I’m the captain of a rookie team, some of us did FTC for the past couple of years but we have very little knowledge of the FRC parts, since they seem pretty different from the things we used in FTC.
Currently we are having issues with deciding what we should focus on in the game. Some of the members want to try and hang from the deep cage to try and get more ranking points, and maybe try placing coral, while others think we should try to focus on placing coral and seeing if we can hang from the shallow cage.
With the deep cage, we would basically have to copy a design that has been posted, maybe with a couple of modifications, which some of us have expressed discomfort with. With the other strategy we might be able to figure out something ourselves with a bit of outside inspiration.
I’m just wondering if either of these ideas are viable for us, or if we should be thinking much smaller. Any advice would be greatly appreciated :]
First off, welcome. Lots of good people willing to help here, with a variety of opinions.
When you are new to things some (generally) good advice is
“Pick one or two hard things, outsource the rest”
Being a rookie is already hard. You could "outsource " to the kitbot and that would probably be enough in a lot of people’s opinions.
You could also pick a “hard thing”. That may be a shallow cage climb, algae manipulator, or spend a bunch of time on autonomous. The kit bot looks really competitive this year, don’t discount it, if you want add something to it to enhance it.
As a rookie, in my opinion, one of the best (and honestly impressive) things you can do is show up organized: have your tools in order. Have your wiring labeled and zip tied down, do one thing (or maybe one and a half things) REALLY well. Be ready to discuss what you can do with alliance partners, go simple so you have a ton of drive practice, and an auto that can contribute (even if that is drive forward, spit out coral after 5 seconds).
Do this and you will likely be in the top half of teams at your event. Many teams will over build this year and show up with a buggy mess of a bot.
Absolutely rock it instead. It is totally ok to “steal from the best, invent the rest”. The top teams in the world “steal” all the time (and are not shy saying they did so).
My team just had its rookie year last season and what I can tell you is to not bite off more than you can chew.
As @Skyehawk said, as a rookie you’d have a leg up simply by pulling up to comp organized, functioning, and excited to play. Dont feel bad about outsourcing certain ideas from other teams, from my own experience I’m assuming that as a rookie team you have neither the funds nor mentorship to pump out prototypes every day.
The best bang for your buck to have a succesful first season for all your members is to not overcomplicate the robot design. A simple consistent design will allow your drivers to practice, your programmers to tune auto, and the rest of your team to begin outreach/strategy initiatives.
Learn and take notes of what went well and what didn’t at comp. Write this down, discuss it a day or two after you are done with comps. There is a lot to learn, you will likely get overwhelmed. A notebook of ideas/observations/counts of things/approaches/etc will help you remember. Just a running list or two, go over that after comp.
Trust me, if you go simple, show up organized, show up practiced, and ask questions on how you can improve… there is a pretty good chance you will be picked for elims.
If for some reason you have time at comp (organized people often have time)… help out your fellow rookies if there are some there. People will notice.
The general advices here are great, but if you want more specific advise for this particular game then I recommend you to go only coral and do it the best you can, if you succeed in doing it you can add the climb.
The climb only give you 10 points (12 minus 2 of parking), while being good at corals should generate you 30+ (assuming you did it well).
If you are going for RP, the climb might seems like the easy way to do it, free RP every game, but if you dont have corals you wont have much chance for the corals RP where you need all the alliance members to help, and you are still gonna earn the climbing RP in some of your matches where you alliance partners can climb.
Eventually, do you really want to be the alliance captain when all you can do is score 12 points? I would rather be picked by stronger robots at this situation, go for high scoring robot and only then start thinking about RP.
These are my advices but do your own research and decide what is best for you team
Congrats and Welcome! I am a freshman on an FRC Team, And what we are doing, is trying to go for all three main points, but mainly focusing on the Algae or focusing on the coral mainly could still significantly help, it’s probably best not to overdo oneself, and stress out too much. Good luck!!
Get really good at one thing at a time. That doesn’t necessarily mean stopping at one game task for the whole season, but try to fully develop some aspect of your robot / game before moving onto another one.
In the early season, this means prototyping, building fast, breaking stuff, and redoing it a lot. In the late season it may mean rebuilding or modifying existing mechanisms to add just a bit more functionality (extending the reach of a gripper, making an intake accept a second kind of game piece, etc). The important thing is that you are building off past success. Nothing is more of a demoralizing grind than trying to do everything at once and never really getting good at anything at all.
Specialists can contribute to this game at all levels of play, so if you only get good at one or two things, you can still have a competitive season. No one aspect of a robot is mandatory this year; you do not have to single-handedly complete every RP task or scoring objective.
WE did Defense our First season and it was an enjoyable time made Worlds, it’s nice to frustrate the best teams your first season and the tasker to develop a good defender is lower you want to be rare and there will be less defenders this season
Already a lot of good advice in this thread (+1 to specializing to one or two things). As a rookie (or any less experienced/resourced team) I would hesitate doing things for ranking points. First, extra ranking points that help you rank 15th instead of 30th don’t really matter – most alliance captains (especially those you want to be picked by) don’t consider ranking. Secondly, if you do plan on seeding high enough to be a captain, you should be spending time on scouting. While scouting is very helpful, it is something that should be skipped if a team doesn’t have the resources.
