Given you’re in Michigan, my assumption would be that this is a middle school program. With that, and that you’ve already invested somewhat in REV equipment, here’s what I’d say in order of importance:
- Field, either half or full-- you can do a home version of the perimeter, but absolutely buy the official tiles and the actual game elements
- Some type of small straight cut saw (cut off saw, horizontal bandsaw, whatever)
- A drill (cordless or otherwise), with common sizes of bits (for REV, this would be 2.5mm (for tapping), 1/8" (clearance), 9mm (bushing), 12mm (bearing) (via a step bit)) and spiral flute taps (hand tapping sucks, and being able to add threads to things is really nice if you do any amount of custom, if you don’t want to do anything custom don’t bother with this)
- A robot cart, as mentioned-- really does not need to be fancy, makes life so much easier at events
- Some sort of 3D printer
Personally, I don’t consider nearly as much of the full custom stuff we do in FRC to be necessary in FTC. If you’re interested in making sure you build up specific skills that are useful for an FRC team, I would buy equipment and supplies with that in mind. I mentor an FTC team that is a pure FTC team-- we are an alternative to FRC, not feeding a specific team, so read the following and preceding advice is with that perspective.
In terms of actual robot parts, I’d consider a full complement of those to be 8 UltraPlanetary gearboxes, and some amount of the REV 90 degree gearboxes, and whatever the appropriate servos are. I’d generally recommend purchasing servos from GoBilda– they have a much broader selection than REV does in terms of speed, power, size, and turns. I wouldn’t necessarily pre-stock these unless you have a ton of money lying around-- they do add up fast.
Right now I’m pretty sure control hubs and expansion hubs simply are not available, but when they are, I would try very hard to make sure you have at least two of each, as spares or for testing.
I am a big fan of the Wera hex keys that REV sells a la carte on their site. They simply do not get lost or confused in the same way that plain black ones do. We have a few of each size, though the smallest one doesn’t really work with REV’s shaft collars due to the geometry.
While you’ve invested in REV equipment, I would generally not recommend focusing on their extrusion system with your robot. They have a considerable amount of hole-pattern based things that are frankly easier to design and play with.
The driver hub is simply better than any phone setup. If you don’t have one, get one. It eliminates many of the issues with USB splitters that exist with phones.
In terms of materials, I’m a big fan of the basics-- for superstructure, that can largely be stuff from REV’s structure page, but we’re partial to the L-beams and sometimes the flat beams.
With REV stuff, you’ll use a lot of their hex head screws with extrusion, but I prefer socket or button head wherever possible personally. For some reference, this is what our summer restock/gap filling looks like for hardware and some core materials (9205 Summer Buy 2022 - Public - Google Sheets).
We focus a lot on using 3D printing and laser cut metal from SendCutSend so our priorities may be different from yours, but at this point I’m a fan of the way we build robots (which honestly hasn’t always been the case).
In terms of other tools-- I’d recommend metric rulers and tape measures-- REV and Gobilda stuff are all natively metric, and committing to just designing and building the robot in metric will make your life much easier.
Personally we hardly use rivets in FTC, but if we did they would largely be 1/8" (compatible with M3 holes), and I would get a Milwaukee riveter.
100% get extra batteries (and charger)-- they last longer than in FRC relative to match length but they’re just as important to robot performance.
I would recommend having an extra set of controllers. They aren’t terribly expensive, and they can be quite abused. One big thing for controller longevity-- don’t wrap the cord around the controller, wrap it off the controller and loop it. With the logitech controllers especially, the cable connection to the controller is weak and can cause all sorts of annoying problems.
Best of luck!