REBUILT — 2026 Season

We scored a corner-mounted, spindexer-fed shooter against a simple center mount on a 1–5 T-chart. Corner "won" on cool factor; center won on everything else, so it became the plan — merged with the feeder into a single panel assembly.

• Final version laser-cut from ¼" polycarbonate on our CNC router
• Feeder jammed under load through our first competition
• Fix: swapped belt-and-pulley for chain-and-sprocket at an 8:5 reduction — fully reliable since

We picked over-the-bumper over an inline intake for structural integrity and drivability over the bump, after mentor input and analysis of a past swerve build.

• Large contact wheels plus smaller guide wheels for fuel spacing
• Single NEO 550, sprocket mounted direct to the gearbox to keep the intake cavity clear
• Belted axles snapped in the final playoff match of event one — chain since event two, no repeat
• Agitator simplified to a single bar of 3D-printed ribbed spacers after a belt-conveyor design ran out of room

We built up from simple AprilTag-facing routines to full field localization with MegaTag2 — a two-month effort once we had the external gyro reading (NavX2) it requires.

• 30 scoring poses mapped around the field, each with its own preset RPM
• Driver holds "A" — robot drives to the nearest pose and faces the HUB automatically
• We chose lock-and-hold over shooting on the move: more reliable for a first-year programming team, and steadier against defense

Autonomous went from a single, somewhat-consistent left auto at our first event to a full three-path system by our second.

• Right auto: the left path mirrored along the field's center line, for alliances needing a left-side partner
• Left auto adjusted to stay clear of alliance partner 2471 Mean Machine
• Center auto expanded to pull extra FUEL from the DEPOT — 5–6 more fuel than a preload-only path
• Result: our alliance stayed undefeated in autonomous at event two, with one match over 100 points

Covers protect the drive and turn motors from impact and let us run wiring — and a full ring of LEDs — straight through and between modules. Everything runs off a single RoboRIO signal, color-coded for fast mid-competition fixes: red for power (5V), black for ground, white for the digital data line, chained module to module. Only the ground wire has to make the full loop back to the RoboRIO to close the circuit. The LEDs on each module indicate alignment and wheel direction, giving the drive team critical feedback at a glance.