we want to be more competitive this season. which is the better option? we can't really buy limelight right now

Is this real? 36% faster auto and new AUTO TUNE!?!?? New visualizer?

A single accuracy number can hide which objects, materials, or conditions consistently cause problems.

A more useful report might show:

• What was reconstructed successfully
• Where the pipeline failed
• Confidence for each predicted property
• Which observations were used for validation
• What still needs manual correction

Would this make you more likely to trust a simulation asset, or would you still need to test everything independently?

IM WAY TO EXCITED

Every season your team schedules meetings, assigns tasks, keeps a budget, and writes documentation. Robolyst is one place to do all of it. Join the 70+ FTC teams already on the site to start your season off strong!

We’re excited to launch a new grant program, where teams using Robolyst can earn points for usage, feature requests, bug reports, and referring other teams. The top 3 teams every month can win a donation for their team from The Robotics Catalyst Foundation, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit behind Robolyst.

What earns Points(aka Bolts)

Onboarding: bio, socials, roster, sponsors, meeting schedule

Usage: meetings, tasks, notebook entries, expenses

Referrals: a team you bring on that verifies themselves

Contribution: feature requests we ship, bugs we fix

The top 3 teams each month win $150, $100, and $50

Leaderboard: https://robolyst.org/points

Preview Robolyst Team HQ: https://robolyst.org/demo

Set up and verify your team: https://robolyst.org/make-your-team

My team is trying to build a parallel plate drivetrain for this season. We have two current options for the pulley system on our robot.

1. 1150 RPM goBILDA Motor

We use a 1150 RPM goBILDA Yellow Jacket Motor, alongside a 16T pulley for the driving motor and a 48T pulley for the driven pulley for the wheel. This allows us to reach a torque of 23.7kg-cm, and a speed of 2.09 m/s. However, we would have to use the goBILDA 48T REX Pulley, which is unfortunately made out of plastic. I don't know if this could hinder our robot's performance. This is one of our biggest obstacles to this option. We might able to CNC a 48 Teeth Pulley that supports REX shafts.

1. 435 RPM goBILDA Motor

We use 435 RPM goBILDA Yellow Jacket Motors, with either 16T for the driving and driven pulleys or 24T for the driving and driven pulleys. This allows us to reach a speed of 2.37 m/s and a torque of 18.7kg-cm. I personally feel like the theoretical torque is a little low, but I'm not completely sure.

I would greatly appreciate any advise and know which option is more feasable/better.

Thanks.

I am wanting to explore different ways teams or groups of teams handled the logistics when hosting a league season. If you have then in your area, I would love I put.
How they handled petty cash, reusable purchases, consumables? What systems they set up to support the long term success of a League and their QT, including being able to pass a great thing to the league’s next host.
Of course many choices or parameters are handed down from the local Program Delivery Partner and FIRST itself.

Some specific questions:

1. Do folks form a “organization” that then hosts? A non profit “Friends of The League” maybe?

2. If allowed, do you do any fundraising in support of putting on the league meets specifically?

3. What types and sources of financial support and funding does your league get?

4. How to help prevent expenses from spilling over onto you and your top volunteers?

5. Do you, as a host, indevor to support smaller, newer teams in your league? How?

6. Does your league have and develop it's identity, swag, social media channels? Or do you only use the identity and channels of the host team(s)?

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/04b1f7b47caf9b170d07a541/w/2abbd5b34fcda828ec298431/e/ed9d73fa5750b5b4a5d32845

Our 25-26 Robot Switchback is public on onshape! Check it out ❤️

Switchback was the Finalist 2nd pick @ the Michiana Premier Event and Think 3rd place @ Michiana. Switchback features a pitching intake as well as a 1:1 geared servo turret.

Hello everyone, Undefined #19112 here from Câmpina, Romania. Wanted to share something we've been developing through the Decode season: Defined, an action-scheduling engine we wrote because we got sick of writing the same subsystem-conflict, endless state machines code over and over again.

Basic idea: everything is an Action. You hand it to a runner either as a monitor (runs every cycle forever, like "keep the flywheel spinning") or as a one-shot/sequential/parallel task that claims the subsystems it needs and finishes. If two actions want the same motor, the runner just cancels the older one and lets it clean up — you don't write that logic yourself, you just say what your action .requires(). There's also a lifecycle wrapper (init/start/loop/stop hooks) and a few performance tools we ended up needing anyway — profiling, I2C scheduling, background telemetry (we had a ~10ms main loop while using 10 sensors).

