Welcome to Team 6639 The Mechanical Minds 2025 Build Thread. We are a veteran team(rookie year 2017) and we are excited to join open alliances.
Meet The Team
The Mechanical Minds is an FRC team working hard to bridge the gaps in manufacturing and STEM skills in our future workforce. As the only team in our county since our start we have thoroughly enjoyed fostering the passion for STEM in more levels than just FRC; we help kids at both elementary and middle school levels to see the passion and values in STEM. We just recently opened our doors to kids from all of our county’s schools; with a team of 30 students from 7 different schools in our county.
Off-Season
We proudly use our off-season time to the fullest, everything from classes for new and returning members to helping other teams and our community. A few of our plans so far for this off-season include fixing our CNC, building a mini swerve bot, building and testing MK4I swerve modules, teaching new scouting strategies, teaching new programmers, testing new bumper ideas, and much more is happening behind the scenes to make an amazing season.
Main Season
At the moment, the main season for us looks like we will attend the NC qualifiers at both UNC Asheville and the Hickory Metro Convention Center. We are excited to see what this season brings and hope to make another trip to the States and possibly even to the Championships yet again. We are thrilled to see what new and returning teams we will get to work with this year and hope to help anyone who needs it.
Our Activity
We are hoping to update every 1-2 weeks in the off-season since we are currently only meeting twice a week. Once the main season starts or we get closer to the game reveal, we will move to releasing more; somewhere around 1 post a week.
Where to Reach Us
We have many social media accounts and a website that we update yearly. We plan to start a newsletter this year as well that you can access through the website. Our website will not be current until sometime around December. In the meantime,
You can keep up with us on our other social media accounts until the website is ready and we will be sure to make that public here once it is completed.
Our new programmers have been learning and practicing the basics of Java, and they are making good progress. Our lead programmer has begun researching YAGSL and trying to program our swerve chassis code with it. This season we plan to use new MK4I swerve, so they continue to research the basics in coding for those. In the meantime they are working with our strategy leads to plan new ways to advance our scouting this season.
Buisness Update
Our business team has been hard at work these past 2 weeks. They have ben working on updating our website for the 2025 Reefscape season. They are constantly keeping up with the social media posts for our team and publicizing our upcoming events. They helped us to put together and hold an outreach event with the Western Piedmont Symphony all based on STEM and robots(Photos Included Below). We have also started some very important main season planning, so that we are better equipt when everything gets started in January. We have started looking into hotels and prices for our competition planning for this season. They have plans for every competition, including Worlds ready for us to make a more specified plan to fundraise for our season. Buisness has also been hard at work designing posters and handouts for our Mentor/Sponsor openhouse. We had a great turn out and met many phenominal potential sponsors and mentors for our team, we even got out first dontation of the season that night! Buisness team helped to plan treat bags for local elementary schoolers. Last but not least, they have been working hard to help develop a news letter for our team to send out this season to sponsors, other teams, and those who visit our website.
Electrical Update
Our electrical team laid our the electronics for our small off-season chassi bot. They planned a way for the electrical systems to make sense while still keeping organization. They made sure all ports were visible and that our gyroscope would be in the middle of the bot. They managed to design stands for the motor controllers. All of these plans were put into an Onshape document to help visualize these plans in the bots layout.
Mechanical Update
Our mechanical team divided into sections this week to work on different projects. One group unbolted and reworked our CNC machine, bolted the table to the table, built a new table for the coolest system. They re-routed some coolent pipes and got rid of the ones we didn’t need. They fastened the wire track to the table so it doesn’t move and cleaned the CNC table. We managed to rebuild our CNC compter and replaced the monitor; faster computer and higher UHD screen. They also helped cut the bottom of the offseason bot, cleaned the area around the lathe and mill and organized a bunch of loose equipment. Then they took pictures of the part numbers of the machines we don’t need to be hauled away and marked them to be sold. Another group helped to build all 6 of our new MK4I swerve modules and get them ready to test. They also reserched motors to go with these and proposed a switch from Neos to Krakens. Sharing this with our team we decided this would most likely be a valuble switch to our sucess this season and looked into pricing and accessablity. We discovered Krakens are currently back ordered until December, so we are looking into those and getting team and mentor input. We had another group help to cut and machine aluminum for our off season bot. We train our rookies on machines and tools, they even machined our parts this week!
Outreach Photos
I had planned to include outreach photos from our 2 latest event, however it unfortunately will not upload correctly. When I work out this issue I will be sure to include them in this post or a later one, Im sorry. Have a nice week and thank you for reading!
