FRC 3506 YETI Robotics 2025 Build Thread | Open Alliance

FIRST FRC Open Alliance
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Welcome to YETI Robotics’ 2025 Open Alliance Build Thread!

Hello, everyone! We’re thrilled to kick off our 2024-2025 season with the Open Alliance community!

This past year, our team pushed to grow, share, and learn in ways we never imagined. We’re excited to continue that tradition and to contribute even more this upcoming season.

Who Are We?

We are FRC Team 3506 YETI Robotics, a high school student-based team from Charlotte, North Carolina, founded in 2010 with our rookie season in 2011. Our team is composed of over 70 passionate students and operates under the Queen City Robotics Alliance (QCRA). This organization supports a wide range of local teams across FRC, FTC, and FLL.

As a local team, we pride ourselves on being an open and welcoming space for anyone interested in robotics, regardless of background or resources. We believe every student deserves the chance to innovate and learn.

How We Operate

  • Offseason: We meet twice a week, focusing on skill-building and preparation.
  • Build Season: Meetings ramp up to three times a week (Wednesday-Friday, 6–9 PM) and all-day sessions on Saturdays (9 AM–9 PM).

Last year, with CRESCENDO, we had one of our most successful seasons yet, and we’re determined to carry that momentum into 2025!

What’s New?

This year, we’ve stepped up our game in several ways:

  • Subteams: Each subteam now operates more efficiently, with clear goals and regular progress updates shared during breakout sessions.
  • Workspace Utilization: We’ve reorganized and maximized the use of our resources and classrooms to foster a more productive and engaging environment. For example, we inventoried many of our parts in electrical and mechanical.
  • Structured Learning: Every student is encouraged to take ownership of their work, ensuring their time on the team is both educational and impactful. Additionally, team leads have made presentations to teach students specialized skills for their subteams.

Throughout the build season, we’ll be sharing progress updates, including videos, on our YouTube channel. Our programming data and resources will be publicly available on our GitHub.

We’re excited to hear your feedback and answer any questions you might have. Let’s make this season one to remember—together!

Here’s to an amazing 2025 season! :rocket:

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Best thread, calling it now.

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That’s a lot of pressure man! We will try not to disappoint!

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Programming Overview

During the offseason, the programming subteam trains interested rookies in robot programming in Java for the competition robot. We also implemented the use of Romis to help rookies learn WPLib. In addition, during our annual CADathon, our programming rookies and veterans can practice coding a robot.

Along with our robot, our team is also developing a new version of our scouting site, powered by Next.js and Postgres.

We also train our rookies to use Git and GitHub so that we can contribute to the codebase as a team and maintain effective and useful project management strategies. This enables us to keep our codebase clean, trackable, and up to standard.

Robot Programming

Romis - This year we implemented Romis to help rookies learn and get comfortable with robot programming. The main reason is that Romis are programmed with the WPILib library which is used to program FRC robots. Though not very complex, these Romis provide a great foundation for rookies and help them get comfortable with the library that they will be using for the rest of the season. We also allowed rookies to take these Romis home for additional practice outside of team meetings.

CADathon - Our team has an annual CADathon, in which each subteam can practice and perform the tasks that they were trained for during the offseason. This involves programming a robot that is designed by the CADers on the team, providing excellent preparation for build season. Programmers have to take into account the capabilities and limitations of the robot and program accordingly.

Web Development

Monorepo - This year, we are organizing the scouting website as a monorepo using Turbo, allowing us to separate auxiliary libraries, like ShadCN and database schema tools, into their own package, allowing us to organize our app better. Turbo also has added tooling and performance benefits, including cached builds that make development easier to set up and run.

Docker - Docker allows us to containerize the scouting site and other applications (like the database) and run them in an environment with the required dependencies. No need to struggle with setting up the right version of Postgres, docker will do that for you.

Scout Ranking - Since our scouters are students, we are bound to have some errors. To overcome this, we use an SPR system similar to 1678’s Citrus Scout (Details here) and incentivize being an accurate scouter. For example, the top 3 scouters could be first in line for dinner, get gift cards, etc. This helps ensure our scouting data is relatively accurate.

Codebase Management

GitHub Tools - Our training includes Git and Github lessons. We use these to manage our codebase and ensure it is up to standard. We also utilize GitHub’s project management tools. These include issues, timelines, and a Kanban to maintain and label the importance and scale of various tasks. This is beneficial for the team because it enables excellent organization. In addition, many of the tools used on the team are also used in careers, so it serves to prepare students for the real world.

