Technical Binder Overview
A technical binder is what our team writes every season to walk the competition judges through the whole robot, so most of it is mechanical: the design process, the game strategy, then a tour of every subsystem. Here's the overview of each, with the full binder linked at the end of its overview.
2026: REBUILT (Team 359)
REBUILT is a shooter game. You pull FUEL, the game piece, off the floor and fire it into a goal called the HUB, then climb a TOWER at the end, all while crossing trenches and bumps to get around the field. The robot is built around that loop: a swerve drivebase, a full-width roller intake that grabs FUEL on contact, and a hopper and conveyor that feed it up to a turreted flywheel shooter with an adjustable hood.
The software is the part I work on. It runs against a physics-based simulation, so we can write and test most of the robot code before the real robot exists, and a few of us can work on it in parallel. Almost every constant is tunable live without redeploying, including the shooter's lookup table, which the operator can re-tune mid-match from the dashboard since the values that worked at our field don't always hold at an event. Everything gets logged to a USB stick and all five cameras record, and the logs are replayable: each one is split into inputs and outputs, so we can feed a bad match's inputs back through updated code to chase down bugs that are impossible to reproduce on the bench. Localization comes from five Limelight cameras giving a 360-degree view, fused with the swerve odometry.
The full writeup is in the 359 binder; the software is the Control Systems section on page 18. If you've never seen the game, the REBUILT kickoff animation runs through it in about two minutes.
2025: REEFSCAPE (Team 9442)
REEFSCAPE runs on two game pieces, CORAL and ALGAE, that you score on the reef and in the barge, with a climb at the end. That robot used a swerve base, an elevator, a dead-axle pivot, and an end effector that handled both game pieces, plus a separate ground intake for algae.
The software highlights are heading lock and auto align. Heading lock points the robot for you, aiming at the reef or barge depending on what you're doing, so the driver only has to think about moving. Auto align goes a step further: instead of a wall of buttons for picking a scoring spot, the robot reads its own position and velocity and chooses the target on the fly, so scoring is one button and feels natural. Under that there are seven autonomous routines built off a single path with event markers, vision from two Limelights fusing MegaTag1 and MegaTag2, and a logging setup we moved to DogLog after the old one was causing garbage-collection hitches in our loop times.
The full writeup is in the 9442 binder; the software is the Programming section on page 16. If REEFSCAPE is new to you, the kickoff animation covers the whole game in a couple of minutes.