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Engineering:
This past week we finished V1 of the robot! Though we had to deal with some wiring issues before handing it off to programming—leaving us a bit behind schedule—we have a plan that we are confident in moving forward. Our robot can fit 60 fuel, which is slightly higher than previous estimates, and we have taken off one of the flywheels to fit more comfortably within the weight limit. We got all the main subsystems running, besides the hood and the climber. The majority of our time was spent on the intake, as we had some problems with jamming when testing with a greater amount of fuel. However, we have plans to combat this. We’re excited to start with auto and drive practice! https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/2102-build-thread-2025-2026-open-alliance/506370/20 Boss: This past week BOSS has started working on our Impact presentation. Along with that, we formed a checklist of other projects to get started on. Leaders have been assigned to those responsibilities, and we’ve continued planning the volunteer work we intend to do. Though it was only a three day school week, we spent our time productively and used it to get organized!
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Engineering:
Our climber is fully built and mounted to the robot; we did a test run and it’s looking like it’ll be a very fast and reliable climb. All of our individual mechanisms are assembled and attached, and all we have to do to finish the robot is to finish wiring and then attach the hopper. Since we plan to drive the robot by the end of Presidents’ Weekend, we’ve set up our half-field with apriltags for the first time (DM us if you want to come join our practice)! https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/2102-build-thread-2025-2026-open-alliance/506370/20 Boss: This week we finished and submitted our Impact essay and the executive summaries, as well as the optional video (shout out to Deacon, Taj, and Romelle!). We confirmed dates with the retirement home we’re volunteering at and have started applying to volunteer for a local animal shelter. We also held our first cheering meeting of the season, which is arguably the most “fun” requirement that all students need to fulfill in order to travel. Engineering:
Starting with programmers, they’ve been diligently working to set up the code base and start on higher level automation. With the help of simulation, our coding progress has been faster than the previous years. Through running multiple tests on the indexer, we’ve become much more confident in our design. The shooter and intake are still in the process of being assembled (majority of its parts have been made) while the chassis has been put together and wiring has started. https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/2102-build-thread-2025-2026-open-alliance/506370/20 BOSS: This week, we submitted our Woodie Flowers application; our nominee Karen des Jardins has been with us for the past 19 years and has dedicated tremendous time and effort into growing our students into strong leaders. We’ve also been updating our Exec summaries and Impact essay with current demographics and editing to better highlight our main theme of inclusivity. We’ve started our pin-making process so that we can distribute them during competitions, and designed a couple merch ideas for our collaboration with Team 3128 Aluminum Narwhals. Engineering:
Starting with programming, they have made much progress focusing on the main robot code, which was worked on at the start of the week. As the week has continued they have expanded into setting up a robot simulation. This simulation has helped the branch test features like the auto align and set up an initial control scheme. On the engineering side of things we have much CAD work being done and are starting to manufacture the robot. We are working on setting up the bot and all bottom-mounted electronics have been added to the chassis. We ran into some constraints with the intake but have been thinking of working on a swappable extension. For more information please visit our Chief Delphi thread! BOSS: This week we were able to continue working on various awards including Woodie Flowers and Impact. We have focused on delegating our Woodie Flowers essay, writing, editing and perfecting it over the weekend. For impact we have continuously focused on our Executive summaries, now on the editing stage for all of them. Furthermore we had Info Night at school which many BOSS members stayed for, informing the incoming freshman about our club and the positives of the school. Connected to this we have planned middle school tours to do even more outreach for the incoming freshman and give them an incentive to join our team. Lastly we worked on repairing and repainting the minis swerve box to make it more in line with our mascot and team colors! Engineering:
Engineers have made good progress on the CAD over the week and are now almost finished and ready to start manufacturing! We’ve adjusted every subsystem over the week: the chassis, intake/hopper, indexer, shooter, and climber. To read more about these changes, please visit our Open Alliance thread. In addition to the robot, we’ve been figuring out how to scout this season. Since it’s nearly impossible to keep track of every single Fuel that enters the hub, we’re leaning towards a system where scouters rank teams on specific attributes in each match. This information is then put into an algorithm which gives us overall scores for each team in those metrics. https://www.chiefdelphi.com/t/2102-build-thread-2025-2026-open-alliance/506370/20 BOSS: Unfortunately, we didn’t get enough interest regarding the food/textbook drive BUT we have heard back from the Seacrest Village Retirement Communities and are currently working out the logistics with them. The Mini Swerve storage box is still a work in progress (need to buy more blue spray paint!!). We’ve also started looking through our FIRST Impact Award Executive Summaries from last year and are updating it to fit this year's demographics and activities. Engineering:
