Our 2025/26 season is over and it’s finally time to post an update about how our season has gone.

Competition 1:

• November 2025, starting off the buildup to the first competition was a time when we did not have an area to conduct our work from. Starting in the summer 2025 we were no longer able to stay in our old home at Nevada Union High School. It took about four months total to find our new place, and after all that searching, we found our new home at the Nevada County School of the Arts.
• A result of this is that for the first few weeks before the competition we had been stuck working from zoom calls, but this also gave us the chance to work more with 3D modeling software and fully plan out our design before starting construction.
• The first iteration of our robot mainly used the build of the Gobilda starter bot. At this point in the season the only custom pieces we had were our hopper system that attached to the side of the launcher and our new three-piece number plates.

Competition 2: A series of unfortunate events

• It was December 2025, and not many advancements were happening. our main plan was to refine what we had at the moment before changing things up. In the last competition we had a major issue with the consistency of the robots shooting as the halfpipe launcher we got from Gobilda does not have any real way of controlling where the ball goes once shot.
• We tried many times in many ways to try and get the robot to shoot accurately, but in the end, nothing seemed to work that well. And on top of this, balls would often get stuck inside the launcher due to a piece that was almost required to have a chance at shooting properly.
• While hardware had there many issues, our one software person was busy refining the code, making a way to get balls untuck, and also trying to train up one of our new members to also be software, all of which were moving very slowly.
• Then to make things even worse, the night before the actual competition the power switch to our robot was removed and never packed, leaving us with nothing when we arrived at the place we would be competing at. We ended up borrowing a Gobilda switch from another team, this did not end well for us but there was nothing we could have done.
• As it turns out this new Gobilda switch had some kind of programming that caused it to shut off the robot anytime we tried to do anything, leaving us stranded in the middle of the field mid match, and furthermore, we were certain that the inside of the switch was burning anytime this happened. This would cause us to fall several places on the leader board.

Competition 3:

• Now it was January 2026, at this point we stopped trying to make the current launcher design good and started working on a new design. We did actually get these new designs made but we did not have enough time to actually implement them, leaving us with another competition with a barely functional robot. Luckily our software team did manage to make a fix to the problem of balls getting stuck in the launcher.
• The reason as to why we couldn’t do much was due to us losing two weeks or so of work because of winter break and Thanksgiving week, two areas of time when none of us were available to meet up. With what time we had it just wasn’t an option to take apart the robot and implement the new designs.

Competition 4:

• February 2026, our final competition, this is when things went good for the first time this season. Starting off we got all of our new designs made and attached to robot, one of these designs was a new launcher with a highly accurate and powerful cannon-like design. This launcher had also merged with our hopper to become one solid piece, and the door the kept the balls out of the barrel also doubled as the thing that would push the balls into the flywheels. We also implemented a new, much thinner version of our number plates, removing the issue of them eating up space.
• The actual competition went smoother than our other matches, however, it was clear that we still needed more practice actually driving the robot as we were so busy trying to get it working that we didn’t have time for anything else. In the end, we did not get chosen for finals and we didn’t get any awards, but we still got lots of valuable experience.
• Despite losing two members by the end of this, our team is still growing, improving, and learning.

This post was made by Liam McKenna, his final addition to this team.