Check up on our Subteams!
Programming
Programming has been learning how to apply their knowledge to program our robot. In particular, they are learning how to tune movement of arms and of flywheels. Next up will be learning about cameras and field positioning.
Electrical
Electrical has been working on putting the wiring together on the base of our future robot and has been making very steady progress throughout the month. They also wired a couple electrical boards for the programming team to use. Next up is planning where wire runs will be on the robot.
Mechanical
Mechanical has been focused on prototyping and designing ideas we have come up with, while their field construction team has been building the various field elements we will need to test our robot. Currently, there are teams working on a fuel intake, a fuel shooter, a hopper indexer, and a climber.
Planning new designs
After our kickoff a few weeks ago, our team has been hard at work planning the future of our robot by creating a number of different designs and starting to trim them down until we have one distinct candidate. At the moment, our intake design is close to completion, but work on a shooter, hopper indexer, and climber is still ongoing. Shown below are a few pictures of our discussions and testing where we wrote and contributed various ideas for our machine.
Jumpstarting our Instagram
Our social media has always needed improvements, so has our marketing team. In an effort to grow our internet presence, we have been starting to create new posts for our team’s Instagram, which ranges between memes, progress updates, and event notifications! If you need more Robo Raiders updates, stay tuned!
2026 Robot Game: Rebuilt
The 2025 season officially kicked off on Saturday, January 10th! This year has an archeology based theme: Rebuilt! The game is somewhat complex and there are a few ways to score points:
- Launching 5.91 inch diameter high density foam balls (called Fuel) into a “Hub”.
- Climbing and hanging on a some level of a metal structure called the “Tower” at the end of each match.
Bonus points are available for launching enough fuel into your hub and for climbing enough on the tower. Images of this year’s field are shown below.
The team is hard at work creating plans for the new game, designing and building prototypes for the various robot components and building all the field elements so that we can practice before competition! We anticipate this year being tricky and we think it will be hard to master everything with such a varied list of ways to score. The amount of fuel we will need to gather and launch will make for an interesting engineering challenge.
Northfield’s FLL Team
This past year our upper elementary/middle school FIRST Lego League team, the “Lego Raiders”, split into 2 teams and tied with each other for 5th place in robot score. They also managed to walk away with the “Rising All-Star” Award.
We are proud of the progress they have made and look forward to their future accomplishments!
Look out for information about the FLL team in the Community Education summer brochure!
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