In the past week, Engineers have been making shooter, indexer, and intake prototypes and repeatedly testing them to narrow down on robot designs. We’ve now mostly locked in on our archetype—it’s essentially designed as a big box to hold lots of Fuel with a double-wide shooter, an intake that extends out of the box to maximize storage space, and a conveyer belt as a floor to feed the shooter (please check out our Open Alliance thread for more detail/specifics). We’re currently working on the robot chassis and wiring, CADing all the parts, prototyping a climber, getting into main robot logistics such as programming and determining camera locations, and building the game elements for our practice field. BOSS: After brainstorming during Kickoff, BOSS members decided to focus on two outreach ideas to expand our IMPACT: food/textbook drive with other robotics teams and going to retirement homes to tell them about FRC, our team, and helping with whatever’s needed. Over the past week, we’ve reached out to other FIRST robotics teams in our district and emailed local retirement homes in order to gauge interest, started creating new materials for this season, posted updates on social media, and coordinated with sponsors. We’re also working on revamping our Mini Swerve storage box and are planning to finish it next week. Wow! That was a great season! We made massive improvements and went from unpicked at San Diego in 2023 to the captain of the finalist alliance at Port Hueneme and second pick overall at San Diego this year! We are super proud of everyone's hard work! We would like to thank our amazing alliance partners 3128 Aluminum Narwhals, 498 Cobra Commanders, 3255 SuperNURDs, and 3341 Option 16 for being amazing alliance partners. Thank you also to 3128 Aluminum Narwhals, 8891 Wild Raccoons, and 5137 Iron Kodiaks for the super fun drive practice sessions we had together and special thanks to 4160 Robucs for letting us use their practice field! (Sorry we ran through your stage a couple times and kept shooting through your speaker 🫢) Even though we didn't qualify for worlds this year this season can definitely be considered a huge success and I know that we will improve even more for the water game next season! 2025 worlds or bust! (knocking on wood)
Wow, Week 6 is over. Our engineers finished our final competition bot; we have a full width intake, a climber with a passive spring latch (to prevent the robot from falling back down after climbing, AND we added LEDs to make our robot light up and easy to spot during matches. We also made bumpers and spare parts in case we need them. In Programming, we accomplished drive while shooting, programmed the competition robot and had drive practices with CCA’s Narwhals (Team 3128). The Operations branch have been hard at work finishing our Impact award submission. Additionally, our evidence binder (documentation for the team) is being compiled for this year as well as our judge packets, small flyers that we use as visual aids and reference to when we talk with judges in our pit during competitions. Marketing made a LOT more pins to give away at competitions as well as continued to work on their projects (See Week 2). For Outreach, we held campus cleanups and we visited a local elementary school, Mission Estancia, and gave a presentation to the students about our team and FIRST and showed them this years’ robot. The six weeks went by so fast and now it’s time for the competitions. Port Hueneme Regional is coming up real soon, and in a couple weeks, the San Diego Regional, so be on the lookout for more updates!! Hello again! Sorry for the week off but now we’re back and here’s what we’ve been up to! In engineering we started building our competition robot which should be done in a couple days (hopefully by the next blog). We made various improvements and additions including a climber and wider intake. The programmers have been busy adding new features to our alpha bot including lock on target, a development version of shoot while driving, more autonomous paths, and detecting the state of the game piece inside the robot. The operations team has been busy editing the Woodie Flowers essay and working on the Impact Award essay. They’ve also held a number of judge talking sessions in hopes of increasing our chance to win Engineering Inspiration. Outreach planned two school trash clean ups but unfortunately they both got rained out (hopefully everyone was able to stay safe and dry!). Drive team has been continuing to get a lot of practice in and we invited the Aluminum Narwhals (3128) to our place on Saturday to drive practice together. In addition to drive practice we also filmed clips for our premiere night video which we’re planning on doing together. We also had a very successful welcome night where we got to introduce our team to next year's incoming freshmen. Many of them had a great time driving our robot. Anyway that’s it for weeks 4 and 5 and be sure to look out for us and Aluminum Narwhals on premiere night!
Week 3, recap. Alpha bot was completed in record time (2.5 weeks to build and 1.5 days to program, unheard of at Team Paradox!). We also had a design review and looked at solutions to current problems we’re facing as well as possible issues we may come across in the future. We finalized details of our first climber design, and purchased necessary parts for building version 2. We started renovating our battery cart to make it more efficient and prolong battery life, made designs for a new robot cart, as well as built a new cart for our pit structure. Programmers made auto paths, further developed auto game piece tracking, and coded our alpha bot which is now drive practice ready. The outreach team had a break week and just had Stem2Leaf, a monthly event where we work with elementary and middle school students and spread important STEM principles. The operations branch interviewed fellow team members on their experiences with our nominee (WOOHOO!!) Stimson and the first full draft for the Woodie Flowers Award is almost finished. The FIRST Impact Award essay is also coming together, and filming the optional video to accompany the essay may begin soon. Marketing continued organizing and assembling our new cheer team and continued working on their many projects (see Week 2). To top things off, we had a very successful club fair and brought in some new recruits! That is all for Week 3, be sure to check in next week!!
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