2025 Chezy Champs

Hi! Welcome back to the Iron Claw Blog for the 2025-2026 season! It is nice to see the team back along with many new members joining our team!

Starting off strong, Iron Claw had attended Chezy Champs and obtained the finalist as the fourth team on the first alliance team. With well-thought preparations, our robot, Vantage, was ready to get onto the field in Bellemore College Prep.

The preparation for Chezy was a mix between improvements on Vantage and first year training. Learning from prior experience, the team concluded that attending Chezy would be the best idea for hand-on experiences. Anyhow, the team quickly settled into their competition mindset. Each subteam concentrated on their tasks.

The CAD subteam started with ample Onshape training to get the students into good shape. With continuous diligence, all members are ready to design more interesting parts for the team! For the Control System this year, similar to the CAD team, the team leader gave well pre-season training for the first year’s. As for preparation for Chezy Champ, many crimping options were explored, including IDCs, Breakable IDCs, and Molex crimps. The team also found a kind of IDC to help troubleshoot. In the Machining team, the students were well-trained with the diverse machining tools, like mills and lathe, which will become very handy during the build season. With several widgets, the machinists quickly grabbed the knowledge and became more ready for the season to start. Our Programming team trained their members not only with rigid lectures, but also with rewriting code from last year, along with writing simulations. The programmers were very hardworking and also efficiently fixed problems during Chezy Champs.

Later on, the assembly team assembled the new swerve drives, which allowed Vantage to be swaying on the field smoothly. The CAD team redesign the intake system, switching to a collapsible 4-bar intake. Although it cannot shine on the field, the first year learned lots about the designing process and the steps it takes to perfect a subsystem. In the weekends leading up to Chezy, we went to 971’s practice fields in order to get our robot dialed down, find any final issues with a robot, and make any final changes. We were able to run autos in their field and run cycles with them which was very helpful for us.

With our new drive team, this time at the practice field was valuable. Our driver Alex Chan could improve his skills with the robot, and could help build an efficient relationship with the drive coach. The human players also got practice with timing the coral drops and learning how to deal with the robot before and after the matches. Working with 971 was a great experience and we hope to keep it up for next year! Of course, the drive team cannot operate without the help of the wonderful Strategy team. For Chezy, the strategy people split the work of strategy between our two technical program managers, James Smith and Angie Lam. They are both relatively new to strategy, though James was a human player last year and did gain some experience behind the glass. James and Angie hope to be part of strategy for the next season but the team will still go through the traditional processes to fairly choose our strategy team.

At the end, Iron Claw greatly appreciates 971, the Spartan Robotics, for the wonderful fields where we can fully engage in testing Vantage and operate any necessary actions to improve on every subteam, along with the time we spent together!

Cannot wait for more amazing challenges that the team will face together and the exciting, upcoming season of 2025-2026! Stay tuned for more about Iron Claw~