Welcome to Team 360, The Revolution, 2025 Open Alliance build thread.
Quick Background
Team 360 is entering our 26th year and building our 25th robot: Rainmaker XXV. We’re based out of the PNW District in Tacoma WA, and are the oldest continuously sustaining team in the PNW. This is our first time releasing our build blog in an open alliance format, though we have done less detailed build blogs on our website for previous years (To varying degrees of complete and effectiveness).
A Combination of a big disclosure and an even Bigger thank you to one of our sponsors, This is our Third year as a #TeamREV sponsored Team. We’re big fans of many Rev Robotics products and will likely be sharing some of the videos we create this year about there products here as well.
Without Further Ado: lets get the build blog rolling, or Diving in this years case.
Personal Note: As a strategy mentor, I always find kickoff is always a mixture of being a kid on Christmas morning, and being the parent of a kid on Christmas morning who forgot to buy batteries. There’s lots of happy faces, you’re enjoying every minute, but there’s also some panicking of looking up the prices of some newly discovered things we need to buy and build that we didn’t know about. As a team we’ve refined our Kickoff weekend process a lot over the last 25 years but our process really has been honed to a system we’re happy to share over the last 5 or so. We’ve never posted the process before but no time like the present so here’s what we’ve found is the best working process for us and how it went this year.
Local Kickoff
Our local Kickoff is hosted at Auburn High School, about 25 minutes away from Bellarmine Prep where our team is Located. TREAD (FRC 3219) Is a team we would call a longtime friend. They also host the PNW District Auburn event every year which several of our Alumni and mentors are key volunteers for. This year I failed to get a count but roughly 20 different teams were at this kickoff event, and we find its an excellent way to get the excitement up for the year. Watching the game reveal with 500 friends is a different experience. This Year was especially exciting as another group of our friends were in attendance, FRC 1318 the Issaquah Robotics Society. You may recognize them from the below screen grab. Being in the room when someone learns something cool is still pretty cool, can confirm.
Vibes
When we return to the school we begin by having a chat about the game and the vibes it gives off as a palate cleanser before we dive into the rules and strategy. In no particular order the vibes we got were from past years: 2019, 2022, 2000, 2023, 2017, 2008, 2014, and a few others to a lesser extent. This is sort of an opportunity to mind dump some so the things that some of us need to get out of our head. After we refocus by watching the game animation a couple of times and making a questions board for some added motivation in reading the rules. Here’s this years:
Since some of these things are vague, and others are possibly against the rules, Better READ THE MANUAL
Read the Manual
Our approach for the past 8 years has been to split the relevant parts of the manual into sections, and divide the students into groups. We make sure at least one experienced person is in every group and try to spread out the new and newer students evenly so they learn the process. The groups then spread out and read, analyze, and eventually present to the everyone on their sections.
This isn’t a super common approach if you ask the masses, or at least to other teams we’ve told. The obvious downside being it doesn’t guarantee every student and mentor has actually read or will ever read the full manual. We’ve kept doing it because it maximizes our effective time together on the first day. Anyone with a shorter attention span finds the smaller section less daunting, and this is a big barrier especially for new students to FRC. Secondly it means we, as a team, get to discuss all of the important rules together during the presentations. By about noon PST we’ve made our way through the whole manual and break for lunch.
Scoring Analysis Day 1
For those playing along at home: What do you believe will be a score capable of winning on Einstein? What about at PNW Champs? A PNW District playoff match? A District Qualification match?
There’s a couple ways people will approach this problem, but to apply some metrics later and get an understanding of the game this is the next thing we attempt to figure out. The Students get broken into groups and a couple of the more Strategy focused mentors form one more. There’s no wrong answers but we bring all the groups number back together, Eliminate the highest and lowest number, and average the rest. This years numbers on day 1:
On day 1 these numbers could easily be wildly off, but back testing of previous years I’ve found our results are +/-10% pretty consistently.
Autonomous analysis
This is the newest addition to our Kickoff day breakdown. We again break into different groups and each group tries to design a 'Perfect" Autonomous. We’ve made the mistake of doing this on an individual robot basis before, so the current approach is answering “What is the maximum autonomous score for an entire alliance to achieve, and what does each individual robot do during this period.” We started doing this in a significantly more detailed way after a few of our mentors and students payed too much attention to the same slide of a Jack in the Bot Pop Up Presentation. Thanks @Nuttyman54
We always felt like we were almost* there when it came to auto but never quite actually THERE*. The resulting discussion led us to start building design requirements based off of these theoretically elite level autonomous plans. Are we capable of hitting them? Unknown yet honestly. But from experience it’s way worse for programming to hit their upper ceiling of capability because of a mechanical design limitation, than to still have some ceiling to find late in the season because we designed higher early. We wont finalize these design requirements on day 1, but probably will by the end of week 1 of build. For now we just focus on the “What” not the “How” of the question. Later this week a few of the mentors and students will break down the paths by steps, figure out time estimates for each steps and derive the requirements from those steps and the metrics for them. Check back later for this analysis and our full breakdown.
