FRC 8324 MECO Robotics | 2025 Open Alliance Build Thread

[nfoster]

Hey CD!
Welcome to the MECO Robotics Open Alliance thread for the 2025 Reefscape season. This is our first year as an OA team, and we’re excited to share our season and Reefscape experience with everyone.

Who we are:

MECO Robotics is a student-led community FRC team operating in Bithlo, Florida, on the East side of Orlando. Our team currently consists of 15 students, with five leadership positions and students divided into four separate subteams. We have 14 mentors from all across central Florida, and several from UCF who are also FIRST alum. Our rookie season was 2020, but due to the pandemic that season was canceled. Since 2021, we’ve partnered with United Global Outreach and Orange County Academy, a charter school that serves the underprivileged community of Bithlo. Our goal is to provide STEM access to all students in the area through our FRC and FLL teams. We engage in community outreach across Orlando and Bithlo, and our build space resides at OCA, where we utilize their Maker Space and cafeteria for robot construction and drive practice.

Since our 2024 season, MECO has been working toward becoming a primarily student-led team, and we are implementing a new and smaller leadership team for this year in order to continue pursuing this goal. The lead positions for this year consist of: Mechanical/CAD, Electrical & Programming, Media, Business, and Team Captain.

Team Structure

This year we have 5 leadership positions and four subteams. Subteam leads are expected to keep their subteam members on track and help them succeed. Subteam leads are in charge of presenting subteam status/progress to the entire team during our weekly subteam progress report meetings. These meetings serve as a way to make sure all students and mentors are on the same page, as well as make a comprehensive list of what needs to be accomplished in the following week to stay on track. We utilize monday.com in order to track tasks, assignments, and progress across all subteams.

Mechanical & CAD: Handles primary robot design, robot construction and field element construction and carpentry, repairs, etc.

Programming & Electrical: Responsible for creating programs and autonomous programs, creates electrical schematic, works closely with mech/CAD on electrical

Media: Oversees social media platforms, publishes newsletter, updates the website, photography & videography, handles our community relations presentations, works with business on planning/coordinating outreach events

Business: Compiles the business plan, handles competition coordination, creates all presentation materials, works with media on planning/coordinating outreach events

Socials:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frc8324meco/

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@mecorobotics8324

Facebook: Redirecting...

Github: MECO Robotics · GitHub

Website: https://mecorobotics.org/

Thanks for reading, we hope to post soon again with all of the cool things that we did and learned this offseason.

Also if you are interested read about our minibot we built this season here: MECO 8324 | 2024 Offseason minibot: 16th Note

[healr]

2024 Crescendo Season Recap

Robot overview

This year we designed our Crescendo robot, Delta-V. She was inspired by the Unqualified Quokkas Ri3D design, as well as 3467 Windham Windup. We created an under-bumper intake design featuring dead rollers, and a shooter capable of both amp and speaker scoring, as well as climbing capabilities.

We used a 4-note autonomous routine for most of the season.

We attempted to utilize our Limelight for vision tracking using April Tags, which was unfortunately not able to be used for either onseason competition.

We utilized swerve drive for the first time, using Mk4i modules and Neos.

Team changes & implementations

We made the decision to switch to a fully student-led team this year, with mentors acting as support roles only. We had eight leadership positions: Mechanical/CAD, electrical, programming, business, PR & marketing, safety, scouting & strategy, and team captain. Each student had a designated support mentor to help them in their specific lead roles and assist them in navigating any challenges they faced.

We had a student-operated drive team, including a student coach for both competitions.

We collaborated with team 180 SPAM for scouting & strategy at both competitions.

We submitted for both Woodie Flowers and Dean’s List this year, for the first time in team history.

We placed 12th at the Orlando Regional and currently rank 17th in the state of Florida as of November (via statbotics.io)

Competitions

Tallahassee Regional

We competed at the Tallahassee Regional 2024, which was our first competition of the 2024 season. We placed 25th overall, and were 3rd pick of Alliance 8. We also got to compete alongside some incredible teams, including 118 The Robonauts.

Orlando Regional

We competed at the Orlando Regional 2024, and placed 12th overall in competition. We were captain of Alliance 7, alongside our partners 1902 Exploding Bacon and 5816 GRA-V. This was the first time we captained an alliance in team history since our beginnings in 2019.

