The student leaders of team 4027, Centre Punch, have decided to join the Open Alliance this year with our first ever build thread. I (a mentor) will get things started then turn it over to our students for updates through the REEFSCAPE build season.
About CC4H Robotics/Centre Punch
Centre County 4-H Robotics is a 4-H club in Centre County, Pennsylvania, a “Town and Gown” community centered on Penn State University and surrounded by rural/agricultural areas. This provides us with some unique challenges and opportunities as we seek to fulfill our mission of developing the next generation of innovators.
CC4H Robotics was founded in 2012 as an FRC team and began adding FTC and FLL teams in 2018, the same year we were part of the Detroit Championship winning #27everything alliance. We now have a full feeder system featuring 12 teams between FLL/FTC/FRC with more than 120 students on our active rosters. We run the entire club as a united organization, sharing our meeting space, budget, fundraising, outreach efforts, communications, and more. This setup also allows us to have students mentoring in younger programs (FRC mentoring FTC, FRC/FTC mentoring FLL), which is a huge benefit to both younger and older students.
Centre Punch, our FRC team, operates on 8 Core Values which are student-focused and growth-minded. In particular we emphasize student leadership across the program, welcome students of all experience levels, and promote what we call Robot/Life Balance to make sure students and mentors are prioritizing school, family, and other life outside of robotics even during build season. These core values have created a healthy environment for our students/mentors, driven growth in the club, and enabled continued competitive success, as we have captained alliances in at least one event each of the past 3 seasons.
Our 2025 Goals
This year we have our largest ever senior class, and our ultimate goal is to send them off well. Some of the specific goals our student leaders identified for this season include:
- Swerve Better: Last year was our first year ever running swerve. While we were happy with the results, we know we can do better both in autonomous (faster/more precise) and teleop (smoother) driving. We will be running the new WCP Swerve X2 modules this year with Kraken motors, assuming nothing at kickoff changes our mind.
- Submit for Impact Award: Over the off season we worked hard to recruit a new business team, who have been an amazing resource in fundraising and outreach. Their attention is now turned to our first ever Impact Award submission. We believe that the story of our growth and impact in Centre County will be a compelling one, and I can’t wait to see the final version of the award submissions.
- Do Vision Better: Last year we used PhotonVision for both AprilTags and object detection. While we were happy with the results, when I asked the programmers at the end of the season what they learned about computer vision and machine learning, they couldn’t really answer. We already have decent Raspberry Pi AprilTag detection code in our toolbox and are working towards custom ML object detection next.
- Improve Scouting/Strategy: Competitively, we want to move from being alliance captains to being alliance captains that make a run in the playoffs. To do this, we know we need to improve on scouting and strategy. We are investigating different options for tablet-based scouting/data collection and using Tableau for analytics so we’re better prepared to assemble a competitive alliance if we have the opportunity to captain again in 2025.
- Support our FLL/FTC Programs: The first few months of the year are crazy when all 12 of our teams are active at the same time. While our FRC students/mentors are focused primarily on their build season, we want to make sure we are still fully supporting our younger programs. This year this includes hosting the Pennsylvania FTC State Championships in Centre County on March 7-9, during which we will pause FRC activities to fully support this event.
- Maintain/grow community relationships: Finally, we will work to continue and grow relationships with our sponsors, outreach partners, and other community leaders. For the second year we will be collaborating with the Penn State Ri3D team (follow their Build Thread), joining them for kickoff and sharing game pieces, practice field elements, and ideas.
Links
- Website
- Facebook/Instagram/Youtube
- Robot Code
- Vision Code (work in progress)
- Robot CAD
Centre Punch can’t wait to jump into the ring for the Greater Pittsburgh Regional in Week 4 and the NYC Regional in Week 6.
