Team 177 & 429 | Bobcat Robotics Program | 2025 Build Blog

[Akash_Rastogi]

Welcome to the second Build Blog from FRC Team 177 - Bobcat Robotics and our latest addition FRC Team 429 - Two Many Bobcats!

Thank you for joining us as we tackle the 2025 FIRST Robotics Season.

Who Are We?

Team 177 Bobcat Robotics was founded in 1995 and is based out of South Windsor High School in South Windsor, CT. Our team currently supports more than 100 high school students and ~20 volunteer mentors, along with 3 Teacher Advisors, and a very active Parent Booster Club.

In 2023 we began planning for expansion, and in Fall of 2024 we officially registered our Freshman team 429 as a means of better training freshmen and engaging more students in building robots.

Our two teams have many partners and supporters to thank for 2025 including:

• South Windsor Public Schools
• South Windsor Bobcats Boosters Inc.
• Ensign Bickford Aerospace & Defense
• NASA (429)
• Pratt & Whitney/Raytheon
• The Gene Haas Foundation
• Labcorp
• Intuitive Foundation
• WestCoast Products & Design teamwcp
• The ThriftyBot teamthrifty
• TE Connectivity
• Parker Hannifin

The Bobcat’s Mission: “Our Product Is People”

We work to inspire tomorrow’s STEM leaders and engage them in activities that build leadership, self-confidence, and effective communication skills. This is achieved by spreading the message of FIRST through community involvement, competitive spirit, and Gracious Professionalism. Success for us has been and always will be seeing progression in our students’ knowledge and problem solving skills inside and outside of the classroom. As our founding mentor Al Mothersele used to say, “Our product is people.”

Team Structure

Our team is split into 6 main sub-teams:

• Design
  • Models the robot in OnShape and delivers manufacturing drawings to Mechanical
• Mechanical/Manufacturing
  • Manufactures our robot parts utilizing various manual and CNC machines in-house
• Electrical
  • Designs and builds pneumatic and electrical systems for the robot, using the latest electronics components from various FRC vendors.
• Programming
  • The team currently programs the robot in Java, using the WPILib framework.
• Marketing & Business Administration (MBA)
  • Sponsorships, budget management, community outreach events and team fundraisers
• Media
  • Work to develop and manage the team website, social media, apparel, and team videos & photos.
• Three additional sub-teams are established during the season which focus on on-field performance, competitive intelligence, and partner/team support:
  • Drive Team
  • Scouting & Strategy
  • Team Help.

429 Structure

• Will be discussed in upcoming posts
• Internally and in posts we may call 429 “team 2”
• Composed entirely of roughly 40 freshmen for 2025 - may change in the future as needed.

Important Links:

• 2024 Build Blog
• Website
• YouTube
• Instagram
• Twitter/X
• Facebook
• TikTok

2025 Links will be shared in the coming days.

Competition Schedule

We will be competing at:

• New England District Week 2 Waterbury
• New England District Week 3 Western New England University
• Hopefully you’ll also see us at New England DCMP and the World Championship in Houston.

Build Blog Goals

• More content - more frequently - from a variety of students
• A variety of student leads and mentors posting robot updates
• Kickoff process documentation
• Season goals definition (post game reveal)
• At least one technical and one non technical post per week
• Discuss dynamics of our team - “How We Work” including mentor and student partnerships
• How 429 came about and how we chose to organize it/structure it
• Discuss detailed prototyping and technical reviews for mechanical, software, electrical, etc
• Discuss products being used and highlight many specific applications
• Sprinkle in work done in the pre-season
• Students will address questions alongside mentors
• Discuss how we help others
• Discuss collaborating with other teams
• Discuss how we ensure our team is having fun while still competing intensely

In a vast sea of many many build blogs this season, we hope you will follow along as we take on new challenges this season with both 177 and 429!

Authored by: @AidenK @Adithya_Anand @Molly_Connolly @Akash_Rastogi

Have a fun and productive kickoff in a few hours! I should really sleep.

[Akash_Rastogi]

Team 429’s Season Goals

Team Performance

• Have a consistently functional robot
• Build a robust and reliable robot
• Get enough points to qualify for DCMP
• Get picked for playoffs

General/Team/Personal

• Be proud of our work
• Learn something new
• Have fun
• Ask questions
• Make new friends
• Get comfortable with team processes

[AidenK]

Offseason Programming!

Welcome back! Programming has been busy these past few months, below are some of the most notable projects.

BobcatLib

“What is BobcatLib?”