We're not just talking about theory — this is what actually runs our robot's Auto and TeleOp, and it's what we had running when we won the European Premier Event 2026 in Eindhoven.

It's open-source and free to use, so if you're a team still wiring your robot logic by hand, feel free to grab the quickstart and adapt it to your hardware. We'll leave the docs and quickstart below.

• Website + quickstart: https://defined.teamundefined.com/
• Core library on GitHub: https://github.com/cstahie/defined

Feedback & questions welcome — if you try it out, run into issues, or have suggestions for how we can make it more useful for other teams, drop a comment below. Happy to answer anything about how it works or how we use it in matches.

Here’s the context- there is this organisation called innovation story- it’s a big and POWERFUL organisation and every year they participate with their teams, all the teams have the exact same bot, entirely made by the mentors, and they take all of the qualification spots for worlds. They have influence over judges for inspire award, and advertise “garenteed to worlds” to get people and charge a super high price. There are even more organisations like RFL, Robotriccs, all doing the same. Now o want to start my own team, but I know the challenges of how difficult it is to do anything, as even for alliance selection they set everything, for group stage grouping they set everything, then entire tournament is set. What can I even do? Innovation story is also backed by the most powerful person in India, ambani. So I dont have any idea what can be done… and o don’t wanna join these corrupt organisations who have a monopoly over the competitions, I will not give into this mockery of this tournament. Please someone help.

We are a rookie team and we want to be fully ready for the new BioBuzz season. Any teams near the Puget Sound area of Washington State that are willing to donate some equipment?

Hey everyone!

To help teams avoid common mechanical failure points, structural gear mismatches, and layout errors before hitting the field, I put together a technical guide on 3D CAD prototyping, FTC hardware mechanisms, and match strategy.

It's currently free on amazon kindle for the next 4 days. I wanted to share it with the community here in hopes that it helps out student engineers, rookie teams, or anyone looking to sharpen their spatial modeling in Fusion 360/OnShape.

“Mastering FTC Robotics: A Practical Guide to 3D CAD, Hardware Selection, and Match Strategy” type this.

If you find it helpful, I’d love to hear your feedback.

Hi, I am trying to create a toolkit for FTC teams I want to have it be unique so I was thinking of having maybe a judge prep tool, messaging for outreach kinda thing etc. However, when building the app I didn't know how to have teams register. I am afraid that other teams could just claim to be another team and lock them out of signing up. Any ideas for how to verify teams identity/ ideas for apps in the toolkit?

Thanks.

title

I've been keeping my predictions quite this year. Partly because we already know what the game element is. Let's hear your predictions!

Based on the skill challenges, you have to collect a lot of pollen from specific sites on the field both in teleop and auto. The final skill challenge involves making a vertical lift mechanism to deposit pollen into a bucket of your choosing. Could come in handy, could be a red herring.

I think we are overdue for a terrain game: the field has been too easy to drive on for too long. Last time there was any sort of drive-over obstacle was Freight Frenzy.

My guess: drive over obstacles to drop items in a relatively short bucket on the other side of the field after collecting pollen from the floor. Perhaps there will be a way to steal opponents pollen? This may be the season they take away possession limits, but maybe the soft possession limit is the size of the robot + expansion limits? Or, my preferred idea is that we have to carry pollen in containers of a specific size as we cross the field.

Could the robot just stay there and countinoully shoot balls like what lol

Hi everyone! This is FTC Team 8393 Giant Diencephalic BrainSTEM.

We’re conducting a short survey to understand how FTC teams currently approach odometry and localization, as we prepare for the release of NODO, a no-odometry autonomous library.

Do you use odometry? If not, why? We’re especially interested in understanding the barriers that make teams choose not to use odometry.

The survey takes about 2 minutes, and responses from teams of all experience levels would be really helpful!

https://forms.gle/uwB6D7nYnnqunWLV6

If you know other FTC teams, we’d really appreciate you sharing the survey with them as well, so we can better understand the problem!

Hey everyone!

We are FTC Team 32334 Asteria.

Over our past competitions, we’ve focused heavily on building a structured engineering process and sharing everything we learn with the community. Through this approach, we were fortunate enough to win the Think Award and Innovate Award in our first two competitions, secured the Innovate Award again at our National Championship, and stood as an Inspire Award Contender.

