Welcome to the 9642 I.N.T. Robotics Open Alliance build thread for the 2025 season! We’re excited to share our journey as a team in our second year and our first as a member of the Open Alliance. Our goal with this thread is to document our progress, offer insights that could benefit your team, and hopefully inspire people.
9642 is a community team based in New York City, organized by our fiscally Sponsored 501(c)(3) nonprofit I.N.T. Robotics. Our team includes 20 students from 4 of the 5 boroughs of NYC, from over 8 different schools. We’re supported by 9 dedicated mentors with diverse expertise in both technical and business areas.
This season, we’ll be competing at the Hudson Valley Regional as well as NYC Regional. We intend to keep high level strategy in mind when designing our robot and aim to have a good performance early on with our software. We hope that by participating in Open Alliance we can spread the knowledge around our local community in NYC and further beyond.
We want to be very prototype oriented this year and consistently iterate our CAD designs. All the while posting progress checks on our socials.
We will update this thread on a weekly basis prioritizing centralized updates packed with info all at once rather than a few crumbs at a time. We feel like we have the ability to get a lot of cool stuff done this year and it would be a pleasure to have you all as a witness to our journey. As the season starts we will always be available to answer any questions or curiosities you may have about either the team or robot.
Better late than never–Heres our midweek report beginning from kickoff!
We’re grateful to all our students who took time apart from their ftc seasons to attend kickoff and help us brainstorm. We begun by having an in depth talk about the different strategies we could see during some competitions.
Game Strategy:
Plan A:
Be highly offensive
Quick Coral Cycler
12-15 coral solo(Potentially 20), we’re having half field cycles since the first time in a while and automation will allow for quicker cycles
Algae sweeper
Take care of the algae on your alliances reef while they focus coral. Also score into processor for co-op bonus
Plan B:
Be highly Defensive
Disrupt pathing
Slow down cycles
Take advantage of coral stations being unprotected zones
Robot Tasks:
Acquire Coral
Ground
Not a priority but we’d like for it to be a capability especially with coral stations being unprotected
Human Player Station
Biggest focus, similar “touch it own it” mentality of the last few years. We dont want to waste time with robot/HP alignment
Acquire Algae
Ground
De-scoring from the Reef
Hanging from the Cage
Hang from Deep Cage seems to be the most optimal. Ri3D teams have proven its not the red herring it seemed to be and is essential for the climb RP
Auto Routines:
Coral Spammers
Due to HP interaction being allowed during auto, high coral autos will be meta. Even if the auto point bonus is small its points you wouldnt be able to otherwise gain in teleop. Example 2 Coral pathing:
*Algae Clean-up
Some teams will find it easier to clean the reef of algae during auto and could use this time period to already set up co-op.
DriveTrain:
Our rookie members have been assembling our new WCP swerve modules to be used on the chassis. We expect the chassis to be mechanically done over the weekend when one of our replacement bearings come in the mail.
Our dimensions seem like they’ll be either 27x27 or 28x28, the former would be better for weight and maneuverability but the latter is seeming to be more comfortable for our elevator mechanism.
Elevator
This is what we’re currently putting most thought into, the final chassis dimensions depend upon the elevator and our ideas for an intake are also kind of contigent on the nature of the lift system. Right now we’re leaning towards having a pivoting elevator for a few reasons.
Easily solves the problem of the different positions of interest (L1-L4, Coprocessor, Coral station, ground preloads)
Is what we believe will allow us to be capable of ground intake
Works well with our climbing concept
Here are some of the concept sketches and designs we’ve been working with:
The most volatile aspect of our robot design, we have multiple ideas and members designing and getting ready to mess around with prototypes. Right now some of the leading designs are a redesign of 254’s 2019 intake
Where as long as one of the lines of rollers fits inside the 4 inch space inside the coral we can tightly grip it and have an accurate drop off at the reef
Thank you guys for reading!! We plan to do another update over the weekend with what we got done and our next steps software/mechanical/outreach wise
