Iron Claw Editor – Iron Claw Robotics

2025 Season Recap Blog

By Iron Claw Editor|2025-06-11T14:27:07-07:00June 11th, 2025|

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 [...]

2025 Competition Season Week 2

By Iron Claw Editor|2025-03-19T16:10:16-07:00March 10th, 2025|

Preparing for Sacramento, we've upgraded our robot and strategy based on Pinnacles insights. Here's our progress. After lots of hard work over the past week preparing for and attending Pinnacles Regional, we gathered together on Wednesday to debrief about our performance at the competition. During our time together, we split up into three groups in order to evaluate the aspects of our performance - the pit team, strategy team, and scouting team. For the pit, everyone agreed that our indexer was our weakest subsystem due to the 50% jam rate, even though we got lucky and it performed closer to a 95% rate at Pinnacles, we wanted to learn from our mistakes and continuously improve the robot. We also rewatched all our matches from Pinnacles, and compared our scouting data and saw that our outtake was outtaking the coral much faster than we needed at the angel of our outtake, so we redesigned it with the help of the strategy team and our driver Arman who did a phmonel job at Pinnacles. Lastly, the scouting team has undergone many big decisions and renovations as well, such as an automatically selected ‘Leave’ and an alert to remind scouters to click from auto to teleop, this is allowing us to improve the accuracy of our data. We are also trying to [...]

Changes to 972!

By Iron Claw Editor|2025-02-12T16:03:47-08:00September 13th, 2024|

Welcome back, team! This season has kicked off with a burst of energy and excitement. From revamping our leadership selection process to diving into presentations on the latest FRC scoring updates, we've embraced change and innovation like never before! This year, we updated our leadership selection process to better align with the team's goals. In previous years, the process involved students giving presentations in front of the class, followed by anonymous voting and an announcement of the new Leadership Council (LC). While team managers made the final decision, this year's system introduced some improvements. Now, students submit videos expressing their interest in joining the LC, which are then reviewed by mentors and the team, who provide their feedback. Although team managers still make the final decision, the new approach emphasizes responsibility. It prioritizes veteran students who have the experience needed to lead while allowing new members to get comfortable and integrate into the team more smoothly. Our Leadership Council is led by an outstanding team: Nico Gomez-Llagaria and Piper Robinson as captains, Ellery Han as Shop Manager, Claire Mayder as Operations Director, and Henry Lee and Saara Piplani as our dedicated hardware and software directors. Together, this exceptional group has been [...]

2024 Build Blog Week Three

By Iron Claw Editor|2024-01-29T22:17:24-08:00January 29th, 2024|

Week three concluded with a DVC (Decision Voting Council) vote on our subsystems. As a team, we extended our prototyping process to ensure that our DVC could use the data and information collected to make an informed decision. We also created an integration team that is responsible for researching possible ways to package and integrate the subsystems onto our 26.5” x 26.5” swerve drivetrain. Below is an overview of how the final prototypes progressed and finished over the week. This year, when presenting the final subsystems, the prototyping teams ensured they validated the capabilities against the functional requirements that the team created in week one. The Fliptake team finished a CAD of the prototype and simulated the full range of motion. We also worked on mounting it to Phil, our off-season swerve robot, to test its ability to intake while driving. In its stowed position, the two rollers of the Fliptake are positioned halfway across the robot with a polycord infinity loop, allowing spin in opposite directions. Incorporating a self-centering board cements the note to flip back on the pivot and handoff to the shooter. However, we found that the self-centering board acted as more of a hardstop for the note. During data collection, we accomplished a 100% success rate during 25 trials from the center using the stationary [...]

2022 Season Recap

By Iron Claw Editor|2023-03-27T20:38:23-07:00May 4th, 2022|

Excited to be back, yet well-aware of the challenges we would face due to coming back from the COVID-19 pandemic, we set humble expectations for our season and robot. We instantly recognized the importance of a consistent climb and set our initial goals as the high climb while shooting low hub. These expectations were reinforced at our first competition, the Hueneme Port Regional (HPR), and we even started shooting into the high hub as the competition went on. After our average performance, coming in 25th place after qualification matches and losing in the quarter-finals of the play-offs, we came back reinvigorated to improve on our robot. Our unexpected success in shooting into the high hub at HPR inspired us to significantly change our robot capability goals ahead of our next regional, the Monterey Bay Regional (MBR). After analyzing areas of improvement from the Week 1 competition, we set our eyes on a traversal-climbing robot that can shoot consistently into both the high and low hub. Specifically, for the latter goal, we started integrating computer vision into our robot using Limelight, which was the first time we successfully used vision. After much tuning, we became a fairly consistent high-hub shooter. The improvements to our robot paid dividends, to say the least, [...]

