I am the founder of a new FRC team in the Central Valley and it’s going great, however, I’m not sure what we will do up until the 2024 season begins. I can introduce my team to CAD and programming but I don’t think that alone will be able to last us the 3 months until break. We also have some old Vex parts but I’m hesitant to have us work with them because I don’t know how much of what we can learn from Vex bots transfers to FRC.
What do yall think?
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Find an offseason competition and show up. Depending on where in the Central Valley you are, I might have some people for you to talk to…
@R.C , for instance, in case the MadTown Throwdown (Madera) is close to you.
You may also want to start stocking up on parts (motors go quickly around these parts), forming networks with local teams (see also: show up at offseason) as well as your school(s) and community.
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You can easily educate on CAD and programming for 3 months. Not sure how many days a week and hours per session you and your students can devote to fall training, but there is a lot to learn.
Fall pre-season is prime time for education on robot fabrication and assembly techniques. Get your students up to speed on whatever hand tools, power tools, machining tools, and CNC tools the team has access to. Make sure the students know how to export CAD models, run 3D printer slicing software, and can run 3D printers if your team has any.
Make sure they know exactly how to wire a robot and build a pneumatic system. Rules relevant to these areas change very little from season to season, so the 2023 Charged Up manual is an excellent reference. WPI has a nice intro to wiring. The FRC Pneumatics Manual is also very good.
Simulating the week of kickoff can be a valuable use of time, especially for a new team. Choose an old game, find the reveal video, and run through the process you plan to use for game analysis, brainstorming, and prototyping in the first week of build season.
Start to work on your scouting plan for the upcoming season. If you are going to go software-based, what software are you going to use or create for data entry and data analysis. If you are going to go paper-based, make sure you have a good template ready and some way to consolidate and analyze data.
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My best advice if you have some funds, is to build an FRC drive base. This will be similar to the drive base you’ll get in the kit of parts, so you can use it for spares. Looks like roboRIOs are out of stock, so see if you can borrow one from a nearby veteran team. They can probably lend you some other electronics parts too.
Drive base link: AM14U Family Chassis: AM14U5, AM14U Upgrades & Options, and AM14U Family Parts - AndyMark, Inc
If you do this, you can start programming code for the drive base and even start on some autonomous code. This will help you prepare probably better than anything else you could be doing.
Other than that, make sure your mentors are as educated about the particulars of FRC as much as possible. Connect with nearby teams, they’ll be happy to talk to you and give you pointers!
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To emphasize others great suggestions about parts - lay in a good supply now. You want to be able to take what you want from your shelves and drawers and not wait days or a year for an order to come. I’m a software and controls guy for the most part so I’d get a good supply of various sensors and something for vision AprilTags such as a LimeLight or Raspberry Pi for PhotonVision. Get spools of the right kinds of wire and insulation colors (copper - no CCA for power circuits). Connectors are needed so pick a standard(s) and get a supply. (Some teams solder most everything but not my team.)
Similarly, a stock of mechanical parts like various gears, axles, wheels is needed.
Ask teams what they use specifically and buy some.
Most robot components can be purchased or you can custom-build almost everything. Decide where you want to be for the upcoming season and where you want to be in a year or two and plan equipment, purchases, training, etc. accordingly.
The WPILib documentation and visiting other teams are great resources.
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Read through last year’s rule book and you’ll see many things you’ll need that you won’t have from the Vex program. For example, you will need pool noodles to build bumpers. They won’t be as easy to find in January. The rookie kit will get you one battery, but I wouldn’t show up at an event without at least 4 and chargers for at least 3 at a time. We travel with 6 and many teams travel with 10 or more.
Take a look at some of the FRC vendors and some patterns will emerge for fastener requirements. an assortment of good quality 10-32 hardware in lengths up to 2" will go pretty far.
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I second the recommendation to do a build and program of the drive base, if your budget allows it. Another good and easy thing to do is a dry run of the release day. Pick a previous year from say 2017 onwards, have all of the team assemble and as a group look through the whole season manual to understand and be able to explain the goals of the game. Have the students point out what the specific rules are such as protected zones, robot dimensions etc. are, and how those can be used strategically and also what risks they represent in terms of penalties for offending robots. Then get them to suggest what mechanism designs they think will be successful and within the ability of the team to fabricate and program. This will (hopefully!) get them engaged and thinking about robot designs. As a follow up, have small groups of students each find and review one successful team from that season and explain what their robot’s mechanisms were and whether your team is able to make that mechanism. Ask them to find teams other than “pinnacle” teams as many of them have literally decades of design and fabrication experience that you may not be able to immediately replicate, look at teams that succeeded with unique, especially easy to make mechanisms. Team 1561 from this past season is a stellar example. Their intake mechanism is quite straightforward, but really effective and very well programmed which gave them a high level of success this past season. Especially look for teams that provide technical binders for CAD and programming. Finally, using the VEX robot parts is still very valuable to get “hands-on” experience, even if only to identify those members who will quickly be comfortable with build tasks.