Team Organization (Inspired by 2910 Jack in the Bot) - Based on the CADathon and overall offseason performance, we divided our programming team into two levels: L1 and L2. L1 programmers are learners, and during the season, will work on their skills primarily by programming last year’s robot from scratch. They can also contribute to this year’s robot, but their main focus will be developing their programming experience. L2 programmers, on the other hand, are veteran programmers who have more experience programming FRC robots and will work on programming this year’s robot. Using pull requests, we can monitor and control code changes, allowing us to review both L1/L2 programmers’ code, and give appropriate feedback to help improve it.

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It’s time for (drum roll please)… Kickoff!

During off season, YETI prepared by conducting tests for the controls subteam, hosting presentations to teach about mechanical subsystems, and making sure all of our team members were prepared for the chaos of build season. Now, our team is ready to dive into the deep end.

This past Saturday our team met at the QCRA Zone for our introduction to the new game, Reefscape. Along with team Avalanche, we officially commenced our build season by watching the highly anticipated 2025 game premier.

After the exciting reveal, we began our build season by having every member read the manual and get familiar with the game. Then, we “simulated” the field so that we could brainstorm strategic design ideas. (And, to answer the infamous “ball pattern situation”, we have the wavy knurling pattern!)

Next, our members broke into small groups and sketched out basic robot designs. Many of us used the 2022 game, Rapid React, as inspiration due to the similar game piece and goals. Afterwards, we presented our designs to the rest of the team, taking note of the strengths and weaknesses of each robot. This activity induced critical thinking and let us conceptualize possible design strategies that we may see with teams who have different priorities.

Lastly, our strategy team presented our list of priorities. Here is what we have narrowed down:

  1. Drive
  2. Reorient Coral/ Score all levels
  3. Shallow Climb
  4. Algae- Processor
  5. Deep Climb

I will put out a more detailed post about our strategy, so expect that soon!

As you will see often in this build thread, our robot never looks the same- we will continue to iterate and reiterate, do and redo, build and take apart, and then build again. But that’s the fun (and stress) of build season!

Stay tuned for more build season updates as we continue to grow and innovate with the Open Alliance community! :ocean::robot:

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YETI’s 2025 Reefscape Strategy :ocean:

After kickoff, we made the following list of priorities:

Final Priority List:

  1. Drive
  2. Reorient Coral/ score all levels
  3. Shallow Climb
  4. Algae- Processor
  5. Deep Climb

Of course, driving is our top priority because robots have to, well, move.

We decided coral > algae for the following reasons:

  • The algae game piece is HUGE. The coral is smaller, which is easier to internalize.
  • Additionally, there’s a low amount of algae available to score (9) while there’s a higher amount of coral (upwards of 20)
  • Scoring coral has an RP associated with it, while scoring algae doesn’t directly contribute to an RP
  • Focusing on coral provides us with a higher ceiling for our scoring potential, and it is smaller and easier to manipulate than algae

We decided to initially focus on shallow climb > deep climb for the following reasons:

  • From an endgame standpoint we noticed the deep climb was similar to the trap from Crescendo last season.
    • We made the mistake of trying too hard to build a robot that could do everything last year, and for the sake of trying to score trap, we ended up sacrificing a more efficient robot build.
    • The geometry didn’t end up working out. As a result, we were left with an overly complex robot that wasn’t able to truly unlock its full potential, due to how little time our programming team was given to work on it.
    • Additionally, a similar situation (though not as drastic) occurred to us in 2023 (Charged Up) with our ground intake and handoff mechanism for scoring cones and cubes.
  • To prevent ourselves from repeating our past mistakes, we decided to focus on a simple shallow climb mechanism and work out the physics of a deep climb mechanism on the size.
  • We want to integrate the shallow climbing mechanism into our coral collecting mechanism (something along the lines of adding climber hooks on the elevator) because it’s easier.
  • It’s really just more feasible and deep climb is not our primary concern.
  • (We are still thinking about the deep climb, but it’s more of a side project)

Our main goal as of now is to get something out for programming ASAP. Last year, we went for a complex mechanical design but didn’t finish the robot in time for it to reach its full potential from a coding standpoint.

But wait! There’s more.

We also made a list of things we can do in this game, including how many points we can score and whether we can score RP. The green is what we can do during Auto, the yellow is what we can do during teleop, and the red is what we can do during end game (the “notes” are things we forgot to put on the list). The order and ranking is based on Eastbot’s examples from previous seasons, so full credit goes to them! It really helped us narrow down our priorities, and we have many ideas on fine-tuning this process to suit our strategy style next season.

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That’s all for strategy!

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CAD Updates 🪼₊ ๋࣭ ⭑

For the first week of build season, we’ve made cartoon CAD to base our overall robot on. Here’s what it looks like:

Rough colorized

More in-depth

The arm swings 180° and is our main focus right now (we may have it swing 360°! :mechanical_arm:). The elevator is not a big challenge for us because we have experience in building similar elevators.