A better question is, “What isn’t BobcatLib?” BobcatLib is the sole reason to get up in the morning; it’s the pep in your step and the twinkle in your eye. BobcatLib is much more than a library; it’s a way of life.

In more technical terms, BobcatLib is our bespoke programming library designed to streamline robot development. BobcatLib allows us to focus on season-specific code rather than rewriting the same foundations each year by providing reusable templates for subsystems, controllers, commands, and more. This modular approach speeds up coding and ensures consistency and efficiency across seasons.

BobcatLib is kept as a maven repository, built and published to github pages.

Check out the repo here.

Key features include:

Swerve:

• Fully json-configurable
• Minimal setup
• Aim-assist and autoalign functionality
• Custom odometry w/ slip detection
• Easy vision integration
• Built-in teleop control
• Built-in pathplanner functionality
• Sysid Integration (WIP)
• AdvantageKit Logging
• SimpleSwerve, a bare-bones swerve drive designed to run on a Rio 1.

A fully functional, feature rich swerve, ready in minutes!

Subsystem Templates:

Prebuilt basic subsystems including Arms, Elevators, Intakes, and more – quickly prototype new subsystems, and add advanced features on top of them!

Gamepads:

Never have to remember a button’s driver index again! We’ve made several wrappers around a CommandJoystick making it much easier to interface with all of the gamepads we use, including Logitechs, Xbox Controllers, 8BitDo Controllers, and Ruffy Joysticks.

Note

This is our team’s personal library and is NOT designed for use by other teams. While you’re welcome to explore it and borrow any elements you find useful, be aware that we won’t be able to make it broadly accessible and user-friendly for non-bobcat teams.

Northstar

By: @Adithya_Anand

Over the offseason, we tried to revamp our vision system. Last year, we used exclusively limelights, but found that there were certain cases where a custom solution would have been more useful, such as putting a telephoto lens to track the speaker tags from a distance more accurately (not to mention the higher resolution/performance available from an orangePi). We’ve always been a fan of 6328’s controls (shout out Jonah), and decided that northstar would be a fun thing to try over the offseason. With minimal changes we were able to get it up and running after a discussion with 6328 at Battlecry.

Currently, we have documentation on how it works on our Northstar repo, but like 6328, we simply don’t have the resources to help other teams get it working for themselves. Anyone is welcome to take a look. It functions very similarly to 6328’s version, but we plan to publish it as a docker container in the near future for ease of installation for some of our less-experienced programmers.

Performance-wise, it’s been great, running dual 2mp Arducams at about 30 to 35 fps each. We are also looking at potential object tracking with the OrangePis, as this is a feature of the Coral Edge TPU. Limelights don’t support it, but this is a project for the future.

We will continue to use limelights as they’ve been extremely reliable for us last season (which should only get better with the new NT4 updates), and hopefully we can get even more precise driver assist this year!

Repo here:

GitHub - BobcatRobotics/northstar

Training

With a record 150+ students, including ~40 freshmen, programming was fortunate enough to have 15 new programmers this season! Training started with in-person instruction and guided Codecademy courses, then progressed to hands-on projects with Romis. This approach ensured they gained foundational skills and practical experience to contribute effectively this season. As we move into the build season, new programmers will work with prebuilt projects to gain hands-on experience with advanced programming like swerve at an accessible level.

More experienced programmers worked on BobcatLib, Northstar, and migrating our codebase over to the 2025 API. Our goal for the preseason was to write as much of the generic boilerplate as possible, so that when kickoff rolls around, we can focus on the season-specific tasks.

Happy New Year and good luck in Reefscape!

[Akash_Rastogi]

Checking in really quick to share that we’ll be trying out these printed Reef fittings from Team 1740

Geometrically Accurate 3D Printed Reef Pipe Fittings

I had some free time today since the team isn’t meeting, so I decided to use it making a series of fittings to assemble the REEF pipe and BRANCHES out of old 1.25" PVC pipe from my garage. The goal was to make them strong enough for some abuse, easy to print, and matching the geometry of the real parts without any external fasteners or parts. These internal fitting is what I came up with. [Print bed] There is one fitting design for the T branches, and another design for the S bend. Each fi…

Will report back hopefully quickly!

[Akash_Rastogi]

Robot in 3 Days Homework for Two Many Bobcats - Team 429

Hey all,

Quick teaching resource we put together for our freshman on 429 this season:

Justification: 429 and 177 officially only meet on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 6-8:30 and Saturdays 9-3 or 4PM. We do not have that much time to meet. The gap between Saturday and Wednesday is huge and needs to be better utilized.

