FRC 772 Sabrebytes Robotics Build Blog

[Miller77]

About Us
Welcome to our 2025 build blog. We are a FRC team located in Sandwich Secondary School in Lasalle Ontario and compete in the Ontario District.

Our team has 4 main sections with few subsections it is organized as follows:

• Mechanical (Design, Machine, Build)
• Electrical
• Programming
• Business (Awards, Outreach, Sponsorship and Media)

While we do a bunch of awards stuff this thread will be dedicated to robot stuff.

What to expect
Being new to this we hope to bring weekly’s updates on our progress and struggles throughout the season. We plan on sharing our findings prototypes in pictures and videos and some lovely cad screenshots. At the end of the season the CAD (once cleaned up will be posted here, that’s not to say we won’t share parts here and there.

Looking forward for the 2025 season!

Rhys M,

Mechanical Lead 772
Design Lead 772

[T3_1565]

Another Canadian joining the build blog scene. Cant wait to see whats in store!

[FinIce]

Its been a joy playing with you guys at BGRC for the past two years and being on the same alliance last year. Excited to see what you guys do this year!

[Miller77]

Off Season Updates
As most teams do we did not sit silence and did much during the offseason. Sorry in advance for lack of photos in this post, unfortunately not at the shop till Monday. Projects we took on listed below.

Mechanical

Organization
Me and a group of two others spent many hours cleaning and getting ready for the
offseason, nothing too special other than making our parts wall larger and more
accessible eliminating the fun task of searching for that one belt you need!

Bot Repairs
After a whole season and tons of outreach our 2024 robot (C#) had many issues including dying motors bearings popping out, worn down feeder wheels (too much compression in the feeder among many other things

Pit Redesign
After many years of working in our current pit from another era of FRC our team grew frustrated with some of it’s struggles including being cramped and not all that easy to grab our parts bins (ex. 1/4 20 bin) making already stressful repairs more stressful. It’s still a work in progress but here is the current state of the pit mod design.

It uses two of three of our original carts while adding a light aluminum upper structure, we are trying to keep it light so our trailer can actually be used.

Flash (2013 bot restoration)
This project is almost done but gives some build people stuff to do while protoyping phase is going on. This bot’s main purpose will be outreach and will give us the chance to steal some falcons off our 2024 comp robot. To keep things not too painful we kept all the old electronics except we switched to a roborio 1 for the controller and an omp5 radio. the whole thing did get rewired. Although far from perfect our restoration document to keep track of this thing is linked below. Maybe Flash will make an appearance at one of our events who knows.*Keep in mind it was programmed by me the design lead and not real programmers so I made some silly mistakes.
Flash Restoration Project.docx (17.6 KB)

Disassembly of Our Beloved 2022 bot (Panic Attack)
We needed the motors so that bot has sadly left us, you can find a rather cool tribute video on Instagram. It also had many issues as well.

A Silly Prototype
I’ve always found our intakes to be at least somewhat annoying to work on and this sentiment has found its way to multiple members. Part of this being the bearing in plate design. We had tons of Versa rollers, so I designed an adapter that works with good old 1 1/8 hex bearings, and makes these versa bits into dead axel rollers. To test the fix we printed out of PLA if we were to use them in season we would definitely use a better material with better thermal properties. Also would use button heads but we didn’t have any short enough at the time.

Electrical
Electrical lead just gave me a list so here ya go!

• Organized build room
• Rewired Flash(2013 bot)
• Tested sensors with an Arduino
• Training

Programming
Programming said nothing interesting happened (debatable) their major projects was creating their own swerve code and game piece detection code as well. More to come …

Wish you a fun filled kickoff,

Rhys M,
Mechanical Lead
Design Lead

[wildmustang4903]

Great to see you folks publishing this.

1229 Tidal Shift will be following this season!

[Miller77]

I’m very curious to what y’all will bring this season. Are you guys still doing that week after kickoff thing like last year at St Clair? I really enjoyed that.

[wildmustang4903]

Perhaps not a week after as that is the FTC event this year but hope to have a Windsor-Essex get together maybe in week 2?

[natek]

Strategy Meeting Update!