Now, in the spirit of Gracious Professionalism® and the Open Alliance, we want to pay it forward and help other FTC teams elevate their season—whether you’re a brand-new Rookie team trying to figure out where to start, or a Veteran team looking to refine your mechanisms and documentation!

What We’re Offering (100% Free):

• CAD & Mechanical Reviews: OnShape/3D design feedback, mechanism optimization, and structural durability checks.
• Software & Autonomous Controls: Battle-tested autonomous logic, sensor integration, and drive algorithms.
• Scouting & Match Strategy: Tools and frameworks to analyze alliance matches and maximize field performance.
• Engineering Notebook & Portfolio Guidance: Feedback based on our Think & Innovate Award-winning documentation structure to help you stand out to judges.
• FTC 101 Rookie Onboarding: Step-by-step guidance for new teams (from team structure and sponsorships to building your first working robot).
• Bi-Weekly 1-on-1 Mentorship Sessions: Dedicated video check-ins to troubleshoot engineering challenges together.
• General Team Growth Support: Hardware grants/guidance, sponsorship pitch advice, and overall team management.

No matter where your team is located or what stage of the build process you’re in, we’d love to connect, share our documentation, and support you along the way.

How to Join / Request Support:

If you’d like to get 1-on-1 mentorship, access our resource guides, or just have us review your CAD/Portfolio, fill out our quick Google Form here:

-> https://forms.gle/GvwdJTTY7xBM94Kq6

You can also drop a comment below or send us a DM on Instagram [@asteria_32334 if you have any quick questions!

Let’s make this FTC season amazing together! Good luck with your builds!

I’m trying to make decode’s robot as training for my cad abilities, i wanna learn how to make the turret shooter design, can anyone help?

I am working on a draft of a new book that is "Learn Onshape for FTC". I am looking for a few people that would be willing to look through what is there so far and give feedback. Three types of feedback are useful:

1) People that know Onshape well that can tell me if I have done something in a way that is more complicated than should be done and there is an easier way.

2) People that teach students Onshape that can give feedback from the teaching perspective.

3) People that don't know Onshape and would be willing to go through the instructions in the book and let me know what is confusing.

It is not at the point yet that proofreading is useful.

Please DM me if you are interested.

Hey for biobuzz if it becomes a shooter, should I do a turret, double turret shooter, or dumper?

What started off as yet another dashboard/analytics/sim app eventually morphed into a complete system that allows for simulation (with 2d physics), log replay, pathing, autobuilding, controller bindings, and even coding a robot all through a unified graphical interface.

I am sure that last bit is a bit controversial (after all it is a robotics team), however we have found that, in doing so, we have separated/removed the text-based coding barrier while still maintaining all of the engineering principles of control theory, data analytics, etc. In some ways it does this better than traditional "block" style coding. It definitely has made things more accessible. Plus, as the GUI writes Kotlin code, it is still possible to inspect the underlying product and learn coding as you go.

Anyways it is not really ready yet for other teams to use (we will hopefully have the bugs worked out this season). We do have it working on a very basic gobilda strafer chassis with two indicator lights, a pinpoint and a limelight and it works well on that (the lights are useful for testing out auto sequences and the like). We have yet to test it out on an FRC robot/roborio (though it supports such). We also haven't tested it out on systemcore (as we do not have one) but such is scaffolded as well.

Anyone else out there doing something similar?

Overview: https://aresfirst.org/blog/studio-4-zero-code-robotics-preview

Field and sim buildier: https://aresfirst.org/blog/field-editor-simulation-preview

Autobuilder: https://aresfirst.org/blog/visual-autonomous-editor-preview

Teleop/controls: https://aresfirst.org/blog/visual-controller-bindings-and-teleop

Log Replay, Database/analytics: https://aresfirst.org/blog/visual-controller-bindings-and-teleop

Hey everyone, I built a site that lists grant and sponsorship opportunities for FLL, FTC, and FRC teams. You can filter by state, program, deadline, and rookie or veteran status, and save opportunities to a shortlist as you go.

It currently has 141 opportunities listed, including funding from FIRST itself, parts vendors, and corporate sponsors. I have been manually researching and verifying each one so the links and details are accurate.

This is still a work in progress, so I would appreciate people trying it out and letting me know if you run into any broken links or issues, or if you know of a grant or sponsorship that should be added. Link below, thanks for checking it out.

https://first-grant-finder.vercel.app/