Since the focus of 429 is to be a development team for 177, we are focused on them learning as much as possible about FIRST, other FRC teams, FRC resources, and obviously how to build robots. This Robot in 3 Days group assignment focuses on students following an Ri3D team and answering some basic questions, which they’ll then present at our 2nd and 3rd meetings this week on Wednesday and Thursday. It is a good way for them to work with teammates, learn research skills, learn what questions to answer when analyzing another robot, and what processes go into robot design.

Really - everything we are doing with the freshmen this year is in hopes of turning them into top 1% students who all are invested in the FRC community, ChiefDelphi, FUN, Robot in 3 Days, other FRC teams, and in general are crazy about robots. With a freshman team of 40 students, even if half of them are crazy about FRC, that is a wildly high number of top performing students we’ll graduate onto 177.

Link to Team 429 Robot in 3 Days Homework Assignment

This assignment can be for new or veteran students - we chose to focus only on freshman doing this homework assignment.

Edit: This assignment won’t dive in too deep because we don’t want to dissuade kids from doing work at home. This is a required assignment, so making it relatively easy and relaxed is important. We don’t want freshmen to be overworked right off the bat. We think the minimalist questions here set decent expectations for kids.

[mlillis1]

The Bobcat Cinematic Universe: Origins of Team 429

This season marks the first year of our two-team system; with the introduction of team 429: Two Many Bobcats, or “Team 2” for short. The origins of 429 go all the way back to the World Championship in 2023. At that event, 177 competed in the Newton division, where we were picked by the 8th seeded alliance captain 4522, Team SCREAM. Of course, Team SCREAM is now a household name, after their World Championship in 2024, but they inspired us long before all the fame and glory.

After being eliminated from the division playoffs, I found myself outside the George R. Brown convention center taking a break from all the chaos. With the season now firmly in the rear-view mirror, a couple mentors and I (shoutout Molly and Jake) ended up talking about 4522 and their second team, Team SCREAM Jr. We wondered what a second Bobcat team might look like.

Meeting Demand for STEM Programs

Our program has always been one of the largest in New England, with at least 70 students registered each year since 2018. Since COVID we have seen an increase in demand that we simply were not able to meet. The number of students simply interested in being on the team grew from roughly 80 each year before COVID to 100+ last year.

This demand is not going away anytime soon. Our school district, South Windsor, was the only town in Connecticut with 10+% growth from 2012 to 2022. Town projections show increasing enrollment until 2030.

The numbers reinforce what our mentors have experienced for years: too many kids, not enough work. One memory stuck with me during this whole process, at District Champs in 2023 a student came up to me and asked, “Is there anything else I can do? I finished all my pit and scouting shifts for the day.”…it was only 11am.

The Fall and the Rise (like a phoenix from the ashes)

Getting everyone on board with the idea of a second team had its challenges. Our school administration supported the idea, but required all three teachers to be in agreement. In the summer of 2023 we spent a lot of time digging into the experiences of other teams, like 4522, 111, and 2468. There were informal discussions over dinners and summer gatherings. It was a mixed bag of feedback and ultimately one teacher decided that if the mentors could not reach consensus, then it was not the right time. That put an end to all discussions of a second FRC team…until May of 2024.

We felt like we just won the lottery. In the Spring of 2024 the State of Connecticut announced it was covering the registration cost for all existing FRC teams for 2025 and 2026. This solved one of the biggest concerns we had about starting a second team: cost. This time around we were all in agreement – it was the right time.

Part 2: Coming Soon™

In the second part I will discuss how we planned and organized the team.

[mrwright]

This is so awesome! Cant wait to see you put all of those Bobcats to work! How has it gone so far?

[mlillis1]

It’s been great! We had 150 students declare interest in joining the team(s) and right now 114 have actually paid the school sports fee to join. We have 45 freshman For context, we typically get about 30 freshman and naturally retain ~50% of them through the end of the season.

There’s definitely been a learning curve, but I think this week has been awesome. Before kickoff we had all of our freshman training with their respective technical subteams, alongside 177 students. Since kickoff the freshman have been doing cross-training sessions. We’ll probably make a post with more details this weekend, but they have been doing mechanical/design (building simple elevators out of wood and string) and some 177 students trained them on electrical/controls.

We also have a few new mentors and they have gravitated towards helping the 2nd team so far. We suspected coming into this that a 2nd team would help with mentor retention, which we have struggled with in the past.

[mrwright]

Wow! You’ll need a couple more teams really soon! So excited to see what you all come up with. Good luck!