This is the last thing we do before we break for the day. We go home, catch up on some sleep, RTFM, and generally get ready for Sunday
Day 2: Community Strategy session
Sunday after Kickoff we host a community strategy session for anyone in the PNW that wants to attend. We had students and mentors from six or seven teams this year and it’s nice to bounce some ideas off the community and hopefully motivate some teams to aim a little higher, or think about the game outside the vacuum of their own teams bubble. Our promise is to keep all discussions “Design agnostic”, in that we try to lead everything without planting specific ideas on construction of the robot. Thus words like elevator, arm, shooter, etc. are to be avoided. So “shoot the algae into the barge” is not okay, but “Score the coral on L4” is perfect.
Scoring Analysis Part Deux
This is the first exercise we have everyone do and for our kids it’s a repeat of day 1. Break into groups, evenly split up teams in attendance so every group hopefully has students from every team and answer the same scoring question as the previous day. This year the community groups had these results:
Autonomous Analysis Part Deux
We then repeat the same exercise as the previous day where we begin to break down a 'Perfect" Autonomous period. Now with other teams in the room we go a little farther and typically figure out what the exact steps for a single robot on this alliance are. The list looks something like:
Drive to the reef
Score L4
Drive to the Coral Station
Acquire a Coral
Drive to the Reef
Score L4
Drive to the Coral Station
Acquire a Coral
Drive to the Reef
Score L4
Drive to the Coral Station
Acquire a Coral
Drive to the Reef
Score L4
In years where we’ve moved quickly and had more time we will start adding time steps to these so the list looks something like:
Drive to the reef (2s)
Score L4 (.25s)
Drive to the Coral Station (2.5s)
Acquire a Coral (Zero seconds - Requires Touch it own it intake)
Drive to the Reef (2.5s)
Score L4 (.25s)
Drive to the Coral Station (2.5s)
Acquire a Coral (Zero Seconds)
Drive to the Reef (2.5s)
Score L4 (.25s)
Drive to the Coral Station (2.5s)
Run out of time (Total 15.25s)
We take a couple minutes to explain to everyone there who to take the steps and use additional tools and calculators (JVN calc, ambcalc.com, Reca.lc, Path planner path optimizer) to reduce these numbers and determine the power and speed requirements for each in order to push their teams auto farther and determine the derived metrics for each.
Break For lunch
Thinking about the full spectrum of teams
Finally we get into the last two exercises of our community strategy day, and what is typically deemed the most useful and valuable by the students. We create a list of generic teams and split into groups randomly assigned to each. Each team must imagine they are in the shoes of a team that falls into their category and decide what robot they would build in their shoes. This can take a while for some and be very quick for others. The goal is to get students to think about the entire FRC community and develop an understanding of the range of robots that make strategic sense to exist, even if its not the right call for their own team. They present their analysis to everyone and the crowd gets to ask questions on the decisions made. The List* this year with their randomly assigned group numbers(Green) so no one can cherry pick a favorite group to join ahead of time.
*a low resource team can be interpreted in a variety of ways, so for clarity: we know and are friends with several teams that would consider themselves this category, who we also think are often better at making strategic decisions. Necessity is the mother of invention after all.
Some Mentor additions this year are the Coral Only, Algae only, and a “Not Good at Auto Team” who’s job is to ignore auto and focus on if there would be any difference in a robot optimized for Teleop at the complete expense of Autonomous (These groups had a hard job)
Simulated Match Strategy
The last and fan favorite part of the day. We convene a panel of mentors, pull out a random number generator and have it pick two groups of 3 with no repeats. Group one is the red alliance, group 2 the blue. Three minutes on the clock. Alliances create their match strategy, as if they are still on the theoretical team they just strategized for, just as if this is an upcoming Qualification match. After three minutes “Drivers behind the lines…” and the alliances now present their match strategy. Any student teams not currently on an alliance are allowed to ask questions about the strategy they chose and weigh in on the result. After discussion winds down the mentor panel makes a final assessment of the match result, including any assigned RP the alliance was able to achieve. Its a fantastic rowdy affair and maintains our “Design agnostic” approach while still getting students brains churning on how to approach the problem from different perspectives.
Day 3 part 1
We start our build and prototyping as a team on Monday after kickoff, but up to this point we haven’t started to finalize what OUR team will actually do. We take the first half of the meeting to do so and build our initial priority list for proto typing and design. Rank them in order of our teams priority of execution. New this year we are planning on doing a full team re-evaluation after a week or two to make sure we are still on track and determine if we need to descale, upscale, or completely change based on prototyping what we need to change. This process always starts out easy but gets hard fast. The results and what our next update will focus on:
Ignoring my terrible hand writing our initial priority list for prototyping:
Drive
Reliability
Acquire Coral
Score all Levels
4+ Coral Auto
Remove Algae from Reef
Deep Climb
Score Algae in Processor
-Jake Dusek
Strategy and Design Mentor
Due to some student safety rules and requests from the school, I’ll most likely be posting the majority of the updates on behalf of the students that write them and do my best to give credit to the specific ones that do. I’ll pass along any questions and many of our students are actively reading along so throughout this year feel free to ask away.
