A drivetrain optimizer for every FIRST Tech Challenge team
We built a drivetrain optimizer for our own drive team, revised it through the summer, and made it free for any team to use.
Every FIRST® Tech Challenge team has the same argument in the pit: gear for speed or gear for torque. The rough math most teams settle it with leaves out what decides a real match: battery sag, the 20 amp main fuse, whether the wheels grip or slip, and the stop at the end of every leg.
So we built an optimizer that models all of it, and made it free for every team. It runs in the browser, with nothing to install.
Tell it your robot: weight, wheels, battery, motor and gearing. Then give it a path. It reads Pedro Pathing chains, Pedro 3 paths or last season’s pathBuilder code, and drives them across a full field on your drivetrain. You get the time for that run, the stretches where corners rather than motors are costing you, gearing you can order (a cartridge plus a tooth pair, not a motor speed nobody sells), and the heaviest robot you can push off its spot. Each answer comes as a range rather than a single number, because the constants underneath are ranges.
If that gearing runs through a belt, the belt calculator finishes the job: type the two pulleys and either the spacing or the belt, and it solves the rest, then lists the nearest belts you can buy and who sells them.
Ethan Zhang wrote the first version for our own drive team in July. We revised it through the summer, and each round tightened the model and made its answers easier to act on.
If your team uses it and something looks wrong, tell us. The constants it runs on are published figures, not measurements from your robot, so numbers measured in your own pit make the model better for everyone.