[Akash_Rastogi]

Akash’s Editor’s Note:
Disclaimer - Team 177 is sponsored by West Coast Products. The following product review is from one of our mechanical students and is an honest representation of the students’ experiences with the WCP X2i modules. My edits have been for structural and grammatical purposes to better convey their comparisons. Always take product reviews with a grain of salt.

Student Review - WCP X2i and Comparison to SDS MK4i

Over the past few weeks, we have worked on building our WestCoast Products X2i swerve modules with the X4 gear ratio. Having used the SDS mk4i’s the past two years, there were a lot of differences with the new assembly process that students took note of. Below you’ll find out comparisons to the only other swerve modules we have direct experience with:

1) Kit Organization

WCP - The gears for all ratios come separately, not in one box. Any gears unique to one of the ratios came in a separate bag, which does mean we can choose the ratio we want and it makes it really easy to change it if we decide later to do so. Gears not being mixed together made it easier for students as well to not make mistakes during assembly.

SDS - All parts for an entire module came in one box. It didn’t cause any issue, but it requires some more attention to organization while building.

Overall we really like that the kit comes with multiple ratios and that the ratios are in separate packaging.

2) Press Fits

WCP - The bearings are a tight fit pretty much everywhere. This isn’t a huge problem, but it does require a press fit using an arbor press or wood blocks and mallets. We did run into an issue on the wheels however, where the bearings didn’t sit flat and this caused the ring gear to bind with the bevel gear on the wheel. We had to really press these in, and pay extra attention that they are fully in the bearing holes.

SDS - It felt like modules typically had looser fits for the bearings, but almost always ran smooth when putting it together the first time. At times we have had bearings that didn’t want to stay in during assembly but were easier to put in by students.

Overall the bearings on the WCP modules had a good fit once assembled.

3) Modular….Modules

WCP - The X2 is a modular build, with three sections that come together at the end to fully make a module. This made it easy for multiple students to assist with each module and have smaller “sub-assemblies” that went together.

SDS - MK4 modules are a full assembly, which has a lot of plates and parts.

Overall, this doesn’t have a large impact on the assembly, but I believe it will make maintenance easier on the WCP X2 modules.

4) Rigidity with Motors

WCP - The plates the motors mount to, mount flush against the motors, allowing the pinion gears to be as close to the motors bearings as possible.

SDS - Standoffs are used to mount motors instead of being flush. The pinion is not as close to the motor bearings as it can be. In the past we have considered adding an additional bearing to support the motor shaft.

Overall, I believe this should be better for torque on the motor shaft this year.

5) Encoder Mounting

WCP - The X2 kit comes with a 3D printed encoder mount that serves as the bottom of the housing. It is a little finicky to get the encoder on and screwed in, but it is a lot more secure using 10-32 bolts to hold it down than it was on the SDS modules.

SDS - While the housing screws are small, we really liked having an encoder “cage” on the MK4 modules to protect the encoders.

Overall, I like the 10-32 mounting and the WCP housing, but I wish the modules came with protection for the encoder like the SDS modules do. I designed and added my own protector for the encoder similar to the MK4i design.

6) Gear Driven Steering

WCP - One of the biggest positive is the 88t rotation gear taking the place of a belt.

SDS - Stretching belts during assembly isn’t fun. The large steering pulley would feel “exposed” sometimes since it extended outside the plates.

Overall, the WCP module should be more reliable, and it makes the assembly of the rotation gear train much easier as you don’t have to stretch a belt to make it work, it’s just aligning gears.

7) Encoder Magnet

WCP - One of the biggest improvements in the assembly is the magnet on the encoder shaft coming pre-installed on the X2. We have had some problems with this magnet not being glued in well enough and coming undone over time or due to user error.

SDS - User glues in the magnet

Overall, I liked that the X2 came with the magnet installed. This speeds up assembly, and gives some peace of mind that there shouldn’t be issues with the magnet messing up the encoder due to user error during assembly.

8) Pre-Cut Tread

WCP - The tread for the wheels was much better cut to size and the holes were much better. In the past few years, retreading wheels was a hard process as we really had to stretch the tread sent to us, resulting in more than one cross-threaded hole. The assembly of the wheels was much easier, and changing tread on wheels will be a less-involved process this year. We’re also hoping to try out the molded wheels to see how they compare against our black tread we always use.

Summary:

The WCP X2i module assembly was fairly smooth, and was pretty quick and easy. Also, the modules have a really nice finish on them with a sleek black look. They seem to be an improvement, and we’re excited to see them in action this year!

Authored by: @DrewGlatt Junior on 177 Mechanical Subteam

[Akash_Rastogi]

Pre-season Electrical!