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Regarding batteries, there is a lot of discourse on the best type of battery, but most everyone points to the MK model as the best one. You can buy them direct for a lot less than AndyMark’s price - call 800-372-9253 and ask for FRCFIRST Robotics Competition batteries (they know what you are talking about). You’llLimelight, an integrated vision coprocessor also need hardware to attach wires with the Anderson SB50 connector to the battery - those can be had from AndyMark precrimped - you’llLimelight, an integrated vision coprocessor just need to bolt it to the battery lugs and apply electrical tape for insulation.
If you’re in the central valley area there are a bunch of helpful teams. @nabors and others in the area can help, please shoot me a private DM or email me: rc at wcproducts.com
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@RileyA Always happy to work with our local teams. Where are you based out of? Please feel free to reach out via DM or email andrewnabors at me.com
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Learn how to build good quality bumpers.
Practice building good quality bumpers.
Look at lots of pictures of good quality bumpers.
Seriously. Make good bumpers. Make sure they stay on your robot. These things will serve you well.
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You’re already being assertive about learning and open to input from experienced folks, which are important starting out.
I recommend taking RC’s advice & getting some input from local experienced FRC people. Even a 1-to-2-hour deeper dialog with an experienced FRC coach or mentor about your team’s situation should yield some great, usable advice in context. There are a lot of things to understand like size of team, # mentors, how much FRC experience you collectively have, how much time per week you have to invest, budget constraints, etc. that will greatly influence the advice you might receive. As is true with most endeavors, you need to avoid biting off more than you can chew. On the other hand, if you have one or more strengths (an awesome shop, plenty of shop time, plenty of funding, etc.) it is good to lean into those things because you will need to learn to leverage those strengths.
So do a local consult or two, and I also agree with the general advice to get students building stuff. A chassis would be great; you might even find a local team with an unbuilt KOP chassis, Roborio v1, older PDP, etc. that would sell to you cheap or loan to you.
Thinking about how you will handle robot design the initial weeks after kickoff might also be a good idea. There are options now that used to not exist like the new FRC KitBot or team 118’s Everybot. For some rookie teams, it is a reasonable decision to plan to outsource design the first year to whichever of the publicly available options you prefer and focus on building up manufacturing, assembly, and all the other knowledge and skills the first year. There will still be some design opportunities, but the heavy weight of doing a full integrated robot design is avoided. If you decided to go that route, it will likely affect how you invest your time now during pre-season.
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Planning
Training
Fundraising
Buy the tools on the Spectrum 3847 Blog: Spectrum's "FIRST $1000"
There is never enough time for these activities. If you dont have a kitbot reach out to an established team near you Many have a kit bot frame, CIMs. Buy a spare Rio and build a drive base as soon as you can. Study resources from other teams as you make your plans. http://1000.spectrum3847.org/
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I agree! You don’t need to compete or anything, but just attending the event can be a great help so folks understand what a competition is like, and it will also give you an opportunity well ahead of the start of the season to network with teams. If you can swing it, bringing a few students and mentors to roam the pits and chat with folks is so helpful.
Build robots to shoot Paper airplanes, that’s what all the cool FTC kids are doing 
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There’s a ton of engineering training you can do, but FRC, in some ways, is arguably more of a strategy competition than an engineering competition. I’ll echo what several people above have said: practice Kickoff day. Read a manual from a previous year and come up with the core questions that you need to make sure you answer on that very first day - things like how exactly you can score, what earns you penalties, restrictions on robot designs, etc. We have a multi-page list of questions that we use every single season to help us distill all the information in the manual down to just the things that are directly relevant when making those early season decisions. I highly recommend looking at the game objectively from the strategy standpoint before ever even discussing design details. It’s too easy to get carried away in the cool things that you could build and forget to build the things that will actually help you perform on the field. We have a strict ban on talking about design specifics on kickoff day and only analyze and discuss the game from the strategy perspective.
