9659 Open Alliance 2025
Hello Chief Delphi, we would like to introduce ourselves as team 9659, the Vanier Vikings, located in North York Ontario.
Overview
The 2025 season will be our second year competing and our first year as part of Open Alliance. We have a team of about 50 students and 4 mentors working towards our next season. While we aren’t a team with a lot of resources, we hope that we can contribute at least some amount to this wonderful community. We hope to post at least once a week about our findings and robot development.
Instagram
YouTube
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Week -1
With 15 days remaining until kickoff, we hosted a meeting to discuss our plans for kickoff and to show our calendar for the next season. It’s quite an aggressive schedule and we hope that the risk we take with such a schedule pays off. We’ve also created our own engineering log, which will be posted later in the season. The team is excited for kickoff tomorrow and we hope to have a successful season.
Our team is larger then expected, we currently have over 85 active members. We expect this number to decrease as the season goes on but it’s quite promising that a majority will stick through as they have completed our rigorous training material. We expect 8-20 hours per member a week to contribute towards the team.
Team 9659 the Vanier Vikings would like to wish a successful season for all that compete this year!
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Kickoff
We had a fun day and discussed a bit about the team.
Day 2
Hello all, today we were unable to access the shop so it came down to just strategy and what ideas we wanted to prototype.
Game Analysis
This being a game with no safe zones around the source is unprecedented, the last we could find that allows the level of defense we believe will be played is 2013. Another notable change we’ve taken into account is the 3 RP for the win and the new auto RP. For us, this means the end game RP is worth even less than previous years, considering the trap and how that could be avoided we believe that the deep climb this year is out of our reach and our goals. Another notable conclusion we’ve reached is the algae, while able to unlock the COOP RP which is very useful, it ultimately isn’t necessary due to how much RP winning is worth. We will attempt to do an algae mechanism after we have designed a coral mechanism we like.
Coral
The Coral is very tricky, initially, we were planning to do source only, but looking at the tricky angle of the source and the angle of the coral, we believe a wrist of some sort would be required on an end effector to source intake. This is remarkably complex and would make any arm holding the end effector significantly more heavy. As such we are currently considering a floor intake, while it is a daunting task we believe that prototyping tomorrow could lead to some success. L4 also seems out of reach, the geometry required for a claw to do all 4 levels without a wrist is quite challenging and we believe out of our capabilities. L4 would also require significantly more time to do, and we believe that time vs action dictates that it is not as important. We will attempt L4 if the geometry is in our favour but it currently isn’t looking very optimistic.
Robot Design
We currently only have one design in consideration as every other idea we’ve had is quite difficult and has not been fleshed out yet. As the days continue we hope to get more ideas and gain inspiration on how to do certain game aspects.
Both of these ideas are not very good and we hope to develop better ones in the next few days.
Until next time!
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Day 4
It’s been 4 days since kickoff and we’re back on the burner cooking. The team is trying to sort out how to create a floor intake as we believe it’s quite valuable. CAD has been hard at work trying to package a robot together with a floor intake. We hope to have a full CAD ready to release by Sunday night, it’ll be a grind but we are hopeful. We currently are about 80% through the CAD, and we’ve decided that fast cycle times are a must meaning a low center of gravity. We think we can package a deep climb and an algae mechanism onto our robot, this isn’t a priority and we will sort it out later.
Our programming team is delving into Path Planner 2025 and other exciting new resources such as Maple Sim. They’re also trying to get a SYSID routine running soon and we hope to have all the code done within the next 2 weeks.
The mechanical team has been hard at work assembling together a tank drive and also servicing our swerve drive. They have also begun planning out field elements and how we will store them within the school.
Until next time!
