On February 27th, the LigerBots partnered with Chop Shop to host the Impact Exchange at the Granite State Competition, in Salem NH. The FIRST Impact Award is the most prestigious award at FIRST. It honors the team that best represents a model for other teams to emulate and best embodies the mission of FIRST.

This event was a wonderful opportunity to collaborate and share information with other FRC teams. Those teams competing for the Award had the chance to present their Impact Presentation and receive valuable feedback from their teammates and other teams. The goal being to change and improve upon the presentation before the time came to go before the impact judges.

The teams that attended were: Wire Clippers (5902), The Highlanders (6201), Aluminum Panthers (9443), The LigerBots (us! 2877), and Team Phoenix, who also ended up winning the Impact Award at Granite State.

The LigerBots are hosting another Impact Exchange and will compete again for the Impact Award at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) Competition on March 22-23.

On February 28, The LigerBots were generously invited by the Burr Parent Teacher Organization to the school’s STEAM fair.

At the fair’s opening, we showcased a variety of STEAM activities from binary beads to coloring. These activities are meant to help kids engage in and have fun with topics relating to science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics.

We also showcased our 2022 robot. Overall, we answered questions related to the robot, explained its basic functions, and how it works.

Kids also had the opportunity to interact with the 2022 robot feeding balls in and waiting for them to be launched by the robot in a game of catch. Interacting with the robot in this way was meant to showcase the myriad of possibilities available,if they continued to pursue their knowledge on STEAM.

Stay tuned for our exciting upcoming events and competitions, including UNH on March 22-23 and DCMP (if we qualify), on April 2-5!

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!