This season was a wild ride. We kicked things off strong—our climb system ranked 8th in the world after our first competition, and it held up all season. That reliability gave us the consistency we needed while we worked out the rest of the robot.
Early on, there were definitely struggles. At Pinnacles, we couldn’t score coral on Level 1 in auto and our intake jammed constantly. We ended with an auto EPA of 4.94 and finished 16th out of 35. Sacramento was even rougher. Coral kept slipping between auto and teleop, and the outtake angle threw off our Level 4 scoring. We dropped to 21st out of 34. In both regionals, our playoff runs ended in Match 5, often because of one last-minute failure—usually the intake.
But instead of getting stuck in the negatives, we took it as fuel. After Pinnacles, the team split into groups to break down what happened—pit, strategy, and scouting—and rebuilt from there. We redesigned the indexer to fix the jam rate, adjusted the intake from 23 to 19.5 inches to cut weight and improve speed, and reworked our outtake angle. For the first time, we prioritized outtake performance over intake size, and it was absolutely worth it.
Scouting made big upgrades too, adding features like automatic “Leave” selection and reminders to switch between auto and teleop. We even modified our app so other teams could use it and shared it on GitHub. That collaboration felt like a win all on its own.
By the time we hit EBR, everything had leveled up. Our auto EPA more than doubled to 11.1, teleop jumped to 37.53, and we kept a rock-solid 9.32 in endgame. We were averaging 2 Level 4 corals in auto, knocking down algae and placing it in the net with 80%+ accuracy. Our cycle counts hit an average of 16 coral and 3 algae per match—and even higher in our best games. We finished 2nd out of 55 and made it to the finals for the first time this season.
The design team backed those improvements with solid CAD, exploded views, and better documentation, making it easier for newer members to assemble and understand the robot. Our control systems and software groups worked in sync, testing everything from vision alignment to simulated autos before we put anything on the field.
At every comp, we landed in Alliance 5. Whether picked or captains, it became our lucky number. And while the losses in Match 5 at both Pinnacles and Sac were brutal, the fact that we made playoffs at all—especially with major subsystems still being built the day before—was a testament to our resilience.
We didn’t have a perfect season. But we had a season where we kept getting better. We took the hits, figured out what wasn’t working, and fixed it. By the end, we had a robot that could keep up with the best of them. Our coral cycles were smooth, our algae placement was accurate, and our climb stayed reliable the whole way through.
I’m proud of how far we came—not just the robot, but the team behind it. We learned a lot, worked under pressure, and ended stronger than we started. And that’s what really matters.
