FRC Build Season Timeline: A Week-by-Week Plan from Kickoff to Competition

Six weeks. That is roughly how long you have between Kickoff and your first competition to design, build, wire, program, and practice with a competitive robot. It sounds impossibly short, and the first time you live through it, it is genuinely chaotic. But the best teams are not the ones with the most CNC machines or the biggest budgets. They are the ones with a plan. This is a week-by-week guide to spending those six weeks well, grounded in how the FRC season actually works today.

How the build season really works now

For the 2026 REBUILT presented by Haas season, Kickoff was Saturday, January 10, 2026 at noon Eastern, when FIRST revealed the game animation and unlocked the official game manual. From there, your "build season" runs until your first event, and competition events are spread across roughly seven weekends from late February through mid-April.

Here is the single most important rule change to understand: Stop Build Day and "bag-and-tag" are gone. FIRST retired them after the 2019-20 season because teams without the resources to build a second practice robot were at a disadvantage. There is no longer a date where you must seal your robot in a bag and stop working. Your real deadline is the day you load the robot for your first competition. That means you can iterate continuously right up to (and between) events — a huge change from the old model that this timeline is built around.

FIRST posts Team Updates every Tuesday and Friday during the season; these can change rules mid-build, so read every single one.

Week 1: Kickoff, game analysis, and strategy

This is the most important week, and almost none of it is spent building. Resist the urge to start cutting metal.

Read the manual together. Watch the Kickoff broadcast, then read the game manual as a team. The arena section and the scoring rules matter more than anything else right now. Note every way to earn points, every penalty, and the endgame.

Do the scoring math. Build a simple spreadsheet: how many points is each action worth, and how many can a realistic robot perform in the 2-minute-30-second match (in 2026's REBUILT, that is a 20-second autonomous period followed by 2:20 of driver-controlled teleop)? A robot that does one thing flawlessly almost always beats one that does five things poorly.

Pick a strategy, then a robot. Decide what role you want to play in an alliance before you design a single mechanism. Strategy drives design — not the other way around.

Week 1 checklist:

• Watch Kickoff and read the full game manual as a team
• Build a points-per-action scoring spreadsheet
• List the field's key dimensions, heights, and game-piece sizes
• Define your robot's "job" in one sentence (your robot priority list)
• Confirm the season's robot constraints in the current manual (for 2026, R103 limits the robot to 115 lb excluding bumpers, R408 caps it at 135 lb with bumpers, and R104 limits the starting configuration to a 110 in maximum frame perimeter and a 30 in starting height — always re-verify these against this year's manual, since they change)

If your strategy is solid, everything downstream gets easier. If you want a deeper structure for this, our mechanical build guide walks through turning a strategy into a mechanism list.

Week 2: Prototyping

Now you build — but you build to learn, not to keep. The goal of prototyping is to answer questions cheaply before you commit them to a real design.

Use wood, scrap, polycarbonate, zip ties, and the kit motors to mock up your hardest mechanisms. Can your intake actually grab the game piece? Does your shooter reach the target? Test the riskiest, most uncertain mechanism first, because that is the one most likely to force a redesign.

A common shortcut here is the official quick-start robot. The REV ION FRC Starter Bot (and historically the AndyMark KitBot/Everybot) gives newer teams a proven, buildable drivetrain and basic scoring platform you can have driving in days, freeing time to prototype your custom mechanism.

Week 2 checklist:

• Prototype the highest-risk mechanism first
• Test with real (or accurate replica) game pieces
• Record what works with measurements, photos, and video
• Kill bad ideas fast — a failed prototype is a success, not a waste
• Start a parallel "drivetrain" track so a chassis is moving early

Week 3: CAD and design freeze

By now your prototypes should have answered the big questions. This week you convert decisions into a real design.

CAD the whole robot, not just the cool parts. Model the drivetrain, mechanisms, electronics board, and battery location together so you catch collisions before they cost you a week of fabrication. Confirm everything fits inside the legal frame perimeter and height with bumpers attached.

The deadline that matters this week is a design freeze — a self-imposed date after which the geometry stops changing. Without it, designs drift forever and fabrication never starts. Because bag-and-tag is gone you can still refine details later, but the core architecture needs to lock now.

Week 3 checklist:

• Complete a full-robot CAD assembly with all subsystems
• Verify legal size, weight estimate, and bumper mounting
• Generate a Bill of Materials and order long-lead parts immediately
• Set and announce your design-freeze date
• Plan the electronics layout in CAD so wiring is not an afterthought

If CAD is new to your team, start with our CAD design guide before this week, not during it.

Week 4: Fabrication and assembly

Frozen design in hand, this is the loud week. Turn drawings into parts and parts into subsystems.

Split into parallel teams: one fabricates the drivetrain, another the main mechanism, another preps the electronics board. Assemble subsystems independently so they can be tested before final integration. Keep your BOM and CAD open as the source of truth — when a part does not fit, fix the model, not just the metal.

Week 4 checklist:

• Fabricate parts in priority order (drivetrain first — you cannot test code without it)
• Assemble and bench-test each subsystem in isolation
• Build and wire bumpers to the legal weight allowance
• Track remaining parts daily; chase down anything backordered
• Mount electronics on a board you can later move onto the robot

Week 5: Wiring, programming, and integration

This is where teams that ignored programming and electrical all month get punished. The earlier those teams started on a test board, the smoother this week goes.

Wire to spec. Follow the official control-system layout: a roboRIO (or roboRIO 2.0) as the robot's brain, a REV Power Distribution Hub (or the legacy CTRE PDP) feeding the motor controllers, and the radio — the Vivid-Hosting VH-109 in 2026 — for driver-station communication. The WPILib robot wiring guide is the canonical reference — match it exactly during inspection.

Integrate and program in parallel. As subsystems land on the frame, get the drivetrain driving, then layer on mechanism control and your 20-second autonomous routine. Tools like PathPlanner make building and tuning autonomous paths far faster than hand-coding them.

Week 5 checklist:

• Wire the full robot per the official control-system diagram
• Confirm every motor controller has a CAN ID and responds
• Get teleop driving, then tune each mechanism
• Build and test at least one autonomous routine
• Run the official inspection checklist on your own robot

Programming and electrical move fastest when they start in Week 2, not Week 5 — see our programming and electrical guides to get a head start.

Week 6: Driver practice and continuous iteration

The robot exists. Now the difference between a good team and a great one is practice and reliability.

Drive it, a lot. Your drivers need real reps to develop muscle memory under match pressure. Run full 2:30 practice matches. Time your cycles. Find what breaks and fix it before a referee or an opponent finds it for you.

And here is where the post-2019 freedom pays off: because there is no bag, you keep iterating. Reinforce the part that snapped in practice. Re-tune the autonomous that missed. Add a feature you ran out of time for in Week 4 — then keep improving between competition events too.

Week 6 checklist:

• Run full-length practice matches daily
• Log and fix every failure (loose bolts, brownouts, dropped CAN devices)
• Build a pre-match checklist and a spare-parts kit
• Pack tools, batteries, and a laptop with your code backed up
• Keep a running "fix-it" list to work through between events

The one rule that ties it all together

If you remember nothing else: strategy first, building second. A team that spends Week 1 deciding exactly what their robot must do, and then protects that decision through a design freeze, will out-build a faster, better-equipped team that started cutting metal on Kickoff night. The six-week clock is unforgiving, but a clear plan turns it from a panic into a process.

Ready to turn your strategy into real hardware? Start with our Mechanical Build track.