Marcus Bartholomew the Third Senior
FTC Team #32314
FIRST Tech Challenge · First Season · 2025–26 Decode
The 2025–26 season was WCCA’s first year competing in FIRST Tech Challenge, a robotics competition for 7th through 12th graders where teams design, build, and program robots for head-to-head matches.
What is FIRST Tech Challenge?
FIRST Tech Challenge is a robotics competition where you build and program a robot to play in a robot game. There’s a different game every year.
The 2025–26 game was called Decode. The main way to score points was by getting balls, called artifacts, into an alliance’s goal. The game was played with two alliances of two robots each, with four robots on a 12-foot by 12-foot field during each match.
Each match started with a 30-second autonomous period in which the robot ran using pre-programmed logic. That was followed by a 2-minute teleop period in which drivers controlled the robot.
Our Robots
Robot 1: The Starter Bot
Our first robot was based on a starter bot from a company called GoBilda. A starter bot is a robot you can build from a kit using instructions that can do the basic things necessary to play the game — and it’s a great way for a new team to get up and running quickly.
The starter bot used a tank drive — it had a different motor powering each side’s wheels. If both sides turned the same direction, the robot drove straight. If they turned in opposite directions, the robot spun around.
A human player could load 3 artifacts into the robot when it was in the loading zone. When the robot was ready to launch an artifact, the flywheel spun up to speed, and then two servos spun wheels to feed an artifact into the launcher — and the artifact shot up and into the goal. We added a servo for adjustable launch angle and variable launch speed so that we could shoot from farther away from the goal.
The starter bot taught us a lot, but we wanted to take things to the next level — so we moved on to building a much more capable robot.
Robot 2: The RI3D Bot
Our second robot was based on GoBilda’s Robot in 3 Days (RI3D) design.
This robot was a big upgrade from the starter bot:
- Mecanum drive — Unlike the tank drive, mecanum wheels let the robot drive in any direction, including sideways. This made it much more maneuverable on the field.
- Intake — Instead of relying on a human player to load artifacts, the robot could pick up artifacts from the field on its own.
- Dual launchers with diverters — The robot had launchers on both sides, with a diverter that directed artifacts to the left or right launcher. This let us choose which color artifact to launch.
- Odometry system — We added odometry wheels and the GoBilda Pinpoint computer to help the robot track its position on the field. This was an upgrade that we originally made to the starter bot and moved to the new bot.
- Limelight camera — We added a Limelight 3A camera to help detect the robot’s position on the field.
- Pedro Pathing — We worked on using Pedro Pathing for smooth, accurate autonomous movement.
Throughout the season, we refined the robot by improving launcher consistency, fine-tuning autonomous routines, and working on auto-aim to hit the goal more reliably.
Competitions
Adventist Robotics FTC Carolina Scrimmage
March 1, 2026 · Our first-ever competition!
We competed in 5 qualification matches and finished 2nd in rankings out of 8 teams. Our focus on ranking points helped us pull ahead of the 3 other teams with a win/loss record of 3-2.
For alliance selection for the playoffs, the NC Avengers (team 26520) selected us as their alliance partner, and we graciously accepted! The first match did not go so well. Our auto-aim was off and we lost 60-76. The NC Avengers suggested that if our shots weren’t working so well we should focus on defense and preventing the other alliance from scoring. Using that strategy, we were able to come back from behind and win the next two matches convincingly to win the finals 2–1 and take home the championship together with the NC Avengers! 🏆
Explore Our 2025–26 Work
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