2022 Monterey Bay Regional Recap

By Iron Claw Editor|2023-03-27T20:38:23-07:00March 28th, 2022|

Last weekend, our team traveled to Monterey Bay to compete in the Monterey Bay Regional. Unlike at Hueneme Port Regional, almost our entire team went to this competition. On the first day, the pit crew and drive team drove early in the morning to Monterey and set up the pits. Inspection and robot weighing went fairly smoothly, except for a camera module that was causing the current to not properly ground. In between the inspection, we finished attaching our climb mechanism to the robot and performed some system checks with the programmers to confirm that the robot was in working order. After this, we rushed to the game field to calibrate our robot for the field. Field calibration, something our team never had the chance to do in the past, was particularly useful for optimizing the consistency of our vision alignment and planning a precise autonomous sequence. Afterwards, our drive coach and strategy lead toured the other pits at the competition to learn more about our competitors and their robots. They compiled a comprehensive list of teams’ match strategies and robot capabilities. When the practice matches began, our robot did decently well, consistently maneuvering a two-cargo autonomous routine, shooting several upper hub cargo in teleop, and climbing to the traversal bar. However, we were not able to shoot [...]

Class Competition/Holiday Promenade

By Iron Claw Editor|2023-03-27T20:38:23-07:00December 16th, 2021|

Class Competition For the class competition, we split the class into four different teams. Each team was given a rules manual and a few weeks to design a robot that fit said parameters, which is a direct representation of our build season process. The purpose of the class competition was to prepare our team for the upcoming competition season. Students took part in the designing, building, and refining process for each of their team's robots, gaining vital technical and teamwork skills. The objective of the competition was to score the most points at the end of each round, which included two teams completing an autonomous and remote control operated period. During the autonomous period, robots scored points for crossing the midline and for depositing wiffle balls into their team's bank. During the remote controlled period, drivers employed various creative offensive and defensive strategies to either deposit balls into their scoring zones or prevent other teams from scoring. As the teams progressed through their builds, many structural, programming, or knowledge based challenges were encountered. The best part about this competition was seeing how each team persevered to overcome struggles and to build a functioning robot. After the class competition, our class collectively became better at problem solving and more prepared for build season. This [...]

FIRST Season Cancelled

By Iron Claw Editor|2023-03-27T20:38:24-07:00March 12th, 2020|

Team Iron Claw is extremely saddened to announce that we will not be attending any official FRC competitions this season since all FIRST events from here on out have been officially cancelled due to COVID-19 concerns. An official statement from FIRST reads: It is with deep disappointment that I share an update on the immediate suspension of the current FIRST season and the cancellation of both Championship events. Thank you to our sponsors and everyone who supported us this season.

Competitions Postponed

By Iron Claw Editor|2023-03-27T20:38:24-07:00March 9th, 2020|

Unfortunately, we have learned that both competitions we were planning to attend, San Francisco Regional (March 19-22) and Silicon Valley Regional (April 1-4), have been indefinitely postponed as a precaution to the spread of COVID-19. Postponing suggests that it will be held in the future, but FIRST has not given out any additional information. We have worked extremely hard on our robot, and there is a possibility that we will participate in a different regional. We'll be providing updates as the situation unfolds.

Competition Recap and Houston Announcement

By Iron Claw Editor|2022-01-16T12:09:15-08:00April 1st, 2019|

Our first competition was the San Francisco Regional. We ran into technical difficulties, particularly with the electrical board. Our planning for assembly was not up to par, so we were faced with mechanical issues as well. From there, we knew what we had to do in order to perform better at the next competition. Although our performance at SFR was not as successful as we had hoped, we agreed that this was a stepping stone we could utilize in order to learn from our mistakes. Putting this into practice, we spent a lot of time in the two weeks before our second competition testing and refining our mechanisms on our second robot. By the time of the Silicon Valley Regional, it had become clear that all of the hard work we put into preparing had paid off: our robot ran much more smoothly, and we had improved to the point that we were the number one robot for delivering cargo. After 80 qualification matches, alliance selection began and our performance earned us a spot alongside the fourth seed alliance, headed by Team 604. In the playoffs, we made it through the quarterfinals and semifinals to ultimately compete against Team 254, one of the best teams in the world. Although we ultimately lost against them, as a result of [...]

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