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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!
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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!!
This past week, our engineers have worked hard to put the intake together and have almost finished wiring our swerve chassis. On both Saturday and Sunday, we had drive practice in which our drive team practiced with our newly prototyped intake that we attached to our off-season robot, Phoenix. Programming continued to come up with new autonomous paths and successfully got some of them to run according to plan. The operations branch interviewed this year’s candidate for the Woodie Flowers Award (go Stimson!!), transcribed the entire conversation, and began to write the first draft of the essay. Outreach discussed future elementary/middle school tours since we want to reach out to the younger kids and hopefully interest them so they may join robotics later when they reach highschool. As for marketing, we received a new shipment of t-shirts and sweaters that we will soon be printing for our mentors and parents. Designs for new sponsor banners, informational banners, pins, and for the Evidence Binder (a binder storing everything our team has done in the past years to refer to when judge-talking) have been in the works. We also started to look more into redesigning our pit to create more space for judge-talkers since it is always very cramped in the tight area. Week 2 is over, heading on to Week 3!!
Whew, first week of Build Season, complete. Before the recap, big shout out to the parents and mentors who assembled many of the field elements for us, thank you all so much!! We really appreciate all your hard work. Over the past seven days, we’ve developed robot concepts, started designing them, and modeled these ideas on Onshape. We prototyped with rollers to make a horizontal intake, started assembling the intake, began to put together a multifunctional telescoping arm, tested out a promising shooting strategy, and devised layouts and a new wiring set-up for the robot. Programmers attempted to get autonomous paths to work and made progress on the AI game-piece tracking project. The operations team, after brainstorming ideas and analyzing previous essays, began to work on a rough outline for the Woodie Flowers Award and the FIRST Impact Award. In marketing, we made new cheers, discussed the cheer team logistics, and created timelines for upcoming events as well as contacted those lending their artistic abilities to help design our banners and booklets. Anyway, that’s all for this week and keep your eyes out for our video recap!
Kickoff is here! Which means that it’s time for late nights in the shop (or cold basement if you’re a programmer) and fun dinners with the team! We split our kickoff into two days and here’s how it went: Day One: Early Saturday morning, we stream into our school’s cafeteria with the Wild Raccoon where kickoff is taking place for us. Everyone is tired but excited as we sit down and watch the game animation. This year’s game is called Crescendo, and the objective is to shoot rings (called notes) into "amps" and "speakers" and to climb on stage (chains) at the end of the game. Maybe if you’re feeling ambitious you can try to place a note into the trap (which in our opinion is definitely a trap). After watching the animation, we split into groups and studied the game manuals and rules in depth. We also brainstormed various strategies and each group presented what they came up with. Day Two: We did a quick review of the rules and then split into groups again. Each group spent an hour in each branch (engineering, outreach/marketing, and operations) to discuss that specific branch’s goals for the year. In engineering, we learned about the importance of scouting, what it is and how we do it. Then we head into the metal shop to prototype. We had a lot of fun watching our ideas come to life through the prototypes. In Outreach/Marketing, we looked into how we can improve our pit layout and sketched out ideas (last season our pit crew was sitting on the dusty floor *insert sobbing emoji*). In Operations, we discussed judge-talking and talked about awards, focusing on the FIRST Impact Award and Woodie Flowers Award. And that’s about it. There we go, kickoff with Team Paradox is complete. Happy Build Season everyone (we’ll be posting these blogs once a week so be on the lookout!)!!
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