Welcome to FRC Team 2181’s build blog! We are excited to share what we’ve been working on this fall and what we build this coming season in Crescendo. You’ll notice there is no Open Alliance tag. It’s not because we don’t love OA, we do!!! This is the first time we’re trying to do a build blog publicly so we want to take a “no pressure” route on ourselves. We’re excited to see how this year goes, and we hope to make it official OA next season.
About Us
Team 2181 GEARS is a FIRST Robotics team from Blaine High School in Minnesota. Our high school pulls from a few different Northern suburbs of the Twin Cities and is part of the Anoka-Hennepin School District with a number of other FRC teams (7850, 2225, and 4664).
The team currently has about 20 team members this year (13 of them are 9th graders) and 4 mentors. We are still recruiting more mentors to help.
In the preseason (September-December), we met every Thursday from 7-9 PM. During the build season, we will meet Tuesday and Thursday from 3-8PM, Wednesday 3-6PM, and Saturday 12-5PM. That’s 18 hours total per week.
In 2024, we are planning on attending the Lake Superior Regional. We are currently on the waitlist for the Granite City Regional, and with the help of our regional director, are keeping an eye on the MN 10K Regional in hopes of adding a second competition to our schedule this year.
We plan to go to at least 1 Week Zero event. We will also compete in MN offseason events next fall.
Quick History of 2181:
The team started in 2007 and was led by the high school woodshop teacher until 2018. There have been a number of leadership changes since then with Covid especially doing a number on team/mentor recruitment. In 2022, @justicht led the team with Jarrod assisting. @jjbydlon joined in 2023. This year, we’ve recruited Nathan to help as well. All 4 of our mentors are professionals outside of the school.
Our Booster Organization was in shambles after Covid when many of the booster parents had “retired,” and there was no understanding on how to keep it running. A small group of parents spent the past year getting that in order which has been incredible. We’ll speak more to this in an update post later but our fundraising has really kicked off again.
Our school is a Project Lead The Way magnet high school, called “Center for Engineering Math and Science (CEMS)”. We only had 7 returning members this year. We concentrated hard on recruitment last spring and this fall by visiting the middle school and CEMS classes (thus the 13-ish 9th graders).
Long story short, we often refer to ourselves as a “2nd year team with an old team number.”
Update Schedule
We hope to post at least once a week during the build season when we have things to talk about. If we miss one, keep an eye on our socials and we’ll try to make the next post twice as good!
We’ll be posting the first preseason update soon. We have a few topics lined up to talk about from last year/preseason. If you have any questions or thoughts, we would love to hear them!
Upcoming Preseason Posts (in no particular order):
- 2023 Season “In Review”
- Branding/Logo Update
- 2023 Fall Preseason
- Fundraising/Recruitment
Team Links
- Team Website
- YouTube
- Twitter (X)
- GitHub
- OnShape (we are working on this!)
Jeremy B and Justin S