Week 1 of build is in the books for us and like everyones season there’s some wins and some “Learning Opportunities for us to unpack”
Monday -Thursday Updates:
Mentor Note on our team process early in the season
Coming back from the pandemic we had a lot of Students, but not enough veteran students, to give our team that Gut check early in the season. So we went a lot deeper into build season building a much more complicated prototype robot, mostly out of plywood. By the end of the year we had actually become deeply appreciative of the quality and usefulness of building a “Wood Bot” as we called it, and decided to keep doing so. This has lead us to build 2 and a half bots a build season, our final “Comp Bot”, a functionally and dimensionally identical “Practice bot” that our drivers can beat up while programming works on the comp bot, and our “Wood Bot.” This year is shaping up to be the least actual wood on the Wood bot, but that’s a function of the mechanisms involved. Our early design and manufacturing goal is to get the Wood bot up and running with the most important features to our robot for the year, so programming can get to work on Autonomous and driver controls ASAP.
Business
Week Synopsis: This week we finished and worked on multiple grants including, Korum 4 Kids and the Bamford grant. We also finished the first draft of the team’s impact documentation. This week we were also to connect with a local elementary school, to discuss helping them with an upcoming STEAM fair they are hosting. We also were able to talk to a team alumni who is now a local mentor for a different FRC team, and are planning on meeting with him on Saturday to discuss how we are able to sustain our team and our sub-team.
Design
This week was mainly focused on prototyping and figuring out what we wanted for the robot. We then split into multiple groups and each designed a mechanism: one group took elevator another shooter etc and then these designs got sent to the mechanical team to be built.
Marketing
We finished organizing everything we need to do this year in the media upload schedule, just need dates for certain tasks. We also posted a kickoff weekend instagram post. We are brainstorming button and sticker ideas. We discussed ways to organize all of our work and what we can do to make canva more providable. We took many pictures and practiced taking pictures with new members. We also prepared ideas and slides for ICS. Mostly organizing and preparing for the upcoming weeks in build season.
Programming
During build season week 1, programming started to get 2025-ready. We updated our laptops to be up to date in WPILib, NI Game Tools, Pathplanner, and AdvantageKit. Then we divided into working on implementing simulation through AdvantageKit, planning, measuring the field elements to be ready to tape up the carpet, and therefore test autos as soon as possible. Additionally, we created drive code for the new Rainmaker25 repository we created in Github prior to build season starting, in preparation for limelight integration. Wednesday rolled around, and programming continued to get a basic layout for AdvantageKit for this year’s code, alongside personalizing our drive code so it can work with our program. Programming taped up a corner of the field, including a half of the reef and the coral source. After being taped, we got to work in creating basic, bulletproof paths and autos in Pathplanner so we can test them as soon as possible.
Scouting
This week, we brainstormed potential questions for the 2025 scouting test and developed a rough draft. After formatting adjustments, we finalized the scouting test, formatted the images correctly, and printed the first final draft, which still requires review. Additionally, we created an answer key for the test in preparation for administering it soon. We welcomed a new member for their first day of build season and got them up to speed training them in our job and related tasks we are asked to do. We began writing the 2025 driver test, collaborating with mentors to align the questions with their and our expectations. During a general meeting, we introduced the freshmen to the scouting and driver tests, explaining their purpose. Research on new robot prototypes continued to develop our strategy for this year as we refined the driver test questions.
Manufacturing
Manufacturing was the first subteam to hit some quick successes, followed by those learning opportunities this week. Initial prototyping began and started extremely well. We had quick success with a couple of prototypes for handling and scoring Coral. Overall the design we began working on ended up very similar to the concepts that Cranberry Alarm did in Ri3D, being a funnel into a pass through coral “Shooter” as we’ve called it.
We thought this was enough validation to move into building a wood bot to meet our primary game functions of “Acquiring Coral”, and “Scoring Coral on L4, and L3”. So design and manufacturing got to work building and designing an elevator and the Coral scoring mechanism. This is the elevator in CAD, and the photo taken leaving the shop for the weekend.
In the rush to create the Wood Bot, lines got crossed and the Long vertical bars of the First and second stage got flipped with each other. This Happened while Design was still figuring out placements of Motors and Pulleys to make our first cascade elevator, and hadn’t finalized the drawings for the parts, while manufacturing wanted to get ahead. We can tell but the drilled holes that the lengths got flipped sometime between the first dry fit and milling the holes for the bearing blocks. It’s not super intuitive for the outer most rail to actually be shorter so, mistakes happen, and now we get more mill practice this coming week.
Everything is 2x1 1/16” wall, except for the 2x2 tube on the very bottom that everything stands on. That’s 1/8” wall so we can mount it to the drive base from our practice bot last year a little more haphazardly. Our wood bots tend to be more thrown together with whatever we have on hand, where we would integrate this mounting into the frame for our Practice and Comp bots and keep it 1/16” most likely.
Not at all. Though that answer can change if you mount too much weight to the carriage and/or at a weird cantilevered angle. But if the carriage and whatever you attach to it is under 10 lbs, we’ve found the gusseting or tube blocks you hold it all together with become the biggest factor in keeping everything square and together.
