Hey r/FTC,

I'm a high school student and the CAD/mechanical lead on my FTC robotics team. I've been using Onshape for a few years now through robotics and Science Olympiad, and this fall I'm running a free 5-week online course to help other students learn the basics — sketching, part studios, assemblies, basic mechanism design, that kind of thing.

To be clear: it's completely free, online, and I'm not selling anything. I just wish something like this existed when I was starting out, so I figured I'd put one together.

Details:
- Free, fully online
- 5 weeks, one session a week (Thursdays, 5–6 PM PST)
- Starts at the beginning of the school year
- Open to any student wanting to learn

- AGE DOESNT MATTER. If you're 40 years old and want to start getting into CAD, it's never too late and I'd be ecstatic to teach you.

Sign-up here if you or someone you know is interested: https://forms.gle/mZqGkuE225ftpBSB7

Also happy to answer any questions in the comments — and if anyone's taught something similar before, I'd genuinely love to hear what worked for you.

Below are some of my creations!

There are some things I'd like to improve (e.g. the organization of the document itself, mirroring parts more efficiently) But I would also like to know how I can improve the CAD itself (i'm new to Onshape)

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/8ed3a21dd15cd08a452884f1/w/589ab4ec180dcf4a146f293c/e/29f5e9d7228ede1c094d0c32?renderMode=0&uiState=6a5fe9713f1514c09c723fda

Hello guys I've seen once a video of a team(I think it was I.C.E Robotics in ITD) that said that it found it pretty accurate with a very low position drift, why no one is using it and if you are using it can you share your experience with me. Our team is really thinking about using it

I'm from Team NazarX #34241 from Uzbekistan, and we'll be participating in the FTC China Off-Season in Sanya.

If your team is also attending, could you please send me a DM? We have a few questions and could really use some help from teams that are participating.

I'm looking at this extra hole in the pollen and it seems really strange to me. It looks like either a mistake or a poorly planned manufacturing

Our team is now going to be entering our second year, and we have aspirations to become more competitive and qualify to premier events. However, we are quite lost in how to improve our programming. We initially used time based movement using the sleep() function for autonomous, but during the season we realised how inconsistent it was and we switched to using encoders for our movement motors in our autonomous. We use a very basic form of encoders tho. I've heard of Pedro pathing but have absolutely no idea what it is or what it helps with, and I've also heard of odometry, which I think I understand but we can't buy dead wheels so I was thinking on using the gyro in the hub and to use encoder ticks? What do you think our next steps should be in improving our programming and becoming more pro? I would love to hear what programming changes or additions really helped your team excel!

Btw we program in java on onbot

Hi everyone we are team 16333, Mechatrons (United States) and we were wondering if there were any teams who would like to speak to us whether its just to get to know each other or share information.

we are interested in Pedro Pathing, limelight, odometry pods, and CAD and some tips if you guys would like to share.

Please let us know if anyone is interested

:)

Hey everyone! I’m a high school student helping run a student-led program that teaches Autodesk Fusion and CAD to students for free.

We recently secured an international partnership and are getting ready to work with a lot more students, so we’re looking for a few more people to join the team.

We’re especially hoping to find people who already have experience with CAD, whether that’s Autodesk Fusion, Onshape, SolidWorks, Inventor, or another program. Fusion experience would be ideal, but familiarity with other CAD software is still very useful since many of the main concepts carry over.

The main roles we need are:

Co-President and Vice Presidents: Help lead the team, communicate with partners, organize meetings, and help decide where the program goes next. This role will collapse onto the other two roles below.

Mentors: Join weekly Zoom classes, demonstrate Fusion tools, answer questions, and help students when they get stuck.

Curriculum Developers: Help improve our current lessons and create new activities, projects, and assignments.

CAD experience is especially important for mentors and curriculum developers, but we’re also looking for people who are reliable, communicate well, and genuinely want to help students learn engineering.

Apply here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSckr1UBILkgySbmjvRhKD0qca_-Omxy_aLmG5aN6JIEhE9tJg/viewform?usp=dialog

As you know, in previous years we were able to register our FTC team and order kits through Dashboard and Pitsco, but this year, under the new system, registration is only available for FRC teams. When will Storefront be active for FTC?

We just have Two-Pieces Shore 15A Rubber Silicon and we are thinking of making smth like 2mm on the round surface of a 3d printed 48mm gecko wheel, we CADed the intake with 48mm gecko wheels and kept the compression 2-7mm all away in the intake system

I think in the last stages (transfer to shooter) it is smth like 9mm compression since we didn’t know how to make the compression fixed in a range of 4mm

anyways, what do u think abt the rubber silicone thing? it’s all abt the friction and I think it’ll give friction but I don’t think we will match the gecko wheel compression, do for that 2mm layer do u recommend making it 3 4mm or 1mm or whatever, to match the real gecko as possible as we can

there are some game elements that have been released like the pollen balls and them naturally rolling off to the corners of the field. as a result what kind of intake are you guys planning on exactly?

