Mount intake to chassis
Chassis blocked
Build subteam Sat
The Robolyst toolkit
Run the whole season from one place.
Your roster, your build schedule, your engineering notebook, your parts money, and your public site — eleven workspaces on the same account you already use to scout the field. Built by an FTC team, for FTC teams.
Free for every team · run by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit
One week of a build season, as the portal sees it.
Nothing here is a separate app. A meeting on the calendar carries the tasks due that day; a finished task asks for a notebook entry; a notebook entry cites the part you ordered.
- Mon
Build meeting logged. Attendance taken on the way in.
- Wed
Intake redesign moves to In Progress. Two people are unblocked.
- Thu
Iteration 3 written up, tagged Intake · Test, photos attached.
- Fri
Parts request approved and ordered against the robot budget.
- Sat
Pre-match checklist runs itself 15 minutes before every match.
Team
Who is on the team, and what everyone just found out.
Rosters churn every September. The portal assumes that: students join with a link, mentors and alumni are marked as such, and subteams own their own work without a separate group chat.
Members
/team-management/members
- Invite by email, or share one join code that anyone on the team can use.
- Add students who have not signed up yet as placeholders, then merge them in when they do.
- Subteams — drivetrain, programming, outreach — each with their own lead.
- Mark coaches, mentors, and alumni so the roster still reads correctly in year four.
- Titles, grades, and headshots feed the public site and the notebook.
Roster sample
- MR Owner
Maya Ramírez
Captain
- DK Manager
Devon Klein
Programming lead
- PS Member
Priya Shah
Grade 11
- MA Manager
Mr. Alvarez
Coach/Mentor
- SW Member
Sam Whitaker
Invite pending
Subteams DrivetrainIntakeOuttakeArmAutonomous
Announcements
/team-management/announcements
- Write it once — it lands in-app, by email, and in your Discord or Slack channel.
- Pin what matters so it stays at the top of everyone’s portal.
- Aim a post at one subteam instead of spamming the whole roster.
- Keep a draft until it is ready, then publish when it is.
- Every post is dated and attributed, so nobody argues about what was said.
Announcements sample
- Pinned 2h ago · Maya R.
Load-in is 6:30am Saturday
Trailer is packed except the pit banner. Drivers meet at the school gate — bring your safety glasses.
- Autonomous Yesterday · Devon K.
Autonomous freeze is Wednesday
Anything not merged by the end of Wednesday’s meeting waits until after the league meet.
- Draft Not published · Priya S.
Sponsor thank-you letters
Going out once the outreach subteam finishes the photo picks.
Delivered In-app Email Discord webhook
Build
The work itself: what is due, who is blocked, what got written down.
This is the half of the portal a team touches every meeting. Tasks, the calendar, pit checklists, and the engineering notebook are one system, so finishing something in one place updates the others.
Tasks
/team-management/tasks
switch the view
Board — grouped by status same four tasks
Not Started 1
In Progress 2
Machine new intake rollers
Intake
Maya R. Thu
Tune far-side auto path
Autonomous
Devon K. Fri
Complete 1
Write up intake iteration 3
Intake
Priya S. Wed
- Statuses are yours to name — the four above are only the defaults.
- Dependencies: a task states what blocks it, and what it unblocks.
- Assign a person or a whole subteam.
- Tags, subsystems, priority, and due dates, all filterable.
- Comments with @mentions, plus an activity log of every change.
- Link a task to a checklist or a notebook entry.
- Group by status, assignee, subsystem, or priority in any view.
- Due-soon and overdue work notifies the person responsible.
- Finish a task and the notebook prompt is waiting.
This week sample
3 Mon
4 Tue
5 Wed
6 Thu
7 Fri
8 Sat
9 Sun
- Meeting
Build meeting
Mon 4:00–7:00pm · 14 of 18 present
- Outreach
Library STEM night
Wed 6:00pm · Outreach · 3 hrs logged
- Competition
Cedar Valley League Meet 3
Sat 7:00am · Synced from the FTC schedule
2 tasks due Saturday show up on the event itself
Schedule
/team-management/schedule
- Meetings, scrimmages, outreach, and competitions on one calendar, colour-coded and filterable.
- Recurring meetings: cancel one occurrence or the whole series, and edits autosave.
- Attendance per meeting, feeding the season stats.
- Agendas and notes live on the event, not in someone’s DMs.
- Tasks due that day surface on the event itself.
Your FTC competitions, pulled in — not retyped
Search the same live FTC event database this site runs on, and add your league meets, qualifiers, and championship with their real dates, venues, and start times. When the event schedule changes, so does yours.
Add a competition sample
- On your calendar
Cedar Valley League Meet 3
Sat Jan 17 · Cedar Valley HS
- Add
Northgate Qualifier
Sat Feb 7 · Northgate HS
On the calendar app your team already checks
Every team gets a private feed. Subscribe once from Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, or Outlook and every new meeting, cancellation, and time change follows — no exports, no re-adding, no “did you see the message?”
Calendar feed sample
webcal://robolyst.org/api/calendar/… Apple CalendarGoogle CalendarOutlook
Read-only, revocable, and separate from the reminders the portal sends you.
Checklists
/team-management/checklists
- Write a template once, then run it as many times as the season needs.
- Start from a real preset: Pit Setup, Competition Packing, Pre-Match, Robot Inspection.
- Sections and quantities — six charged batteries, not one line saying “batteries”.
- Auto-runs: 15 minutes before every match, or an hour before a competition.
- Checking off is live and team-wide, and works with no signal in the pit.
- Missed items are recorded, so the same thing stops being forgotten.