Our team (772) held our strategy meeting earlier today. Although some members had already heavily discussed strategy beforehand, this was where we talked with the entire team and actually nailed down what we plan on doing.

This screenshot is from a spreadsheet I made to summarize what we decided on. It’s subject to change depending on what we can design, but it’s what we think would work best. Our design philosophy for this season is to make the simplest robot that can succeed at the most things. I doubt anyone will find it helpful, because it’s a fairly basic game plan, but Rhys really wants me to write this :).

Good luck this season,

Nate K.
Strategy/Scouting Lead
772

[natek]

Scouting Update

Last season, I made a scouting app for 772 that you probably never heard about. That’s for good reason. It did it’s job, mostly worked, and nothing more. I’m not incredibly proud of it, but it was assigned to me mid-season and I’m happy I got it done. Our issue was scouters far more frequently than the tool they were using. If you’re really interested, it’s on my GitHub.

This season, it’s a website, and it’s not just for 772. Primarily online, but with an offline backup for when it’s needed, I present SpeedScout.

The goal is to make scouting easy. One issue we ran into last season was scouters not knowing who to scout. With a website (and help from TBA), that’ll be way simpler this season. Members will be shown the 6 teams participating in a match and pick the one they want! Selected teams will then be greyed out for other members. This way, while we plan on having shifts for who scouts, we don’t need to worry about who they scout.

The main issue with this approach is, obviously, a website communicating with a web-server does not work without internet. We’re confident that we’ll be able to get internet access at the competitions, however we recognize that not every team can say the same. There will be an offline version that will work with the web-server, however it will lose the main perk of easy delegation. It’s intended to be used as a backup, but will be feature complete. While I’m obviously biased, I think even the offline version will be comparable to popular scouting tools.

For any nerds interested, it’s based on Flask and Jinja2 templating, with HTML/JS/CSS of course.

I register teams personally, simply to prevent people from registering fake team accounts and blocking teams from using it. It probably wouldn’t be an issue, but better safe than sorry. Members will be controlled by the team’s admin account.

If anyone is interested in using SpeedScout, have a mentor/team lead send me an email. Anyone who wants to use it can :).

Good luck again,

Nate K.
Strategy/Scouting Lead
772

[Miller77]

Block CAD!
After, deciding our team’s strategy and approach to Reefscape. We started playing around with basic block cad designs.
We wanted to do the following:

• L1- L4 Coral placement

• Processor (for coop)

• Deep cage climb

• Barge ( if we could reuse other mechanisms)

The rough architecture we will probably go with looks like this

Thing to note is that the claw is just a place holder while we are probably doing a roller claw, it will look very different in the real design and IRL. Other than that the hook to grab on to the deep cage isn’t attached on, it will probably be pneumatically operated similar to some teams rotating climbers in 2022.

Here’s this robot doing some tasks on the field

We will be back tomorrow with some prototypes and hopefully an assembled chassis!

Rhys,
Mechanical Lead
Design Lead

[Miller77]

Updates
Sorry for being late there’s been a few mishaps.
Mechanical
It turns out that our school’s shop only has two mills with working readouts and so we need to make another drive member to cover up for the condition of our shops machines. 3/4 of the drive members are machined and ready to go. Additionally because of this we’ve had less time to prototype the past few days (stay tuned for a hopefully epic manipulator). The one prototype we were to get done was just some simple wheels and clamped together pieces of tubes and similar to some of the first stuff we saw from ri3d when they started.

Algae Launch.mp4

We’ve also started our master sketch for the rest of the bot (nothing too special)

Electrical
Electrical has been working on a test board pneumatics so we can dust off our knowledge of these systems. We currently have a test board wired up and with the programmers. The Electrical team has also been working on fixing up C#(2024 robot) the roboRIO 2.0 has not been the kindest to us so we switched C# to the 1.0.

Programming
Along with working on pids for future mechanisms, theyve also been working with Electrical. They are also brushing off on the pneumatics stuff, started today, turns out we has some issues with the electrical because off being rusty with the system.

Our next update will be a meaningful one so will probably in a few days time.

Happy build season!

Rhys M
Mechanical Lead
Design Lead