Hey all! Last year we didn’t really cover much of the electrical side of things, so the plan is to change this.

Preseason Training

This year we started by presenting the basic topics and skills based off of a skill matrix that we developed over the course of the summer.

Take a look at a public Work in Progress copy of the 177/429 skill matrix here.

Teams are free to use this template and customize it based on relevant skills for their subteams.

The main idea with this is to ensure that all of our students have the basic electrical skills needed to be successful on their freshman team.

Swerve Base Wiring

After we have gone through all of the electrical basics we have them moving onto wiring a swerve drive train, SwerveyMcSwerve. This lovely swerve drive is a decapitated 2023 robot that has been repurposed for both electrical and programming training. We have our freshman take apart all of the wiring and using any pictures they took as well as any documentation we have provided they are responsible for rewiring it.

There has been a lot of debate between whether to train incoming freshman on swerve drive or tank drive. We eventually came to the conclusion that training on swerve would be more efficient as they would get experience with how to use and wire both a CANivore and the Pigeons. This doubles as a way to train them for the actual season as they will be using swerve drive for 429’s robot.

BOOTCAMP

This year, to ensure the efficiency of 429 we decided to create a bootcamp program that runs through the major parts of robot construction during the first week of Build Season while 429 waits for the Everybot design to be released. For electrical we developed a program that consisted of both lectures and fun activities for our students to participate in. We came up with a wide variety of activities for our students to participate in as it can be boring to listen to people talk for 2 hours. Below is a list of all of our activities for bootcamp.

Bootcamp Activites:

• Price is Right game for electrical components
• Demonstration for Anderson Powepole connectors and ferrule crimping
• Pneumatic tube cutting competition
• Jeopardy game covering all the information that was covered

We will release more updates on how the season electrically is going once more of the robot is ready for wiring! Happy Robots!!

Authored by @DylanH - Senior and 177 Controls Hardware & Electrical Captain

[Akash_Rastogi]

@AidenK

Performance-wise, it’s been great, running dual 2mp Arducams at about 30 to 35 fps each.

Quick point of clarification on this - we tested and compared Arducams in addition to the new Thriftybot ThriftyCam. With a variety of lens options, a locking USB port and the ability to mount easily using a robust billet aluminum case, we highly recommend teams use this camera for vision systems if they are running OrangePi’s.

Lens options are pretty critical because they can allow you to use different resolution feeds at higher frame rates with zoom lenses (for example from half court shots in 2024). A combination of lenses on multiple cameras, running at different resolutions can provide better pose estimation depending on the game and field layout.

ThriftyCam

Additionally, we tested powering our systems during these tests using the beta version of MitoCANdria. This was really straight forward to set up and gave use zero power issues when testing Northstar on our 2024 robot.

We are still debating on whether we will run Limelights (either 3G or 4) with a combo of OrangePi and the Thriftycams or if the 4 will be sufficient for our needs this season.

As usual disclaimer from our original post, team 177 is sponsored in part by Thriftybot, but we have been testing these products prior to our sponsorship as well.

[Akash_Rastogi]

Student Perspective Kickoff Recap: Design and Strategy Subteam’s First Meeting for the 2025 FRC Season

During our kickoff meeting, the Design and Strategy subteam dove headfirst into the game manual, trying to wrap our heads around all the new challenges this year’s game has to offer. This meeting was all about understanding what the game requires, deciding what’s most important, and sketching out some initial ideas for our robot design. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at what we worked on and where we’re headed.

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Breaking Down the Game - Alliance Strategies: What, Who, and Why

We started by dissecting the game manual (shoutout to everyone who stayed patient while we flipped back and forth between pages). The goal was to figure out all the core tasks the robot needs to handle, who on the alliance would take care of each task, and why it mattered in the grand scheme of the match. After lots of back-and-forth debates (and maybe a few snacks to fuel the discussion), here’s the list we came up with:

1. Driving

• What: Get past the starting line during autonomous for the auto RP and set up for scoring.
• Who: Every robot—no excuses.
• Why: It’s the easiest RP to secure, and we can’t score points if we’re stuck at the start.

2. Acquiring Coral

• What: Pick up coral from the ground or the human player station (preferred for speed). We also start with one preloaded piece.
• Who: At least two robots on the alliance.
• Why: Scoring coral is essential for the coral RP and match points. Faster intakes mean more scoring opportunities.

