Load-in is 6:30am Saturday
Maya R. 2h ago
Trailer is packed except the pit banner. Drivers meet at the school gate, bring your safety glasses.
The Robolyst toolkit
Run the whole season from one place.
Your roster, your team inbox, your build schedule, your documentation, your outreach numbers, your parts money, and your public site: fifteen workspaces on the same account you already use to scout the field, plus a Discord bot that runs them from the server your team is already in. 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 documentation entry; that 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.
Adoption
Most of your team never has to open Robolyst.
One more website is one more thing nobody signs into. So the parts a whole roster touches reach them where they already are: the server they are in every night, the calendar on their phone, a sheet of paper in the pit. Everything they do out there is written back here.
In Discord
A bot in your own server. Tasks open as threads and reply back, meetings ask who is coming with buttons, order requests get approved in the channel.
Nobody needs a Robolyst account to press a button.
On their calendar
One subscribe link per team. Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Outlook.
Every new meeting, cancellation and time change follows on its own.
On paper in the pit
Checklists tick from a phone. Pit scouting is a QR code taped to the table: scan, fill it in, done.
No login, no app, works on a borrowed phone.
By email
Sponsors and event coordinators write to the team address and get a reply from whoever is handling it.
They never learn there is a portal behind it.
The people who do sign in are the ones running things
Captains, subteam leads, the treasurer, your coach. Accounts are free and unlimited, so there is no reason to ration them. But a season works with four people signed in and the rest reached through Discord and a calendar feed.
What teams say Read the rest
-
this gotta be the best thing ever created, the amount of features and discord linkage is phenomenal
ITKAN-404
-
I love Robolyst. It helps make documentation and taking notes much easier. Since my team started using Robolyst meetings have also started to become much smoother.
Blood, Sweat, and Gears
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So far we are amazed by the layout, and how the app works it’s really something we didnt expect that could be made, in our view Robolyst could be a big app that helps FTC teams around the world, thank you.
MOoNA Warriors
Team
Who is on the team, what everyone just found out, and who wrote in.
Rosters churn every September. The portal assumes that: students join with a link, mentors and alumni are marked as such, subteams own their own work without a separate group chat, and the address sponsors email belongs to the team rather than to whoever set it up.
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 your documentation.
Roster sample
- MRIntake Owner
Maya Ramírez
Captain · Grade 12
- DKAutonomous Leads
Devon Klein
Programming lead · Grade 12
- PSIntake Member
Priya Shah
Grade 11
- AALeads
Ana Alvarez
Coach/MentorLead mentor
- SWChassis Member
Sam Whitaker
AlumniClass of 2024
Subteams Drivetrain Intake Outtake Arm Autonomous
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
Autonomous freeze is Wednesday
Devon K. Yesterday Autonomous
Anything not merged by the end of Wednesday’s meeting waits until after the league meet.
Sponsor thank-you letters
Priya S. Sends Fri 5:00 PM
Going out once the outreach subteam finishes the photo picks.
Delivered In-app Email Discord
Inbox
/team-management/inbox
- Claim one address, yourteam@robolyst.org, that the whole team can read, not one student.
- Assign a thread to whoever is handling it, and close it when it is answered.
- Reply as the team, with formatting and attachments up to 20MB. Schedule a send, or take it back in the 12 seconds after you hit send.
- Remote images and tracking pixels stay blocked until you ask for them.
- Mail from a supplier nobody has written a rule for still arrives filed and tagged.
- Search subjects, senders, and message text back through every season.
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 documentation 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
- 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.
- Write the title and the tags and subsystem are suggested on save. Take them or type your own.
- Comments with @mentions, plus an activity log of every change.
- Group by status, assignee, subsystem, or priority in any view. Save a filter you keep rebuilding.
- Link a task to a checklist, a documentation entry, or the meeting it is on the agenda for.
- Due-soon and overdue work notifies the person responsible.
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
Pre-match run 2/6
auto-runs 15 min before each match checks queue offline
Documentation
/team-management/documentation
Documentation 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, shared with the public site.
- Subsystem, stage and entry type are suggested from what you wrote, so the filing is done by the time you save.
- Entries map to the awards they support, so gaps are visible before judging.
- Anyone can write; only managers can delete.