Also, have a goal setting session prior to the start of the season. Talk about what things you think your team is capable of executing and achieving and make sure that everyone is on the same page. These constraints can come from lack of knowledge or resources like funding, time, and even fabrication ability. Many times, the best rookies understand their limitations and build a very simple but robust robot that takes them far in the season. See SuPURDUEper in 2019: suPURDUEper Robotics - Team 7457 (2019) - The Blue Alliance. As a rookie they built a very mechanically simple robot, made sure that they were exceedingly good at what they chose to do, won both of their district competitions, advanced to Worlds, and were selected for an eliminations alliance on Tesla.
Like others have said, attend an off-season event. You can’t really fathom exactly what an event is like until you actually attend one. I also recommend discussing how teams advance throughout the competition structure prior to attending, as this is an area that new students sometimes struggle to grasp, and by talking about it first, then attending an event to see it in person, that will help them understand what is needed to succeed. Most of this information is in section 11 of the Game Manual. California is not in a district so you can skip the part about district advancement.
I also recommend using the off-season to stockpile resources for reference during the season. FIRST is a very open community and lots of teams post their old CAD, GitHub repositories, training videos, custom calculators, blogs, and more online. Spectrum has a really great resource compilation here. Follow other teams’ social media pages so you can learn from what they’re doing during the season. Keep an ongoing list of links that the students can refer back to once you get into the season. Look into your custom fabrication options, like Fabworks and SendCutSend, prior to kickoff and put the ones that you would consider using in your resources list too.
On the technical front, make sure your programmers have a GitHub environment set up and know how to properly push their code to it, and that they need to do so every time they make a change. This will allow your programmers to collaborate and make any whoopsies easier to deal with - since GitHub keeps a version history, they can just roll back when needed. Same with CAD - make sure that your students all have their CAD environment properly configured and that you have a way to sync CAD across all the people who will be working on it. This method will vary depending on what CAD platform you’ll be using.
Go over awards! Talk about what awards your team is eligible for, the criteria for winning them, and what you need to do to prepare. One big thing is that you’ll need to document your progress throughout the season. A lot of people refer to this as the engineering notebook/engineering log. You’ll want to be able to present a document with pictures and information about your robot design, spanning from how you decided what to pursue during Kickoff all the way down to the little innovative features on your robot. It doesn’t have to be crazy detailed, but it should be a clear and well-written document that you can present to the judges at your event. It will help if you have a plan for keeping this information organized prior to the start of the season - if you’re using a communication tool like Discord or Slack, make a channel called “engineering-log” where people can throw pictures and information that they feel like will be relevant when it comes time to actually create the document. Keep in mind that at the event, the students can give the document to the judges to review, but the judges will also want to talk to them face to face about the contents of the document.
Speaking of communications, make sure the team has an official way to communicate. It helps information stay much more organized when you keep it all in one spot. Our team uses Discord and it works very well for our needs. You’ll also want a way to organize and share files - we use Google Drive.
And, again, as other people have mentioned, focus on fundraising. FRC tends to be much pricier than VEX, so be prepared for that change. There are lots of rookie grants out there, so take advantage of them. Make sure you apply for NASA.
Design your pit. Make the packing list now, most of the stuff is the same year-to-year. At competition you get a space with a work table and not enough electrical outlets. Get shelves/bins and figure what’s going to go where, incl. where any power tools (drill press?) are going to mount. Find out the restrictions on what machining you can do in the pits. Set up a solder station. First aid kit. Leaking battery kit, if you don’t have one a neighboring team will. Get a coat rack [note: I’ve never seen one in a pit] to hang backpacks and coats. Keep stuff off the floor. Use the table for workspace, not storage. There are a zillion postings on Chief Delphi about pit organization. Design your team banner and a way to hang it proudly up high in the back of your pit. Show your team number, mascot/symbol, thanks to sponsors so when you invite them to comp, they’ll see their name in addition to the ones on the back of your shirts. Extra safety glasses.
Charging batteries: many/most/all competitions cut power at night [fire] don’t expect them to charge at night. Make a battery rack, and a hook to hang your battery beak, if any. Places for water bottles because they are the only foodstuff you’re supposed to bring in.
Swag (lower priority): make buttons. 5027 won the Judges Award their rookie year at SVR in part because they made thank-you packets they gave to every judge that came by their pit or to whom they made a presentation.
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We have some custom shelves for our hardware trays with coat hooks on the back. They can be a bit hard to get to, but they keep coats out of the way pretty well.
Post a pix?