Lessons learned

• We figured out what kind of bumpers and bumper attachments were most effective for our team
  • We used side split bumpers with brackets and threaded inserts as an attachment for our onseason bumpers. These broke during our last match of the Orlando Regional.
  • We made a second pair of side split bumpers which also broke at WVRoX in August 2024.
  • We decided to construct raised monoshell bumpers, with the front third raised to allow notes to feed into our intake easily. We’re still using these bumpers on our robot and it has held up for two other offseason competitions.
    • Even though they are monoshell, we created a small gap in the bumpers. The reason for this was, we already had bumper covers created and didn’t want the fabric sticking out and getting snagged while on the field. (Raised bumpers pictured below)

[nfoster]

Hey Chief Delphi, happy kickoff!
We are excited about the challenges presented by Reefscape and looking forward to another amazing season. Today we went to a kickoff event in Central Florida hosted by our friends 1902 Exploding Bacon and 5816 GRA-V. They hosted some workshops that were very helpful going over all sorts of things such as mechanical design, how the FMS works and the whitepapers, judge whispering, and more. Then we headed back to our build space to read over the manual and plan how we want to tackle the game strategy-wise.

Things we took note of (this was after a single day of reading, and we plan on continuing to go through and break down the manual, so if anything is wrong rule-wise feel free to tell us):

• When you score in your algae processor, the opposing alliance’s human player gets to take that algae and attempt to score it in their net on top of the barge
• No ferrying coral (cannot be thrown unless the robot is in contact with its designated reef structure)

Here are the Most Important Things (or MIT) that we outlined for our strategy:

• Level 3 and below coral scoring

• Ground intake for both the algae and coral

• Deep cage climb
  
  This season we are trying to be as self-reliant of an alliance member as possible. We are attempting to allocate resources to the deep cage climb to help achieve the barge ranking point. If we have one team park, that gets us 2 points. The deep cage climb is worth 12, helping us hit the 14-point threshold needed for the RP. We went through and ranked all tasks based on difficulty on a 1-5 scale (1 being easy and 5 being hard) in order to break down the costs and benefits of each way to score points.

  We are considering looking into being able to score L4 coral in the future.
  
  Some backstory to our quote of the day: we have a Google Doc containing all of our random build season quotes and funny things that have been said throughout MECO history dating back to the pandemic since 2020 was a rookie year but we didn’t have the idea to document any funny sayings.

  QOTD: ”You got juked so hard, they sent your ankles back to Florida!” -Mason T
  
  we worked out cad drawings of intake concepts and it looks like traditional single pivot intakes may not be as effective as possible 4 bar mechanisms

  Thanks for reading guys, look forward to our next post!

[MARS_James]

@nfoster

We went through and ranked all tasks based on difficulty on a 1-5 scale (1 being easy and 5 being hard) in order to break down the costs and benefits of each way to score points.

Out of curiosity what were these scores?

[nfoster]

Here is the worksheet that we filled out together, in the future we will turn this into an excel sheet so it will be easier to read but here is what we have.

[nfoster]

1/5/2025

Today was our 2nd day of the 3-day kickoff series.

In today’s meeting we:

• Worked on MECO’s MoSCoW (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have) list and solidified our placements of each task
• Created a mock field layout out in the field by our build space
• Started assembly of our WCP swerve x2i modules
  
  
  We took inspiration from 4613 Barker Redbacks and 3467 Windham Windup’s cube shooters from the 2023 game Charged Up. We think this type of mechanism may be good for manipulating algae. We’re still in the process of deciding how far we want to retract the mechanism back into the frame once it obtains a piece of algae.
  
  
  Due to no bumps/cable protectors on the field this year and the potential for tall-extending robots, we want to keep our robot as low to the ground as possible. Instead of using a 3x1 box tube, we have 1x1 and 2x1 sandwiching a poly plate where we’ll mount all electronics. There is a cutout for the battery to sit in and only the important electronics (roboRIO, Vision co-processor, etc.) would be on top. We are still in the process of creating the CAD for the battery cage, so we’ll cover that more fully in a future post.