Welcome to the Iron Kodiaks Build Blog, for the 2025 REEFSCAPE Season!
We are thrilled to kick off the 2025 Reefscape season and can’t wait to see what this exciting year has in store for us. Our team is eager to DIVE into the challenges that lie ahead, and as the season unfolds, we’ll be updating this build blog regularly. We plan to make a post once or twice a week to share our progress, key milestones, and the strategic decisions. We hope sharing insight into our design choices and technical challenges can be beneficial to others in the first community.
Over the past few years, our team has experienced tremendous growth, both in our technical skills and organization. We are proud of how far we’ve come and can’t wait to continue this progress into the 2025 season. Thanks to the amazing support of our mentors and the whole first community we are confident this season will be one of our most rewarding yet.
Some links to other info on our team -
Website
Instagram
Github
Stay tuned for more updates, and thank you for following along on our journey!
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REEFSCAPE Kickoff
There’s no better way to start a new year than by kicking off a new season of FRC! This year, we were thrilled to host a kickoff event alongside some incredible local teams: Galvanights, Rewind, and Wild Racoons. Together, we dove into this season’s game, broke down the manual, and even ran a mock match to get a feel for what challenges this game may pose.
We started our day by sharing a delicious pancake breakfast and afterward, everyone gathered to watch the kickoff live stream. After watching the game animation (and the special appearance from Mark Rober), we unlocked the game manual and started to break down the rules.
To streamline this process, we divided sections 4 through 8 of the manual among small groups. Each group conducted a deep dive into their assigned section, carefully analyzing the rules and explanations. After that, they presented their findings, ensuring everyone had a comprehensive understanding of both general guidelines—such as robot weight and extension limits—and more nuanced details, like where coral scoring is allowed (within the reef boundary). This collaborative approach not only helped us better understand the manual but also fostered stronger connections among the teams.
To wrap up the kickoff, we set up a mock field and ran through a simulated match. Experiencing the match flow firsthand helped us visualize what matches might look like and what major traffic areas are going to be on the field.
Again thank you to all the teams who attended kickoff with us; Also a huge thank you to the mentors and parent volunteers who helped as this event wouldn’t have been possible without you!
Breaking Down the Games Strategy
Since kickoff we’ve started breaking down what our team wants to prioritize and have been able to set forward a couple of major goals for this seasons bot. Our team ultimately concluded that our priorities for the robot were going to be
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Scoring at all levels of the reef - not only does the reefs 4 levels allow for the most scoring opportunities but being able to score on the reef is also required for two of the three bonus ranking points
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A deep cage hang - while the 12 points scored from the deep cage are valuable our team wanted to be able to make getting the barge ranking point as easy as possible for our alliance
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Processing algae - although it does have the possibility of being countered by a human player score it’s still valuable in achieving cooperation.
We ultimately decided against going for net scoring as we figuring it would have a similar cycle time to an more valuable L4 score.
Week 1 - Prototyping and Designing
After establishing what our goals are for this game our team came back to our workshop ready to start designing.
Scoring Coral
Being our top priority we’ve been designating a lot of time to designing and prototyping a system that can score coral. We settled on the intake design below hoping it would allow us to intake coral from both the coral station on the floor. With about 6 in of spacing between the complaints we were able to firmly hold the game piece with about a half inch compression of each wheel.
We had originally planned on utilizing a telescoping arm and creating a ground intake that could pick up from any orientation by adding an axis of rotation on our intake that could turn it sideways. This would have allowed us to roll over game pieces from any orientation; however, in order to achieve the angle needed with a two wheel intake we would have needed our arms point of rotation to be at least 57 in. off the ground (far exceeding the starting config constraints.)
Because of this we we ultimately opted to go for a elevator lift and arm with one axis of rotation. This design will still allow us to reach L1-L4 while also being able to intake from the floor. Having seen some teams picking up algae with a two wheel intake we are also currently prototyping this intake to see if that would be possible with our design.
Deep Cage Hang
In order to create more clearance between our bot and the ground our team has decided to try rotating the cage sideways and then lifting ourselves up by the sidebars. In order to do this we will have to design a bot with a center of mass very near its center (so the center of mass of the robot-cage system sits right under the chain).
We are currently prototyping a pneumatically actuated clamp design and it has been successful so far.
Over all a really great start to the season and we hope your as excited as we are to see our bots development!
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