3. Scoring Coral

• What: Place coral on the reef’s scoring levels (1 through 4). Higher levels give more points, but we decided level 4 wasn’t worth the extra effort unless we’re aiming for bonus points. Instead, we’ll focus on clearing algae for a Coopertition bonus.
• Who: Two robots, working together to clear space and score efficiently.
• Why: Scoring coral is all about match points and RPs. The coopertition bonus gives us a nice way to bypass the headache of level 4 scoring.

4. Acquiring Algae

• What: Remove algae from the reef or grab it off the ground.
• Who: One robot dedicated to this, maybe two if we need faster cycles.
• Why: Clearing algae is a key part of opening up reef space for coral scoring. Plus, scoring algae in the processor helps with match points and the coopertition bonus.

5. Scoring Algae

• What: Deposit algae in the processor, net, or hand it off to the human player.
• Who: One robot (maybe two if things get hectic).
• Why: Every little bit helps in match points. Bonus points don’t hurt either.

6. Driving Under/Around Chains

• What: Design the robot to avoid chains on the field so we don’t shake the cage during endgame.
• Who: A defensive robot with a low profile.
• Why: Keeping the cage steady during hanging ensures we don’t lose endgame points.

7. Hanging Deep

• What: Create a more complex mechanism for deep hanging in the cage during the endgame.
• Who: One robot with advanced capabilities.
• Why: Secures the barge RP if shallow hanging robots have issues.

8. Hanging Shallow

• What: Use a simpler mechanism for hanging in the shallow section of the cage.
• Who: Most robots should be able to do this.
• Why: It’s the easiest way to secure the barge RP.

9. Defense

• What: Block opponents from scoring coral and algae.
• Who: One robot dedicated to playing defense.
• Why: Less scoring for opponents means a better chance for us to win.

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Design Brainstorming: Sketching Our Way to Solutions

Once we had a solid game plan, we shifted to brainstorming robot designs. We spent some time pulling inspiration from past robots—both our own and others’—and sketching out ideas.

Elevator with a Telescoping Arm

This idea was inspired by Team 254’s 2019 robot. We wanted a vertical lift system with a telescoping arm that could reach all the scoring levels on the reef while keeping the robot footprint small. We discussed making the intake modular so it could handle both coral and algae with ease. While the elevator design is flexible, we realized stability might be a challenge, especially when extended to higher levels.

Double-Jointed Arm

The double-jointed arm emerged as a strong contender for this year’s game. This design allows for incredible flexibility and precision, making it well-suited for scoring coral on all reef levels and maneuvering algae into scoring areas. The arm’s dual-joint configuration enables it to operate in tight spaces, making it especially valuable for scoring in the crowded reef area while minimizing interference with other alliance robots.

We discussed how the geometry of the arm could be optimized to maximize reach without overburdening the motors. We also prioritized designing the arm to handle the weight of coral and algae efficiently, ensuring it remains stable even when extended. Intake-wise, one potential design was a claw with 2 joints on either jaw to bend inwards for coral and outwards for algae. A flat platform could be used to stabilize coral for scoring and we considered the use of a slot with some sort of elastic at the base of the claw to allow for more leeway when holding pieces. The ability to precisely angle the arm for quick placement at lower reef levels—or to reach higher levels when necessary—adds versatility to our strategy. Overall, the double-jointed arm feels like a strong fit for this year’s challenges.

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What’s Next?

By the end of the meeting, we had two solid sketches and a clear plan for what to tackle next:

• Refine the sketches into detailed CAD models for the elevator and double-jointed arm.
• Start prototyping key mechanisms, like the intake and hanging system.
• Coordinate with other subteams to ensure our designs align with the overall strategy.
• Decide which design to focus on based on testing and feedback.

This meeting set the tone for the season—collaborative, creative, and strategic. We can’t wait to see how these designs evolve as we prototype and refine. Stay tuned for more updates, and let’s make this season one to remember!

Authored by @Akshaj177 - Senior and 177 CAD & Design Lead

[D_Price]

One of my favorite threads each year. Keep up the great work Akash! Hope to see ya soon!

[Akash_Rastogi]

Mentor Perspective Kickoff Recap

SEASON GOALS

We always like to take some time the morning of Kickoff to discuss team goals for the season. It helps us focus on what we are aiming to accomplish with our robot. It also helps us remember that competition results are one of many ways to judge the success of an FRC season. Here are the goals the 177 students set for our 2025 season.

Team Organization

• HAVE FUN
• Improve team-wide communication
• Increase mentoring and involvement of underclassmen by mentors and upperclassmen
• Increase student ownership of robot CAD and design
• Increase student involvement in build blog
• Improve social media presence

Competition

• Act with Gracious Professionalism, respecting all members of our team and others
• Emphasize and improve scouting culture and process
• Rank first at a District Event
• Outperform other top CT teams
• Win a technical award at Championship

ROBOT REQUIREMENTS

GAME TASKS

Like a lot of teams, we spent a lot of time breaking down the game into discrete tasks. This year we used the following structure to guide that conversation and ensure we fully understood the benefits of each task.

