I love robotics. However, I don’t think I would enjoy it nearly as much if I was unable to share my love of it with others. Naturally, I was very excited when a mentor from my old FRC team invited me to talk about how to succeed at robotics to her FTC team, which is in its second year. The students are all middle school age, and the mentors are all new to the FTC scene. This didn’t make it much less intimidating to talk in front of (mostly) strangers, although it did mean that they would believe most of what I said.

I had made a list of topics I wanted to cover in the few days leading up to it, so I had a general idea of what I wanted to cover. This being said, I didn’t really have a clear plan. Fortunately, they had their previous season’s robot out and partially disassembled, so I was able to talk and show people what I was doing. This helped a lot for me, as I was able to demonstrate what I was talking about, plus it helped me think to have my hands on the robot. I talked about a variety of things, here are the highlights:

• Identifying tasks that have the best risk/reward
  • Being good at one thing is much more valuable than being mediocre at everything
• Iterate and improve the robot as much as possible: in FTC, you have access to the robot all the time, so use it.
• CAD and designing your entire robot carefully is extremely important
• Gobilda is arguably the best build system for FTC at the moment by a considerable margin, so consider switching to it
  • I’ll talk more about this in my next post
• you should have 4 not direct driven motors on your drive system
• 3D printing is super useful
• Roller-based intakes for game piece handling makes everything faster and easier

Here are some FTC resources:

Game Manual Zero, a comprehensive guide for those starting FTC (made by a very talented group of students, including some of my friends): gm0.copr.cc

Gobilda’s website: gobilda.com