Monthly Archives: March 2026

Spartan (971) Week 0 Scrimmage Arriving at the 971 Week 0 Scrimmage event site, we safely offloaded the pitcases and robot from the trailer, and unpacked our pit cases in our designated pit location near the field. The team worked well getting everything set up, including configuring our RADIO so we could move to field calibration. We also had a few of our team members help out by volunteering at the event, covering field resets, refereeing, and clean-up at the conclusion of the event. The Spartan Week 0 event was incredibly successful for the team, resulting in many learnings from working in the pits with new students, how the robot operated on the field in an Alliance with 5 other robots on the field, and potential match strategies. The team used these learnings to inform what to focus on as we prepare the robot and spares for the  Week 2 Silicon Valley District event. The robot performed well and exceeded our expectations for a week 0 scrimmage. From a mechanical design standpoint, the robot was thoroughly battle-tested during matches. It absorbed several hard impacts with both field elements and other robots, demonstrating that the team has built an incredibly reliable and robust robot. Members of the drive team [...]

Week 0 Scrimmage Preparations: As we continued to work towards the Spartan Week 0 event, we finalized the list of our competition members in both the pit team and strategy. We made some final touches and adjustments to have a competitive robot to field at the event. The week leading up to the event, we allowed the software team to make some major improvements to the robots functions while our new driver and drive coach got prepared. Intake / Store Testing: Throughout the preparations for week zero we made minor tweaks to the intake and store subsystem, our testing revealed some performance issues which need to be fixed. We found that many of the balls would shoot out of the top of the hopper rather than going into the dye rotor (spindexer), so we added a net to the extending portion of the hopper.  Shooter Testing: Over the past two weeks of FRC, our team has had several successes and roadblocks. Our turret now aims exceptionally well using a phase shift combined with the robot velocity. It’s been smoothed with a linear filter for limiting jitter. Our shooter and hood are currently operating well, and have a strong outtake speed, looking forward to seeing how it works at [...]