Resources sample
DECODE game manual, part 2
Game manual firstinspires.org · 214 opens
Robot CAD — 2025–26
CAD cad.onshape.com · 96 opens
goBILDA — order history
Vendors gobilda.com · 41 opens
Programming resources
Docs ftc-docs.firstinspires.org · 27 opens
5 more found this week in tasks and documentation entries
Resources
/team-management/resources
Three libraries on one shelf: the links the team keeps losing, the files it keeps re-sending, and every photo it has taken this season.
- Links: the game manual, the CAD folder, the vendor you always reorder from. Paste a URL and the title, description, and site icon fill themselves in.
- Filed by category (game manual, cad, vendors, docs, media), renameable, and yours to add to.
- Anything pasted into a task or a documentation entry is collected here on its own, one row per link however many places cite it. Categories are suggested as you paste.
- Every link gets a short robolyst.org/go address, so open counts work even when it is shared in a chat.
- Files: manuals, slide decks, sponsor logos, the CAD export a sponsor asked for. Uploaded once, downloaded behind your login.
- Images: every photo, filterable by subsystem, season and album, and the same library the documentation editor and the public site pull from.
- 5 GB per team, with identical uploads stored once, so re-uploading the same logo four times costs one slot.
- Export: 29 spreadsheets across roster, planning, finance, resources and scouting, or the whole team as a zip with the files and photos in it.
- Open counts show what the team actually uses, and manager-only links and files stay off everyone else’s list.
Outreach
/team-management/outreach
The judges will ask how many people you reached. Most teams answer it in February by scrolling back through a year of photos and guessing. Log it the week it happens and the number is already there.
- Four kinds of reach, counted apart: in person, digital, media, donation & kits. A newspaper’s circulation and thirty kids in a room are not the same figure and never add up to one.
- Standing in front of people breaks down by who they were: elementary students, middle school students, high school students, adults & families, plus any audience you define.
- Partners you go back to every year: contacts, how often they host, how much notice they need, and when you last confirmed any of it.
- Next season planned before it starts, as ideas with a target date and the reach you expect.
- An outreach event on the calendar carries its log, so the meeting and the number are one record.
- Tag a log with the award it supports and the submission writes itself out of what you already entered.
Outreach log sample
Lincoln Elementary STEM night
In person Lincoln ElementaryNov 14
Elementary 96Adults 24
Valley Post: rookie team profile
Media Valley PostNov 9
Kickoff build reel
DigitalOct 26
Four starter kits to Mesa Middle
Donation & kits Mesa Middle SchoolOct 18
Middle school 4
Season total 120 in person · people3,400 digital · views18,000 media · readers4 donation & kits · recipients
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.
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
Available balance
$3,182.55
4 cardholders
Total raised
$4,910.00
23 donations
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.
Donors sample
robolyst.org/donate/your-team
Whitaker Family
2 gifts · last Nov 12, 2025
Thanked
$250.00
Ridgeline Machining Recurring
1 gift · last Oct 30, 2025
Thanked
$1,000.00
Anonymous
1 gift · last Nov 19, 2025
Send a thank you
$40.00
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.
Manage Website
robolyst.org/team-sites/your-team
Hero
Team name, tagline, robot photo
Stats
4 numbers you choose
Gallery
Photos from the media library
Sponsors
Logos, grouped by level
Contact form
Submissions land in the portal
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.
- The site is a draft until you publish it, so a half-built page is never the one a sponsor finds.
- Sponsors with their own levels and logos, reusable on the site and in documentation.
- Interest and contact forms whose submissions stay in the portal.
- Per-page view counts, so you know whether anyone read it.
Open source
- Publish what you built: CAD, code, a scouting sheet, an outreach curriculum. Files or a repo link, either way.
- Tagged by what it is (code, cad, drivetrain, intake, scoring mechanism) and listed in the public directory at /open-source, where teams vote the useful ones up.
- Downloads are counted per project, so you can see which release other teams actually took.
Embeds
- Your record, on a site that is not this one. 46 blocks (rankings, next match, award list, sponsor reel, a live ticker) arranged in a builder and pasted anywhere.
- The whole design travels in the URL, so there is nothing to host and an embed keeps working if nobody maintains it.
- Ready for Notion, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Google Sites and OBS, with a QR code for the ones that have to go on paper.
Sponsors Open source Forms
What a team website needs, in depth Discord
The same portal, in the channel the team already talks in.