Whatever you decide to do, get a ton of driver practice before you first event.
I also regard this as the best advice for every team.
The requirement to get driver practice is that your robot must drive. Your robot need not be complete in order to be driving; get the kit drivetrain moving first, add any mechanisms later. Bumpers come after drivetrain, but before mechanisms!
Also, make sure your drivetrain is constructed and wired well; nothing like ending up dead on the field because something got disconnected, or a wheel fell off. I also recommend performing a few “crash-it-into-a-brick-wall tests” (with bumpers).
I don’t know if I have a ton to add, as most have already said it. However, I’m a coach of a team in your same situation - transitioned an FTC to FRC starting this year. Our priority list is…
Move using Swerve X2 drivetrain (this was a fall project, it’s 90% working). Still building the AM14U in case this doesn’t work out.
Reliable, robust robot that does exactly what we want, every time. Built to both play defense (if needed) and can withstand the rigors of competition
Modify the kitbot to work on our drivetrain and score L1 Coral
Custom Algae mechanism that can fit in the volume underneath the kitbot’s coral mechanism . Only able to ground intake and score in processor.
Then, we have a couple of team members that are rockstars at CAD designing modifications to the kitbot that can allow us to score in L2, maybe L3. We are not doing anything with the cage.
We aren’t worried about RP, just about performing well and being a good alliance partner. We are assuming that we won’t be in a picking position, but are hoping to be a proven and useful alliance member. How can we best help those that want the rank points? How can we prove to them that we are a good pick in an alliance?
Focus on getting something built that is reliable and within your means.
100% reach out to an experienced team nearby you. You don’t know what you don’t know, and having another team to talk to is so useful.
Timeline is all that matters. It’s more important to build a good robot fast than a great robot slow. You should have your robot driving and able to score points by the end of week 4, or week 5 at the latest. The rest of the season is for improving, programming, and practicing. So when assessing you’re intended robot capabilities, make sure you can finish them in that time (and being willing to cut scope if you’re not making progress).
This game is nice in that there’s not many ways you can go wrong per say, as long as you don’t take on too much.
Don’t focus on RP, focus on what will score you the most points. Focusing on RP makes sense for the best teams, but if you’re not ranked high enough to be alliance captain it doesn’t matter.
I would put a mild recommendation against climbing. Deep climbing is worth it strategically but not 100% necessary, and it seems pretty hard. Climbing mechanisms also have the disadvantage that they are more “all or nothing”; if you don’t design it well it could not work in most of your matches, which can be disheartening.
Don’t feel bad about stealing ideas wholesale from Everybot, Rev Starter Bot, Ri3D, and WCP CC. Think about whether your team would want to use the Everybot design wholesale (possibly with some improvements).
My low resource strategic priorities would probably be either <L1,L2,L3 coral bot>, or <L1 coral, processor algae bot>. I don’t think I’d recommend taking on more than that without knowing your team.
It all depends on your team size and comfort levels, I would recommend checking out as many RI3D posts as possible and using the most simple and effective mechanisms you can find.
Start by ranking the tasks that score from easiest to hardest for you guys to fabricate. Then, take whatever scores the most points and compare those lists. Try to create some mock-ups of the mechanisms and 3DP or build from wood or cardboard if you aren’t sure you’ll be able to make it work.
I would lastly recommend your team looks into the rookie awards, our Bot last year was a modified kitbot, but our Outreach and Marketing programs won Rookie All Star and took us to Houston.
You can have great success as a team with a simple robot, and there’s no shame in not being able to do everything.
For my two cents on this year’s meta, if you are new, just focus on being able to score coral at most levels with an elevator attached to an existing coral intake/outtake design. That’s probably enough to keep decently competitive, and just build from there. TRAIN YOUR DRIVERS.
Don’t be afraid to copy a design, especially when you are a rookie team with very little knowledge about FRC parts. I would actually suggest order the kit bot and while you wait for it to arrive, build a physical model of the game field, then go straight to practice. The rev Kit bot is actually very capable out of the box. https://youtu.be/tJqVKeSG2rE?si=QcMtelFpQfRJNvxl
From here you can add functionality, like add a climber, maybe find a way to score Algae in the net. Its easier, if you have working bot to test what you can/can’t do.
Something that rookie teams often overlook is scouting. Or rookie year, (I wasn’t there btw) we had zero scouting data but ended up as an alliance captain at our first event, and had zero data, and we basically had to pick a random team. There are plenty of scouting resources out there, and as we(6343) have learned over the years, you never really know if you’ll end up an alliance captain, so assign some people to scout at the event. We use PeregrineFRC for scouting, but there are a bunch of other resources you could look into. You don’t have to scout every robot every match, but even data for just a few matches for each robot is better than none, and you never know if it could come in clutch during alliance selection.