Kickoff W Questions 2025

COMPARISONS TO PREVIOUS GAMES

Once we felt we had a reasonable understanding of the game, we took a look back to previous games to see if we could find any similarities that might help us predict how this game is likely to be played.

• Coopertition Bonus Point - Like 2024, there is a separate bonus point for completing the Coopertition task, and those points serve as the first tiebreaker in qualification rankings. Unlike 2024, there are a total of 6 ranking points available each match instead of 4. The Coop points will likely still be relevant, but not as important as they were in 2024.

• Deep CAGE & 2024 Trap - Being able to score a Deep CAGE climb makes the remaining requirements for the BARGE RP trivial, similar to how the Trap contributed towards the Ensemble RP in 2024.

• CORAL RP & 2019 Rocket RP - In order to complete the CORAL RP, teams will potentially have to spend time doing things that are less efficient from a match point standpoint (scoring CORAL on lower levels, scoring ALGAE in the PROCESSOR). This is similar to how the Rocket RP in 2019 required teams to score in more difficult locations without any added benefit in match points.

• ALGAE in BARGE & 2017 Fuel - The points for scoring CORAL on the REEF are more granular than the Rotor points in 2017 were, but they still have a similar diminishing return as the higher levels get filled. The more effective teams get at filling Levels 3 and 4 of the REEF, the more impactful scoring ALGAE in the BARGE is likely to become.

• CAGE & 2017 Climb, 2011 Minibots - In games where scoring opportunities are limited, and the benefits of scoring a single game piece decrease as more are scored, endgame points can be critical. Similar to ALGAE, these diminishing returns tend to make other sources of points more impactful at higher levels of play.

ROBOT REQUIREMENTS

With our game analysis complete, we sorted our task list into three categories (Must, Nice to Have, and Low Priority). As we go through build season we’ll periodically reassess these lists to ensure they still align with our understanding of the game.

Must:

• Acquire CORAL directly from the CORAL STATION
• Score CORAL on all levels of the REEF
• Remove ALGAE from the REEF between levels 3&4
• Suspend from a Deep CAGE
• Acquire ALGAE from the floor
• Score ALGAE in the PROCESSOR
• Acquire CORAL from the floor (Must for District Championship)

Nice to Have:

• Score ALGAE in the BARGE
• Acquire ALGAE from the REEF (any position)
• Suspend from a Shallow CAGE

ARCHITECTURE DECISIONS

Having set our requirements, it was finally time to start addressing HOW the robot would meet them. We began with some high-level architecture decisions.

• Intake and score CORAL off opposite sides of the robot - The orientation of where we want to intake game pieces relative to where we want to score them from is almost always our first architecture decision. Orienting them towards opposite sides of the robot keeps the path between the CORAL STATION and the REEF as simple as possible, which is beneficial for consistency in Autonomous and Teleop scoring.

• Elevator vs. Arm - This was a big discussion. There was a lot of support within the team for an arm-based architecture, similar to what 176 or 6328 built in 2023. We had the opportunity to work with both of those teams over the course of that season, and some of our team members still remembered how impressive their machines were. Ultimately, the decision came down to looking at where our limited resources (particularly time) would be best spent. Based on our familiarity with elevators, we expect to be able to complete an elevator-based robot in less time than an arm-based robot with similar capabilities. We expect the benefit of being able to spend that extra time on other mechanisms to be greater than any benefits an arm-based architecture might offer us.

• Offset “sideways” elevator - In order to satisfy our requirement to intake and score off of opposite sides of the robot, we needed something beyond a “traditional” elevator. We settled on a sideways elevator, offset to one side of the robot, which would allow our scoring mechanism to swing from one side of the robot to the other.

• Separate intake and scoring mechanism - Keeping the intake and scoring mechanisms independent will allow us to optimize each of them to their individual task. For example, we can make a wide intake to give our drivers and human player a large target to hit without having to worry about adding weight to a scoring mechanism that needs to be lifted 6 feet off the ground. We considered this benefit worth the added complexity of passing the game pieces between two separate mechanisms.

• Single end effector that can manipulate both CORAL and ALGAE - Based on our experience so far with the game pieces, and the experiences shared by other teams, we feel confident that we do not need to develop a dedicated manipulator for each game piece.