Hi guys, I would greatly appreciate it if someone could please help me troubleshoot the following error in Android Studio. I keep getting this error whenever I try to upload code to the robot. Thank you in advance !

Hello. I understand that OnShape and Fusion360 is accessible to an educational account. What if coaches and mentor want to use them for teaching lessons, how can they get access to it?

Thank you

Hi everyone, I'm currently the lead programmer of my FTC robotics team and changed drastically through this year, block to onbot to Roadrunner. But I began roadrunner right during states which was why I received some help from my sister team and I didn't really get their teachings. However, due to this I was wondering if I should just transfer to Pedropathing with SlothLoad because I heard its so much easier. Please advise as I'm not so sure as what to do. I don't really have a mentor for Pedropathing and have been relying on Youtube and AI for the meantime but I would rather want to learn from reliable sources. Thanks in advance.

I see Studica came out with some cool new helical gears. Great job guys!

Our teams are already pretty heavily invested in goBILDA; I hope goBILDA follows suit. In the meantime, it has me pondering how I can integrate a little Studica into an otherwise goBILDA and custom-fab robot.

Does anyone know of any team that wants to donate any available items?

I'm the leader of a newly formed community team and I'm looking for some help.

Hey everyone,

Our team is working on designing a custom web dashboard/interface for our REV Control Hub (giving it a cleaner dark mode/glass look!).

We are trying to find where the stock dashboard webpage files (like the default index.html on port 8080) are actually located in the official FtcRobotController project structure.

We looked inside FtcRobotController/src/main/ but there isn't an assets folder there. Are these files compiled directly inside one of the library binaries (.aar files), or is there a specific directory we are missing?

If they are baked into the libraries, what's the best way to override the default root route (/) to serve our own custom HTML asset?

Any help or repository links would be awesome. Thanks in advance!

So, over the summer I'm having our team switch from blocks to Android studio for code (I knew it would be a big jump) and I was hoping to be able to translate our old movement code over. Can I just copy and paste from the onbot java? (I already set up everything in android studio)

There will be a discount for all Ferra items (as in items that are branded as Ferra items) up until 23:59 on August 16th (time is local to CST). During this time, all Ferra branded items will have a 10% discount. The discount code is: "Summer Discount".

Additionally, new items have been released: Textile Wire Sleeves (now on pre-order). You can get the textile split sleeving for wires in 6 different colors and 3 different sizes. Orders containing this item will be shipped out once they arrive (current ETA end of August/early September). https://ferracomponents.com/products/textile-split-wire-sleeving-pre-order

Additionally, sponsorship information will be released within the next few weeks to help teams have a good season. Once released, the information will be posted on the home page along with the announcement page and Instagram. https://ferracomponents.com/pages/announcements

Hello, i am the captain of an ftc robotics team for 2 years and during this 2 years i couldn't find any sponsors can u guys give me some tips or some tricks to getting sponsors?

Hey everyone,

I’m looking for a way to download a comprehensive library or database of FTC-legal parts (REV, goBILDA, AndyMark, etc.) specifically as STEP files, but in bulk.

To clarify what I'm looking for:

• The Goal: A bulk download (like a .zip archive, a GitHub repository, or a script/scraper) containing all the raw .step or .stp files.
• My Use Case: This is not for traditional CAD (so standard CAD library integrations, Onshape apps, or manually downloading files one-by-one won't work for my workflow). I just need the raw files locally for something I'm working on.

Does anyone know if there is a community-maintained archive of these physical files, or a script/tool that can grab them all at once?

Thanks in advance!

In the past, competition manual part 1 has released around the 2nd Tuesday of July. This is what usually has info about advancement, awards, robot allowed components, and tournament structure. FIRST hasn't made any blog post about it yet: has anyone heard anything?

Former FTC captain here, starting my freshman year in mechanical engineering this fall. 

Our team's inventory system and purchasing system was a mess, and we often spent hours looking for parts that didn't actually exist. I decided to make a website for robotics teams that makes organization a lot easier.

Basic idea is students submit purchase requests, a mentor approves them, and it spits out whatever paperwork your school wants (card auth, requisition, reimbursement form). You can upload your district's actual PO form and it fills it in. There's also inventory with a preloaded catalog of REV/goBILDA/AndyMark/WCP/CTRE/VEX stuff, attendance tracking, and budget tracking. Works for FRC, FTC and VEX.

I need teams to actually use it and tell me where it sucks. Stuff that confused you, stuff that's missing, whatever.

The website is https://benchdog.app and if you use the code BENCHDOG-TESTER in settings it unlocks the paid tier for free. Payments are in test mode anyway so nothing can charge you regardless.

Even if you don't want to test it, replying with how your team handles purchasing right now would genuinely help.