FRC Roundtable

An episode of the Sunday night FRC Roundtable for FIRST Robotics students and mentors. This week 2129 Ultraviolet shares about their team history, make up, dual captain and leadership system, methods of recruitment, youth outreach programs, how they use minitrials for team training, their season flow, process, meetings, etc. There was also a lot of Q&A with the group.

An episode of the Sunday night FRC Roundtable for FIRST Robotics students and mentors. Aaron 2847 MegaHertz mentor lead a discussion on how FRC teams can start advocacy efforts with their local and state government or industry leaders. Aaron talks about remembering overall goals of FIRST - beyond building a robot. Gaining skills in advocacy and business planning are some of the outcomes FIRST stud...

An episode of the Sunday night FRC Roundtable for FIRST Robotics students and mentors. 5! 10! 15! 20! 2530!!! This week Inconceivable! shares about the make up of their team, how they recruit and onboard new team members, the structure of their subteams and functions, how the team handles communications on discord, failure reporting with FEMA - and show their failure report on screen, CAD using On...

An episode of the Sunday night FRC Roundtable for FIRST Robotics students and mentors to discuss the topic of getting ready for FIRST FRC World Champs. This episode was recorded at the end of the REEFSCAPE game season in 2025 but takes a more global approach to generally how to plan for your team to manage the Champs experience, specifically getting there, hotel registration, travel and logistics,...

An episode of the Sunday night FRC Roundtable for FIRST Robotics students and mentors. Team 2847 MegaHertz shares about their team, specifically: about the teams overview, structure and history. They tour their shop space, and talk about the MegaHertz build season approach and schedule. 2847 also talks about their mentorship of 3 Vex IQ teams, 2 FLL teams and 1 FTC team. and their activities for o...

An episode of the Sunday night FRC Roundtable for FIRST Robotics students and mentors. This week is an open table where the group brought up whatever was on their mind, ranging from team finances, changing the robot midstream, robot programming, and finding practice space.

An episode of the Sunday night FRC Roundtable for FIRST Robotics students and mentors to discuss how teams approach scouting and alliance strategy.

An episode of the Sunday night FRC Roundtable for FIRST Robotics students and mentors to discuss what teams took away from their week 1 REEFSCAPE 2025 competitions. Lessons learned, and what they are looking at going forward in the competition season.

(2025-02-23)An episode of the Sunday night FRC Roundtable for FIRST Robotics students and mentors. Team 2052 KnightKrawler student programming lead Afomia leads a discussion of advanced autonomous programming using pathplanner. Specifically Afomia shares how 2052's auto strategy has changed each year for the past 3 years. She also shares a pathplanner GUI demo, talks about key auto classes tha...

An episode of the Sunday night FRC Roundtable for FIRST Robotics students and mentors. John Stratis team mentor and seasoned FIRST Robot Inspector reviews the most common reasons teams fail inspection and what you can do to avoid failing and have a successful robot inspection. John highlights the key new rules from 2025 including that weigh in is now possible at load in and pits now close Thursday...

(2025-02-02) An episode of the Sunday night FRC Roundtable for FIRST Robotics students and mentors. FIRST Robotics Emcee Yoji Shimizu leads a review of the 2025 changes from FIRST on FRC alliance selection and regional advancement points. Plus the reasoning from FIRST on why these changes were made. Some key changes include the pacing of alliance selection including use of timers to speed up decis...

An episode of the Sunday night FRC Roundtable for FIRST Robotics students and mentors. Recorded in January of 2025 this discussion centers on the new FIRST rules for bumpers published in 2024. John Stratis of Team 2177 The Robettes leads the discussion. John is also a FIRST robot inspector. He reviews a brief history of bumpers - none were required historically and now they are part of the design...

(2025-01-19)An episode of the Sunday night FRC Roundtable for FIRST Robotics students and mentors to discuss the topic of Scrum and Agile Project Management and how 2052 uses it for FRC. The basics of agile and kanban boards and task management are covered by Team 2052 mentor Ashley who is a professional project manager. The concepts of sprints, scrum masters, standup meetings, handling dependenci...

(2025-01-12)An episode of the Sunday night FRC Roundtable for FIRST Robotics students and mentors to discuss robot design as they go through the 2nd week of build season for this game.

(2025-01-05)An episode of the Sunday night FRC Roundtable for FIRST Robotics students and mentors to discuss the REEFSCAPE kick off video and first thoughts as build season starts off.

(2024-12-15)An episode of the Sunday night FRC Roundtable for FIRST Robotics students and mentors. Students John and Emilio from Team 3082 Chicken Bot Pie host a discussion about Chicken Planner, an open source app just released. ChickenPlanner is an autonomous path planning tool for FRC robots, developed by FRC Team 3082 (Chicken Bot Pie), that generates paths using Bézier curves and supports mod...

(2024-12-08)An episode of the Sunday night FRC Roundtable for FIRST Robotics students and mentors. Jess a mentor from the Miller Bots Team 2549 leads a discussion about how to use the Agile tool of Retrospectives for your team. Jess covers the purpose - continuous process improvement; benefits - specifically how using retrospectives can improve team morale, find places we can grow and avoid proble...

(2024-11-24)Episode 58 of the FRC Roundtable for FIRST Robotics Competition. 2052 KnightKrawler leads a discussion and demo about designing and manufacturing robot parts. Discussion about how teams approach robot design, review of assumptions and decisions prior to starting CAD, methods of designing around a robot intake plate, designing around robot chassis, game piece interaction, modeling gears...

(2024-11-17)Episode 57 of the FRC Roundtable, FIRST students and mentors discuss programming robot code for autonomous paths and trajectory planning. Team 3082 leads the discussion and presents on their teams approach and best practices. Discussion includes the math behind programming curves - what are splines? what is a bezier curve and how can I use it in robot code? Also following algorithms -...

(2024-11-10)In this episode attending students and mentors have an open conversation about where teams invest their money in tools and equipment. The goal is to help newer teams or restarting teams learn from others what really can make a difference for the team either in making a better robot or having something that energizes your team or provides a training opportunity.

(2024-11-03)Episode 55 of FRC Roundtable is a discussion of lessons learned from in-house machining aka CNC tips and tricks learned by 2052 and others. Pros and cons of in-house manufacturing, how to combat the cons . Tips and lessons from 2052's experience in manufacturing with CNC around preparing operations, recovering failed operations, being efficient with time and resources, CNC machine...

(2024-10-27) Episode 54 of FRC Roundtable is all about getting to know Team 2181 GEARS. GEARS went through big changes during / after the 2020 disruptions to competition and participation and their nonprofit status. The team has been around but also re-formed itself significantly and discusses that process of culture and process overhaul. Students and mentors share about how GEARS approaches their...

(2024-10-20)In Episode 53 of FRC Roundtable there's an open discussion with students and mentors of how teams approach prototyping whether that is in pre-season for off season or mini-trial competitions or in the 6 week build season. Also a discussion of swerve drive and the preference for different motors as the new SDS motors came on the market, issues with programming swerve drive, library...

(2024-10-13) Episode 52 of the FRC Roundtable is a discussion lead by Team 5202, Talon Robotics on how they approach training, both what the team used to do and how they've changed their approach recently around team member and sub-team specific training and an open discussion q&a with the students and mentors attending.

(2024-10-06) Episode 51 of FRC Roundtable is lead by Team 2491, NoMythic. Students and mentors from NoMythic talk about their team culture, core values and mission and how they've worked to create a culture where students and mentors can passionately be themselves.