Remainder of Week 1 for Design & Strategy

Going into our meeting on Thursday night, we had a list of robot requirements that everyone felt pretty good about. That meant the time had come to start nailing down some of the details on what the overall architecture of our robot would look like.

From as early as Saturday afternoon, there was a fair amount of support for building an arm-based robot. Over the course of the 2023 season we had the opportunity to work with both 176 and 6328, and some of our veteran members still remember how impressive those machines were. Things got to the point that a hand-written petition to build a double-jointed arm was circulated late Saturday afternoon. @AidenK and @Adithya_Anand were primarily the ones responsible for this.

When the time finally came to make a decision between an arm-based architecture or an elevator-based architecture, we started a list of pros and cons for each of them.

After a lengthy discussion, we didn’t seem any closer to a consensus. Without a compelling reason to choose one architecture over the other, we looked at how our team’s resources align with those required to execute each architecture. We have several years of learning, as well as our own 2023 robot, that we could use to build an elevator robot. For an arm robot, we would be relying much more on documentation created by other teams.

Ultimately, we came to a consensus as a team that the increased resources it would take for us to build an arm would not be worth the potential benefits over an elevator. Building an elevator would allow us to spend those resources in more impactful areas.

Authored by @Jake177 - Lead Technical Mentor

[Akash_Rastogi]

Sorry for the lengthy recent posts! Going forward we’ll aim for shorter posts with more images and videos as content.

[Akash_Rastogi]

177 Robot Design Update:

ThriftyCoast Elevator™

A match made in COTS heaven

Design work is underway for a “Thrifty Coast™” 3 stage elevator. We decided to use components from both of our fantastic Sponsors in the design of this elevator. We are really loving how compact the WCP inline bearing blocks make the elevator. Only having a ¼” gap between vertical tubes instead of the traditional ½” gap, saves us 1.5” in total width on a 3 stage elevator. On the other hand, cascade rigging on a narrow (5” outside carriage width) has been challenging as demonstrated in the above image. Having used Thriftybot elevators for both of our robots in 2023, we also knew we could rely on the quality of their pulleys for rigging our cable as well as their cable tensioners.

After feeling like we left some controllability on the table on our 2023 elevator due to the slop in the planetary gearbox along with mysterious missed counts on the Falcon internal encoder, we decided to design in a custom gearbox with an absolute encoder as belts and suspenders incase we run into any issues.

For the gearbox design, we wanted to make sure we properly accounted for the 3 stage cascade rigging which essentially results in a 3:1 multiplier on free speed and current draw and a ⅓ multiplier on stall load. Below is the representation we used for our gearing in the JVN linear mechanism calculator. In this case, we will mostly ignore the “loaded” numbers as we intend to use a constant force spring to counterbalance to near net 0 load. Our preliminary design includes a 17.7lb CF spring between the second stage and the carriage. Gearing was chosen that will allow us to swap gears while matching total tooth count in each reduction to allow us to make minor tweaks if we determine it is necessary during our testing.

With any luck we will have the real thing assembled for testing soon.

Authored by @David_Bridge - Bumper R&D and Bumper Manufacturing Lead Mentor (He says I would have to trick him onto logging into CD)

[pigrammer]

@Akash_Rastogi

177 Robot Design Update:

ThriftyCoast Elevator™

A match made in COTS heaven

Design work is underway for a “Thrifty Coast™” 3 stage elevator. We decided to use components from both of our fantastic Sponsors in the design of this elevator. We are really loving how compact the WCP inline bearing blocks make the elevator. Only having a ¼” gap between vertical tubes instead of the traditional ½” gap, saves us 1.5” in total width on a 3 stage elevator. On the other hand, cascade rigging on a narrow (5” outside carriage width) has been challenging as demonstrated in the above image. Having used Thriftybot elevators for both of our robots in 2023, we also knew we could rely on the quality of their pulleys for rigging our cable.

[Kevin_Leonard]

@Akash_Rastogi

A match made in COTS heaven

This thing is wild - cool concept. Excited to see where this goes - looks like a few of the concepts we rejected (we’re too boring for sideways offset elevators on 3467).

[Akash_Rastogi]

P O W D E R C O A T .

We somehow managed to make time to get 177’s robot powder coated a nice spirited pearl white.

Right now we’re not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that we had time to do this. We’ll find out soon!

It matches our SPIRIT. colors when paired with black components from WestCoast Products and The Thrifty Bot.

Big shout out to our manufacturing students for churning these parts out week 1.

And a massive shout out to our team 177 alumni owned local business and sponsor Kinetic MX!