On February 15, the LigerBots won the Week 0 pre-season competition at Merrimack High School in Merrimack, New Hampshire.

In this year’s game, robots need to score with two different game pieces, one a PVC pipe called “coral” and the other a green playground ball called “algae”. We were excited to compete with our robot, which we named Hydra! Hydra was designed and built over the past 8 weeks, based on many different designs by our team members to compete in this competition.

The night before the competition, we loaded Hydra into theLigerBots trailer for transport. Early the next morning, over 30 team members were transported via carpools from Starbucks in Newtonville to Merrimack High School.

We competed in four of the 16 qualifying matches, winning three. As the #1 ranked team, we led the top alliance and selected Team 190 (Gompei and the Herd) and Team 5422 (Stormgears). Our alliance won every playoff match, securing both the event championship and our team’s #1 overall ranking out of the 31 teams.

We learned a lot from this competition! In particular, our climber needs more tuning so that it can be more consistent, and our power chain needs to be reinforced more. But more importantly, we know this season is going to rock! This was the best possible way to warm up for the upcoming competition season and we hope to do just as well at the next few competitions. Our first official competition, Granite State hosted by ……., is on March 1-2 in Salem, NH. Join us in person or on the livestream!

This season, we designed and built a new robot named Hydra to compete in this year’s FRC game, Reefscape.

** If you’re interested in learning more about our kickoff, click this! **

To kick off the build season, the team watched a reveal video of the game. We then split into small groups to begin mechanism designing for the next 3 days. Once every group presented their ideas, our team started building the robot. It’s sure to be a stressful journey, as we have only 7 weeks before our first competition!

“We’re trying to stay on track so we can have a working robot for competition” said Zach H, Robot driver

We purchased the MK4I Swerve drive from a vendor called SDS (Swerve Drive Specialties) to allow the robot to move in all directions and rotate easily. This is key to doing well at the competition and beating out tough competitors we may face.

“We’re on a pretty good pace with our main [competition] robot, and our choice this year to build the Kitbot has payed off really well in getting a head start on programming and testing, says Wes H, Chief Technical Officer

In this game, Hydra earns endgame points and a possible ranking point by climbing onto a high-hanging shallow cage, with additional points for a low-hanging deep cage.

“It was a lot of prototyping and we discovered many different ways we could approach this obstacle” said Sarah H, Climber Mechanism Build Lead

The intake has wheels that spin to make way for the algae, green playground balls used as game pieces, into the robot. The intake team struggled at first, having problems with the motors on the sides of the intake, but were eventually successful.

“We had to restart, but we have a second design and it’s going good,” said Hannah S, Algae Intake Build Lead.

Branding is important to our team, especially at competitions where every team will have custom pins available. Our bright red, orange, and yellow tie-dye design is representative of our team and has become a part of the LigerBots brand. We give out many of our team buttons outreach events, but we give out hundreds at competitions where members of other teams collect them.

While the mechanical team was building the robot, the graphics team was hard at work making designs for this year’s competition pit banner, merchandise, and team flyers. While the Graphics team remains in their separate space, there is still lots of collaboration with other team members for projects such as the booklet.

“Graphics isn’t just about designing stuff, it’s also about the contents as well,” says Yushi T, VP of Graphics.

This was a successful and exciting build season, and we can’t wait to see Hydra’s performance at competitions and hopefully win some awards! Stay tuned for our first competition, Week 0 (a pre-season event), on Saturday, February 15 at Merrimack, New Hampshire!

On Saturday, January 4th 2025, the LigerBots got together at WPS to kick off this year’s competition season as a team.

First, we watched a video livestream from FIRST presenting the game overview for this year’s game which is called Reefscape. In this game, Robots score pipes called coral on a metal bar structure known as a reef. At the same time, robots take playground balls called algae off and score them in a processor. Finally, robots climb on a metal cage to score the final points.

During the presentation, FIRST sent out the official game manual for Reefscape. After the presentation was over, we split into small groups for 3 Day Design, or 3DD for short and scoured the game manual to create a deeper understanding of the game.

After doing a quiz on the manual created by Coach Chris to help our members understand the game better, groups went into mechanism design for the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday. Each group came up with different parts of the robot such as mechanisms to pick up and score coral and algae as well as climb on the cage.

On Monday, the third day of 3DD, we started in our 3DD groups to finalize our ideas before each group got a turn to present their ideas to the whole team. After all groups had presented, we had an open discussion as a whole team to decide what mechanisms we would use.

This was such a successful design period! We are excited to build our new 2025 robot in the upcoming weeks, and we are even more excited to compete with it in a few months!

On Mondays and Thursdays during the months of September to November at Newton North or South, the Ligerbots have been training first-years on electrical, marketing, software, and mechanical design.

First-years focusing on electrical engineering learn how to bring designs to life in the shop, while first-years in marketing learn how to create blog posts and manage fundraisers.

In software, first-years learn to properly code and program the robot. Finally, rookies focusing on mechanical design learn about different mechanics and parts before learning how to use C.A.D. (Computer Aided Design) to put their designs on paper.

Veterans, first-years, and coaches alike participate in preseason activities such as dismembering old robots, setting up for FLL events, and training to prepare for the build season.

In engaging in these activities, the LigerBot team members share memories and build a sense of community within the team to make it even stronger before build season.

The LigerBots are a team that stresses the importance of teamwork and unity in all it’s members. It is especially important for older members to form bonds with rookies and assist them in learning the ropes to grow the LigerBots community.

“With all the support and help from the veterans and coaches during training,” said two LigerBot rookies, Lauren and Sofia, “it really makes you feel like you’re a part of this team.”

On December 14th the LigerBots hosted the First Lego League (FLL) East Massachusetts Championship at Newton North High School in Newton MA, using Lego robots built by students from grades 4 through 8th who are interested in robotics.

Besides the championship competition, the LigerBots also hosted a STEAM Expo event where many STEAM related activities were displayed to educate attendees. We also showed our 2022 competition robot alongside other robotics teams.

As the First Lego League is an important event in the STEAM world, many public figures and local businesses came to show their work to kids who might be interested in joining them in the future, giving workshops to spark their interests.

As the teams would get ready for the count down to begin, the field re-setters would recheck the arena before starting, making sure everything is in the right place. The referee would then give the okay, allowing the rest of the team to give a thumbs up signaling that they are ready to start their match.

As the judges decided on who the winning team was, the LigerBots held a raffle to win several LigerBots merch. As the judges decided who the championship winners were, teams who got awarded sportsmanship awards got called up and received a Lego trophy.

We are happy for all the winners of the FLL East MA Championship and teams who participated. Congrats to the Goofy Gyros for winning the FLL East MA Championship for the second year in a row!