help expedite intake prototyping to try and understand what kind of transition we might need. Tomorrow, we will have a team meeting to regroup and think more about future prototypes for the rest of the week. Next week, once prototypes are established, we will start CAD.

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Short update for y’all right now -

We are now accepting teams to beta-test our new Limelight API!

Message me or email [email protected] if you’re interested.

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STRAT: This week we went through and talked about the different strategies and role built robots that we could encounter. We also started looking for a scouting app that we can use offline while still being able to access the compiled information during the competition. We also started talks of play routing and starting the rough sketches of a play book that we can use as memorized and pre-set ideas to move around the field quickly with coordination between the Driver, Operator, and Drive Coach.

MECH:
Wednesday, Jan 8:

We did some more prototyping today, but not before having a meeting. This meeting was meant to establish things such as who was doing what due to some hectic prototyping and talk about real estate on the robot. We will be making a Cryola CAD to provide an estimate of how much space mechanisms will be taking up. The prototyping we did mostly built off of yesterday’s mechanisms with a focus on new ideas for an arm/elevator.

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Thursday, Jan 9:

Shop Canceled due to Weather, we spent the day researching the differences between one-stage, two-stage, and three-stage elevators, and CADing base ideas and potential designs for different subsystems.

Friday, Jan 10:

Today, we finalized our robot concept. Most of the mechanical and design sub-team spent the day prototyping mechanisms with rollers to grab coral. We also did some cleaning around the shop in preparation for building. Additionally, we decided that due to the complexity of our robot design, we will be using a button board for operating the robot due to the amount of presets and autonomized functions want to have.

Robot Design:

Our robot design so far consists of an elevator with an algae “intake” (more of a grabber that carries and pushes algae into the processor and net). I should also mention that because of the arm on the elevator that manipulates the algae system, we can score in the net using a single-stage elevator.

Our coral intake design is essentially a very large funnel that can orient pieces of coral dropped from the human player station horizontally for an arm to come down and latch onto the coral. This arm will be on a 90-degree - 180-degree (still undecided) pivot that moves left/right to place coral onto the reef.

(Note: We haven’t designed one yet, but plan to have a floor intake for coral as well. This floor intake will be an over-the-bumper that tapers to orient coral into the same place the coral from the human player station will land in (for the same placement method).)

Our climber mechanism will be similar to the one designed by Team RustHOUNDS RI3D. It orients the robot by pulling the cage into an almost horizontal position and grabbing onto one or more bars of the cage, then ascending. This design, however, will have to be carefully optimized around the rest of our mechanisms due to worries of anchor zone contact (major penalty).

Our drivetrain is still a 28’ x 28’ swerve.

As mentioned in the last post, we ordered a two-stage thrifty bot elevator and previously thought we might even need to turn it into a three-stage but only need one to reach the 89’ net zone above the barge.

Sat, Jan 11:

Today, the Bronc Botz FTC teams had a competition. FRC kids set up at 9658 Camber’s shop, which happened to be near the FTC venue, and started to CAD. We estimated that our current robot design is 105 lbs, so we will be careful when adding a floor coral intake.

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