Almost every FTC team runs on Discord, and almost every tool asks them to leave it. The bot goes the other way: the work shows up in your server, and what happens there is written back to the portal, so the two never disagree about who claimed a task or who is coming on Saturday.
Discord bot
add it to your server
- Tasks open as forum threads: a reply is saved as a comment, and /task claim works in the thread.
- Right-click any message and turn it into a task, assigned and dated.
- Meetings post a card with coming, maybe and out; that answer is the attendance register.
- Order requests open a form in Discord and post with approve and reject buttons.
- Checklist runs post a button per item, ticked from the phone already in your hand.
- Roles map to Discord roles once, then channel membership follows the roster.
Channels sample
Tasks posts as forum threads
build-tasks No ping
Checklists posts as forum threads
pit No ping
Announcements
announcements @team
Schedule
general No ping
Orders
purchasing No ping
Leads only
leads @leads
Match results
Don't post No ping
Channels save as you pick them. A ping is per channel, not per message; pick one only where being interrupted is the point. A surface you never point anywhere never posts, which is how you turn one off.
Slash commands
/task mine/next/order request/checklist run/scout/compare/rank/bracket/awards/nearbyControls
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, documentation coverage, spend. Per member, next to the team average.
It exists to answer the questions a lead actually gets asked: is documentation behind, who has been carrying the build, are we going to run out of money in February.
Scouting and match metrics, the other halfAttendance rate
87%
118 of 136 possible
Task on-time rate
74%
96 tasks in range
Days since last entry
3
41 entries this season
Meeting hours
142
38 of them outreach
Hours by subteam sample
Drivetrain
142h
Intake
118h
Outtake
96h
Arm
74h
Autonomous
41h
Settings
/team-management/settings
Roles & permissions 53 switches
Every role between these two is one you write: a Build Lead who can approve orders but not touch the website. A member holds as many as the job needs, and the permissions add up.
Notifications 53 events
Team-wide defaults, then every member overrides their own. Push arrives on a phone with the site saved to the home screen, and any event set to email can be rolled into one digest a day. Quiet hours stop a phone buzzing overnight, and leave the bell and the email alone. Webhooks post into Discord or Slack, and 34 of the 53 events are cleared to carry into a shared channel. Team verification, the join code, and the due-soon window live here too.
Screenshots
What it actually looks like
Every one of these is the portal itself, captured out of the live demo, which anyone can open, without an account.
Questions teams ask first
- Is Robolyst free for FTC teams?
- Yes. The whole toolkit is free to use. Robolyst is run by the Robotics Catalyst Foundation, a nonprofit, not sold as a subscription.
- Do we have to type in our competition schedule and results?
- No. Competitions are pulled from the official FIRST Tech Challenge schedule, and match results, rankings and season stats update from the same data as they are posted.
- Who can see what we put in the portal?
- Portal data (tasks, budgets, documents, the roster) is visible to the members you invite to your team. Your public team website shows only the pages you choose to publish.
- Can we use our own domain for the team website?
- Yes. Point your domain at Robolyst and your site is served from it with HTTPS; the robolyst.org address permanently redirects there.
- Does it work with Discord?
- Yes. A bot you add to your own server. Tasks open as threads that reply back, meetings ask who is coming with buttons, order requests are approved in the channel, checklists are ticked from a phone in the pit, and FTC team and event data answers on a slash command. Everything it does is written back to the portal.
- Does it handle team money?
- Budgets, parts orders, expenses and receipts live in the finance section, and teams under our 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsorship can take tax-deductible donations through it.
- How long does setup take?
- An afternoon. Create the team, invite the roster with one link, and import your competitions. The rest fills in as the season happens.
- Do all our students need accounts?
- No. Accounts are free and there is no cap, but the parts a whole roster touches work without one: the Discord bot takes RSVPs and checklist ticks from anyone in your server, the calendar feed is a subscribe link, and pit scouting is a QR code. A season runs fine with the leads signed in and everyone else reached where they already are.
- How do we get everyone to actually use it?
- Start with the two things that replace something instead of adding to it: connect the Discord bot to the server your team already lives in, and share the calendar feed so meetings land on the phones people already check. Announcements, RSVPs, and pit checklists all work from there. The portal is where the leads work; for everyone else it is invisible.
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.
Talk to us and other teams in the Discord →