Sparky was our V1 robot for the 2025-2026 Season: DECODE. The DECODE Game is summarized here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCqWA6gSCXA. This season, I was the Team Lead that organized each subteam (Design, Build, Program, Drive) to work together and satisfy our goals for the season.

This season, we were very organized and had a talented team, so we set our goal to make it to the World Championship, which we succeeded in. For this specific robot, we wanted to keep it simple and have a fast and reliable scorer for our League Meets. This would put us in a good league ranking while still giving us time to design a V2 robot to compete well at League's and State's. We went for a bouncing intake for efficiency and accessibilty, a quick direct belted transfer, and a normal flywheel with an adjustable hood.

Since a shooter game had not been done in recent years for FTC, we looked to the larger FRC robots for inspiration. Many teams had found success with fast bottom powered belted transfers, but we learned that the belts needed to stay cleaned and sticky to exert a substantial force on the ball. We also saw from many examples that an adjustable hood on our shooter advances our ability to shoot from anywhere on the field. We would be able to get a better launch angle so the balls wouldn't bounce out as easily.

We started our design with a basic parallel plate custom belted drivebase with mecanum wheels allowing for omni-directional movement. I then designed the main intake geometry which consisted of a large ramp that funneled inwards toward our main transfer channel. Once the bouncing intake was added, we aimed to connect our designed shooter with the intake by belt power. Once belt placement was finalized by the team, I designed the transfer sideplates that would hold each axle and direct the balls upward to the shooter. To finalize the design and prepare for building, I pocketed all 6 plates. Later, I designed two ball blockers or each side of the shooter entry to dictate when balls would be able to shoot.

Sparky worked very well in practice and due to our strict timeline that we stuck to (4 week design/shipping/build process), we had 3 weeks to program it to a competition level. Though we lost our first 3 matches due to no sufficient driver practice, we won the next 17 league matches, going undefeated in 3 straight league meets. This set us up in great postion for the league championships ranked 3rd.