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Elevate Your Team's Design Process

baseBot is designed to help all teams develop custom drivetrains to meet the specific needs of their robot. Read below to learn how your team could use baseBot this season to improve your process and your finished product. When you're done, click this "get started" button to get to the designs.

10355 Project Peacock's ORIGIN Experiments

Pictured above is a Mecanum Double Reverse 4-Bar design put together over the summer by the CAD team of FTC team 10355. This is one of several experimental robot design concepts put together by the team. Click here to learn more about the team's experiment designing with baseBot ORIGIN and to see some of the other concepts they developed.

What is baseBot?

Imagine a series of fully customizable open-source plate designs that allow you to build essentially any FTC drivetrain you want. This is the vision for baseBot. It is accessible to teams of all experience levels, although it may force some teams out of their comfort zones by requiring them to make connections within the engineering community in order to manufacture the parts. For less experienced teams, it provides a jumping off point for a better design process. For more experienced teams, it provides a highly customizable base design upon which you can construct your next world-class robot. Keep reading to find out how your team can use baseBot as a part of your design process.

Less Experienced Teams

For those looking to improve their team's design process tremendously, you're in the right place. Here are just a few reasons your team should use baseBot.

  1. baseBot encourages you to design  before you build. You can mount prototypes onto the drivetrains as designed, however your design team will gain a whole new level of control when you start modifying the plate designs to create support structures and mounting points for your robot mechanisms.
  2. baseBot will help teach your team about CAD and simple manufacturing processes that will enhance your robot design and process. Our plates can be laser cut, CNC milled, waterjet cut, or manufactured in many other ways, however in order to gain access to this level of manufacturing, you will likely need to build some connections with the engineering community in your area.
  3. Our community consists of highly experienced teams from all over the world who will be more than willing to help if you run into any issues. These interactions will be mutually beneficial, and will be great connections to talk about in your notebook. Visit the Community page to join our Discord and follow us on Twitter.

Don't have access to a laser cutter or 3D printer? Fear not, we've got you covered. Our FAQ page covers some possible info on where you may be able to find access to these resources locally, and, worst case scenario, we can probably make your parts for you and ship them to you fairly cheaply.

More Experienced Teams

So you're already a fairly competitive team, you employ a semi-professional design process, and you custom-build nearly every part of your robot. Here's why you should think about using baseBot anyways.

  1. A baseBot PHOENIX kit allows you to build any of 5 drivetrain configurations on kickoff day. (Note that baseBot ORIGIN isn't exactly optomized for this functionality.)
  2. The plates are highly customizable compared to other drivetrain kits such as the AndyMark TileRunner. You probably see a lot of improvements that can be made to the available plates, and there's nothing stopping you from making those changes and possibly becoming a baseBot designer in the process.
  3. The baseBot community will provide global connections with teams of all experience levels. This will provide countless opportunities for your team to help out less experienced teams from around the world through a shared design platform. Your team can also submit baseBot tutorial videos, which will be featured on an upcoming "Resources" page.

baseBot isn't a fully designed, all-in-one robot. It's simply a template, which you are encouraged to bend, modify, and break as much as you want.

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Introducing baseBot PHOENIX!

The new baseBot PHOENIX designs are out, and they feature some major improvements over the baseBot ORIGIN design. Still based around the GoBilda system, this simpler, more streamlined design includes 5 suggested configurations, including Center Drive, 8-Wheel Drive, 100mm Mecanum Drive, 6" Mecanum Drive, and a Timing Belt Tank Drive.

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4" MECANUM DRIVE

Check out our legacy design, baseBot ORIGIN

The drivetrain that started it all, baseBot ORIGIN is a somewhat overcomplicated solution to what we were trying to achieve. Based on the GoBilda system, ORIGIN offers 6 different base configurations. Please be cautious if you wish to use this design and know that many of the configurations will require extensive modification in order to work the way you want them to.