Our team was founded in 1999 when our high school physics teacher at the time, Kenton Swartley, demonstrated the real-world applications of physics to his students. After showing a video of a FRC match the students immediately swarmed him wanting to form their own team.
From our origins in Cedar Falls, Iowa, the team has flourished with students from Cedar Falls schools and mentors from the greater Cedar Valley community. Our mission is always to inspire students’ interest in STEM. Beyond the competitions, we are deeply committed to maintaining the FIRST Ladder–with our students mentoring and sustaining all levels of FIRST programs from FLL Discover to FTC.
Our 2025 Goals:
This season, we broke our goals down to focus in three core areas: team culture, engineering processes, and community & team relations.
1. Team Culture
Fill the gaps left by graduating seniors through extensive recruitment efforts.
Increase diversity within our team and subgroups to foster an inclusive and healthy environment.
Empower team members to take initiative and grow as leaders.
2. Engineering Processes
Strengthen our design strategies to ensure well-thought-out solutions.
Increase the amount of prototyping we perform to test and validate our ideas.
Improve documentation throughout the entire season–this Open Alliance post marks our first big step!
3. Community & Team Relations
Build long-lasting relationships with other teams to foster collaboration and support.
Be a reliable team that others can turn to, both on and off the competition field.
Enhance our outreach efforts to make a greater impact in our local communities.
Why Open Alliance?
The idea of doing Open Alliance was suggested by a now graduated senior during the 2023-2024 season shortly after attending Worlds. While we couldn’t join last season, we are thrilled to make it happen for 2025! By participating in the Open Alliance, we aim to: Motivate ourselves to document our build season with greater detail and consistency, give our students valuable experience in technical writing, and to share ideas, challenges, and solutions to contribute to the broader FRC community. This amazing opportunity aligns perfectly with our team’s values of collaboration, growth, and sharing knowledge.
Overall we are beyond excited for our first year in the Open Alliance and can’t wait for a great 2025 season!
Hello all, welcome to our first in-season update.During our kickoff we held and attended conferences for automation, an introduction to advantage Scope, A rules discussion, A game strategy and design discussion, awards, and a mentor roundtable.
Sunday:
The meeting began with a few people showing off their concepts that they had worked on between kickoff night and the meeting. Then we broke up into smaller groups and shared our ideas with each other to improve all of them. We then came back together as a larger group and went around with each group getting to share their ideas for a robot or subsystems. We rotated small groups and repeated the same process trying specifically to mix as many designs together.
After group discussions finished people split up and started working together on prototypes to manipulate the game pieces
Prototypes from that day were:
The meeting began with us deciding deadlines for not just CAD/Design but also Build/Assembly.After that was done more work was done towards prototyping and showing the further development of CAD that people had made.
Prototypes today were:
Modifying the Coral End Effector (for purposes of being able to hand off a game piece at different angles rather than parallel)
We held a large group discussion on various design topics including Deep vs Shallow Hang, Algae Intake, and Arm vs Elevator to get our team thinking about it before our How & What decision on Thursday
Prototypes today:
This worked pretty well for taking in the algae but wasn’t perfect for making it up into the processor
Algae Reef Intake (14 inch compression and it worked pretty well)
Wednesday:
Pilot Swerve X2i Module finished - all four robot X2is started to ~halfway completion. Awaiting Billet wheel hubs. Techhounds Cage Concept tested and iterated - Josh CADding next iteration
Elevator research ongoing - Ryan and Keegan to research power up/down systems and kit.
Frame dimensions softly decided - 31” x 27”
Refined the Coral Ground Intake Prototype
Thursday:
Held a “What & How” discussion for final priorities for what our robot can do by Northern Lights Regional. We plan to have this for our robot:
3-stage continuous Elevator powered by 2 Kraken X60
Funnel Coral Intake
Roller discharge end effector (Think Cranberry Alarm Ri3D)
Deep Hang
Started calculating gearing ratios for the elevator. The deep hang design group tried to research as many ways to hang deep.
Friday:
Fridays are our day off but many design team members continued their hard work to get this robot done. We also were able to machine our baseplate.
We will continue to update this thread every Saturday until then good luck to everyone!
Ahoy Mateys! Welcome to week 2 of build season for Swartdogs. We have made some exciting progress with our design. This week we finalized the design for the Elevator and Funnel subsystems and the CAD is completely finalized for the elevator (for now…)
Drive System: 2 Neo Vortexes on 5:1 MAXPlanetaries driving 22 teeth #25 sprockets.
Motor Controllers: 2 Spark Flexes
Positioning: 10 turn potentiometer.
General Info: 3-stage WCP GreyT elevator with a modified drive system (driving the WCP elevator like TTB Elevator.) A design constraint we gave ourselves was being able to remove the entire elevator with just unscrewing 4 fasteners (for easy assembly and iteration)
We calculated for the elevator to reach max height in half a second (estimated moving weight of 35 lbs) For these calculations we compared KrakenX60s and Neo Vortexes. We found both would be able to accomplish our goals so we looked for what is easier to mount and drive the elevator with and that is how we arrived at the Vortex.
This is a section view of the elevator. The Vortex is mounted right beside the elevator with the chain being bolted to the first stage of the elevator. This is the currently assembled system for mounting the elevator. The Brackets on the right are where the vertical part of the elevator is attached to and the right bracket is where the angled support is attached to.
Subassembly 2: The Funnel
Preface: The CAD for this is not nearly complete and is still being tweaked (despite being past the deadline for the design)
Subassembly info:
General Info: For this funnel we knew that we wanted to be able to hang off a mechanism that is on the back of the elevator in order to save weight. In order to accomplish this goal we needed to design our funnel in a way where it “gets out of the way”. We did a lot of iteration on how to have it get out of the way and what we decided on was it splitting down the center like a trap door. We are planning to drop the funnel out with an electric solenoid pulling on a gate latch but unfortunately the dropping funnel has proven difficult for our team and we would appreciate some insight on the matter.
Subassembly 3: End Effector
Subassembly info:
Motors: 2 775 Pro with 5:1 Versa Planetary
Motor Controllers: Talon SRXs
Sensors: 1 Light sensor (we are between a CX3-AN-1A, CX5-AN-1A, CXP-AN-1A)
General Info: We are planning to run 2” compliant rollers in a similar fashion to Cranberry Alarm Ri3D. We are also ensuring that it reaches above our 3rd stage in the stowed position similar to how Cranberry Alarm designed their end effector. It is also being driven in the same style. Additionally we are saving space below the coral outtake for some sort of algae removal.
Battery Mounting
Last year we had a bit of difficulty with our battery mounting. This year we are trying to make sure that our battery is as secure as possible, especially since we are planning to drag the cage over top of where the battery is. So we decided to use swerve tread on every vertical face of the battery and a 3d printed mount. Then there is a lid that goes over and latches down on our battery.
Thank you all for your time and good luck with the rest of your build season!
Love the design! On Cranberry Alarm, we ran into some consistency issues with scoring L4, due to the angle the end effector was set at. Our angle was derived by a number of things, but ultimately, we would have made a steeper angle to make scoring in L4 easier.
Seeing as you have 3 stages this may be a bit easier to pull off.
Thank you for telling us this. Just prior to your reply we had a design discussion and we reached the exact same conclusion. We are now going with a roughly 33 degree angle for both the funnel and end effector.
This is the currently assembled system for mounting the elevator. The Brackets on the right are where the vertical part of the elevator is attached to and the right bracket is where the angled support is attached to.