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Day 6
Quite a bit since kickoff, the team has decided on a architecture and we have began CAD on it. Our original plan of an end effector has fallen through as we forgot about elevator rigging. Team 4481’s internal coral intake seems promising as it has a small footprint. We also really don’t want to do a wrist but at this point in time we can’t seem to find a way to do a pass through. Here are some early pictures of our CAD, using a 240:1 pivot ratio and a 20:1 elevator ratio we hope to be able to climb using the quokkas climb mechanism. Algae has been pushed back in light of the quokkas climbing mechanism, we’ll revisit how to do algae in the near future.
Until next time!
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I left it for later because it will not be produced, but they look similar 
How large is that chassis?
Just about 700x800mm “27.56 x 31.5inch”.
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How do you guys plan to grab the coral from the ground or the player station?
We were planning to do a floor intake and it’s currently in the works, we seem to have under estimated the size of the coral. Currently we have a wrist so that we can source intake, hopefully soon we can come up with an acceptable geometry for floor intaking.
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Another update for today
Trying to figure out how to do claws that hold the robot in parallel with the cage is proving to be more difficult then initially planned. We wanted to do some sort of spring actuated mechanism so that a motor wasn’t needed but we couldn’t seem to get it to work. A idea did pop up of using a carabiner clip to hold the sides of the cages but we couldn’t find a nice way of doing that. This is what we currently have but arn’t too happy with how it looks, and hope that we can find a better solution tomorrow.
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Day 8
Full robot CAD is done, at least the first iteration. We plan to add either a coral floor intake or an algae mechanism to the front of the robot in the near future. For now, we want to begin manufacturing the current robot to give the other subteams adequate time to start cooking. Capable of L1-L3 Coral and a deep hang we hope to make a far run with this robot. With that 9659 the Vanier Vikings would like you to introduce our 2025 robot FURLIN (we really wanted to render a reveal but ran out of RAM)
Until next time!
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Day 13
Been quite a week for us, from struggling to access our vendors to getting parts it’s looking pretty optimistic. The CAD team is cooking up a floor intake, but unfortunately not having many resources to prototype with makes it significantly harder. Our field is starting to be worked on as we got permission to use the wood within the woodshop and planning is underway. Sadly exams are next week for us and prioritizing exams, robotics will likely not be running. We’ve gotten our gearboxes and have assembled them alongside finishing up service on our swerve modules.
The electrical team is finally alive our digikey and mouser order came in, preparing all of our electronics for use. We’ve decided to standardize all of CAN to Molex SL as it’s pretty hard to mess up once you’ve crimped it correctly. We plan on switching all of our power to Anderson Powerpole as they’re also quite reliable. Unfortunately, our request for a quote from our vendor hasn’t been answered and as such we are waiting on that to get our Anderson Powerpoles.
Programming has been pretty successful, it’s been a long 2 weeks and we’ve got code to show. The Pivot and Elevator code has been written and implemented in MaxMotion for hopefully smoother movement. We originally planned to use Magic Motion but unfortunately, the school board denied our request to purchase Krakens from CTRE or WCP. The wrist is a simple PID controller and that also has been completed. We’ve also fully updated our Swerve code to 2025 too, waiting for the rest of our parts to come in so that we can test it out. We plan on using PathPlanner first in order to get our new programmers acclimated to doing autos and then potentially switching over to Choreo. In terms of vision, we’re eyeing a Limelight 4 for MegaTag v2, and we are reusing our old camera alongside an OPI5 for coral detection.
We hope to have a full robot done by the end of January and we currently are ahead of schedule and on pace. The only concern is vendors and getting our parts in time but that’s out of our control.
Until next time!
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The design looks awesome! I looked through the onshape but could you walk me through the design for the arm pivot?
Which part of the arm pivot specifically are you curious about? The design process is quite long but I can try to write out my through process if you want
When I glanced at the CAD the first time I thought the thunderhex running across was attached to the large sprocket… not the case. Now for the coral mech, what is the plan to keep it in the right spot along the pivot shaft? Shaft collars?
We’re planning to 3dp some hex spacers to retain it in place, using bolts and washers at the end so it doesn’t move
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