We will be posting a complete CAD soon!

✰ Let us know if you have any questions or feedback! ✰

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Coral Intake Prototype Testing🪸

We built a super cool coral intake prototype! As per our CAD, this arm will swing 180° and grab onto the coral using AndyMark Compliant Wheels. It is being mounted on our Alpha bot. This intake was primarily built by rookies and is fixed, so the wrist does not move. We are currently building another coral intake with a wrist that moves 360°.

Here’s a few videos showcasing our intake in action. While you’re there, check out our YouTube channel! :smiling_face:

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More about our Coral Intake Prototype(s) ! :coral:˚ 𓆝⋆｡˚

Our coral intake is one of the most intricate and crucial parts about our robot. Here’s a more in-depth description about it so far!

  • We currently have two coral intake prototypes, one of which is finalized and being placed on the Alpha bot, the other of which we started constructing today based on our CAD drawings.

  • The one that is on the Alpha bot is primarily rookie designed and built, and it is fixed (doesn’t have a wrist). The one we began constructing today does have a wrist and is pulled from our “final” Alpha bot CAD.

  • As you saw from the CAD, the coral intake moves 180° on a pivoting arm. We decided to do this in order to minimize how much the drivetrain has to move- the robot doesn’t have to turn around to grab the coral and put it on the reef, it simply passes from one side to the other via the arm.

  • A cool feature about the coral intake is that through testing, we found that it can be used to take algae off of the reef, which is necessary in order to score coral on L2 and L3.

  • The arm is on a pivot so it can move. The wrist also has a pivot, which we have included in CAD but not yet on the current intake prototypes.

  • The pivot on the wrist allows us to pick up coral from all angles. It can physically rotate 360° but our electrical team is working through how they want to wire it to maximize its range.

Stay tuned for more updates about our robot! :whale2::shell:

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Algae Intake Prototype Testing :green_heart:₊ ⊹

The algae game piece is a very unique and challenging game piece this year. As such, it is imperative to test our intake and make sure it works with the HUGE ball. We have a simple yet effective roller-bar intake. Here’s our prototype!

(don’t mind the heaps of tools inside. We needed to make sure no one would take them :sob:)

Videos of us testing the prototype! And while you’re at it, subscribe to YETI’s YouTube!

We will post a more in-depth explanation of the algae intake soon, so stick around!

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More about our Algae Intake Prototype! ⋆💚𓆉︎⋆

Our algae intake is currently in the works. We have chosen to do a simple yet effective intake for the massive game piece.

  • The intake uses roller bars to compress and push the algae in and out
  • There are soft wheels on the side of the intake to prevent the ball from hitting the arms
  • The intake can pivot up and down
  • The intake can close into the robot

We are planning on building an upgraded second algae intake prototype soon, so keep an eye out for that! Let us know if you have any questions! :shark:๋࣭⭑

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What software did you use to make the geometric drawing?

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Solidworks! We are a Solidworks team, and do our sketches, cartoon CAD, and actual detailed robot CAD in Solidworks.

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:bubbles: Build Season Week 1 YETI Recap! :bubbles:

Week 1 of build season has come to an end, and we’re super pumped about this game (water game‼ water game!! water game!! sort of.) Here’s a condensed list of what we have done and what we’re working on.

CAD 🖳:

  • Made a cartoon CAD! :open_file_folder:
  • Finalized the archetypes we wanted to use for the robot! :space_invader:
  • Started to put all the assemblies together into the top level

More CAD updates and photos will be coming soon!

Mechanical :mechanical_arm::

  • Working on building a climber prototype for the deep climb. We had initially planned on prioritizing shallow climb, but found it difficult to mount the climber on the elevator as we had designed it to. So, we put the shallow climb on the backburner for now.

  • Finished a coral intake prototype! Working on a second coral intake prototype :robot:

  • Finished an algae intake prototype! :hammer_and_wrench:

We are assembling an Alpha bot and have made prototypes for the majority of the robot. A lot of progress has been made, especially by our rookies, so props to them!

Controls 🖮:

:fish: Electrical:

  • Wired 20 Kraken motors! :electric_plug:
  • On the Alpha Bot: wired the elevator and wire managed the drive train!:zap:
  • Working on wiring the Alpha bot’s arm
  • Working on testing the Krakens

:fish: Programming:

  • Working on object detection for coral
  • Working on using photon vision on a Arducam
  • Our alpha bot can move! :computer:
  • Finished the skeleton code for the robot’s subsystems! :keyboard:
  • Our Level 1 programmers are working on re-programming Kitty (see our Programming Overview post by @tacosarecool) and learning how to use Romis

Please let us know if you have any questions, comments, or concerns!

:ocean:𓇼 ⋆｡˚ 𓆝 :coral:⋆｡˚

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