Pre-Match try it
2/6
auto-runs 15 min before each match checks queue offline
Documentation
/team-management/documentation
The engineering notebook, kept as you go instead of the week before judging. Entries are typed by subsystem, entry type, and where they sit in the design process — so the board view shows how a subsystem actually progressed.
- A real editor: headings, lists, images, and @-links to tasks and teammates.
- A media library of every photo, filterable by subsystem and season.
- Entries map to the awards they support, so gaps are visible before judging.
- Anyone can write; only managers can delete.
Entry sample
Intake Test Iterate Priya S. · Wed
Intake iteration 3 — compliant wheels at 45°
Straight rollers stalled on two samples at once. Angling the wheels fixed the jam but cost us 0.4s per cycle, so we widened the throat by 6mm and re-tested.
links to task Machine new intake rollers
- roller-jam-2up.jpg
- wheel-angle-45.jpg
- cycle-timing.mp4
- throat-6mm.jpg
Design process Identify ProblemBrainstormResearchDesignBuildProgramTestIterate
Money
Where the money went, and who said yes.
Teams run on parts orders, receipts, and a budget somebody is keeping in a spreadsheet. The portal replaces the spreadsheet, and — if you want it — the bank account too.
Finance
/team-management/finance
- Budget categories per season, with income, rollover, and what is left.
- A student files a parts request; an approver approves it; whoever holds the card marks it ordered, then received.
- Every expense lands against a category and a subsystem.
- Reports: spend over time, spend by category, open orders.
- Out-of-pocket reimbursements with receipts attached.
- You decide whether members see the budget or only their own requests.
Budget — 2025–26 season sample
- Robot parts $1,840 / $2,400
- Travel & registration $1,275 / $1,500
- Outreach $210 / $600
- Spare electronics $495 / $450over allocation
Order queue sample
Urgent Compliant wheels ×8 Intake $61.40 Devon K. · needed by Thu
Requested Approved Ordered Received
Fiscal Account
/team-management/finance/fiscal-sponsorship
Optional, and the part no spreadsheet can do. Apply once and your team operates under the Robotics Catalyst Foundation's 501(c)(3): tax-deductible donations, a real balance, and debit cards in students' and mentors' hands without handing over a personal card.
- Issue and freeze member debit cards; every transaction shows up the same day.
- Receipts are chased automatically — an overdue receipt notifies the cardholder.
- Spending controls and requirements, visible to everyone on the team.
- No school activity account to book through, and no parent fronting the season on a personal card.
Team card
•••• •••• •••• 4417
JOHN DOE 09/29
Account sample
- Available balance $3,182.55
- Raised this season $4,910.00
- Receipts outstanding 1
Tax-deductible giving
/team-management/finance/donors
Most FTC teams are not their own nonprofit, so a donor writing them a cheque gets nothing back at tax time and a company's finance department has nobody to make the cheque out to. Under the umbrella that changes: gifts go to The Robotics Catalyst Foundation, a 501(c)(3) with a real EIN, earmarked for your team.
- Donors give at your own donation page and get an emailed receipt straight away — no chasing a treasurer for one.
- Companies get a name, an EIN, and an acknowledgement letter, which is usually the whole reason a sponsorship stalls.
- Every gift lands in the same balance your budgets and cards spend from, so nothing needs re-entering.
- The donor list tracks who has been thanked and who has not — thank-yous are the thing teams forget.
- It costs your team nothing to apply, and it stays optional.
Donations are made to The Robotics Catalyst Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN 39-2225353) acting as your team's fiscal sponsor. The Foundation retains full control and discretion over the funds and directs them to support the team. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.
Donation page sample
robolyst.org/donate/your-team
- Whitaker Family $250.00 Thanked
- Ridgeline Machining $1,000.00 Thanked
- Anonymous $40.00 Thank them
Receipts go out automatically. Sponsor logos from the same donors can drop straight onto your public site.
Outward
The face your sponsors, judges, and next recruits actually see.
Every team needs a website and nobody has time to build one. Yours is a page editor inside the portal, on a Robolyst address, with the sponsor logos and open-source releases judges ask about.
robolyst.org/team-sites/your-team
Hero
Stats
Gallery
Sponsors
Contact form
Sponsor levels Title Gold Community
Public Site
/team-management/public-site/profile
- Drag blocks into a page: hero, gallery, awards, roster, stats, quotes, video, donation, contact form.
- Pick a theme, or set your own colours; it stays legible in light and dark.
- Sponsors with their own levels and logos, reusable on the site and in the notebook.
- Open-source releases — CAD, code, designs — with files or links.
- Interest and contact forms whose submissions stay in the portal.
- Per-page view counts, so you know whether anyone read it.
Sponsors Open source Forms
Controls
Who can do what, who hears about it, and how the season is going.
A team is thirty students and four adults. The portal ships with real permissions instead of an honour system, and tells people what changed without anyone chasing them.
Stats
/team-management/stats
One dashboard for the season, built from work already recorded: attendance, hours, task throughput, notebook coverage, spend. Per member, next to the team average.
It exists to answer the questions a lead actually gets asked — is the notebook behind, who has been carrying the build, are we going to run out of money in February.
Season so far sample
- Attendance rate 87%
- Tasks finished on time 74%
- Notebook coverage 61%
- Meeting hours 142
- Outreach hours 38
Settings
/team-management/settings
Roles & permissions 22 switches
Build your own roles on top of these — a Build Lead who can approve orders but not touch the website.
Notifications 27 events
Team-wide defaults, then every member overrides their own. Webhooks post into Discord or Slack. Team verification, the join code, and the due-soon window live here too.
Set it up once, in an afternoon.
Create your team, invite the roster with one link, and pull your competitions off the FTC schedule. Everything else fills in as the season happens.