Ok, wow, what woulda been the traditional season is more than half done… now would be time to realized you don’t have a crate and frantically start figuring that out. Or that you’ve lost the tags next to wherever you put all the IGUS stuff…
My win, bluntly, still employed. Can’t say that for some of my coworkers and that makes me sad.
I got some great insights from my fellow teammates as well as mentors for what to write about in our Woodie Flowers Essay that I will have co-written by Thursday. The mentor we nominated this year absolutely deserves it, and I can’t wait to have an essay that shows that.
Got our Axiom AR8 V5 up and running (in the school copy room…).
Extra win: got it running using Kiri:Moto and Onshape. So kids on chromebooks will be able cut parts (eventually).
Far bit of stuff this week:
Survived my conference trip with no major hiccups. Considering there were 5 total modes of travel involved I’m calling that a win. (Albeit only one that may have been problematic ) .
Made some good contacts and touched base on a project or two.
Had some feedback on my own work that I hadn’t fully considered, overall a good thing, albeit annoying in the moment because I didn’t have the answers immediately available.
The cats seem to have worked out an issue or two when the humans were out of the house. So that’s good. More peaceful now.
Oh and ROBOT PARTS!!! We progressed from “pieces of 2*1 cut” to “assembling with custom side-plates”. Big relief. Send-cut-send worked well.
It warmed up enough so that I could volunteer again at the kangaroo exhibit at the Detroit Zoo.
And I passed the first part of a rather important required training, 100%.
Man… Before this morning it would’ve been a pretty good week.
Students got a swerve chassis together (yes it’s partially… Okay mostly wooden but so what). The KitBot is up and running as well while we work on the main bot.
I have a student I’ve been teaching some NodeJS and Web dev to and they are trying to work on a team attendance system with NFC cards. It’s a great idea and they were able to make their own endpoints and make a sample program over the course of this week.
Then this morning I found out my father died overnight. Not a win at all, but he was the one who taught me how to work with my hands (he was a carpenter and ASE master mechanic), he was my first coach in just about every sport and he was the guy who helped me when I was first coaching to read the field drawings and make field pieces in our garage. I’m gonna miss him like crazy, already do. So hopefully this next week goes better.
I have an amp-scoring robot arm that will be intaking and scoring notes by Monday.
It’s not spectacular, but a good start that I am proud of.
I got laid off 2 and a half weeks ago.
Last Tuesday I got an offer for another job. I’m excited about this new company, especially since a lot of former coworkers now work at this new place.
My start date is less than a month after my layoff date, and I can’t describe how great that feels.
hope you feel better my friend. as someone that’s been through the loss of a parent it’s definitely not easy, but i hope you can still find happiness elsewhere. keep going strong my friend!
Robot drove for the first time today! Thankfully code ported from last year seems to still work and it just worked with no hiccups so far. Should be able to climb chain tomorrow and get really working on intaking and scoring NOTES.
I’m so sorry for your loss, but I know that doesn’t make the pain better.
Sending love and hugs 
I took a two day first aid training course with my coworkers at our office this week. That was pretty cool. I also did a practice exam entirely in turkish. I’ve never taken any kind of exam in turkish before. It’s really really hard when it’s not your native language. Normally I’d be the first to finish an exam, but this time I was the last because I was struggling to read it. But I did read it and while I didn’t get enough right to theoretically pass, I was close and if I do a few more practice exams I think I’ll be ok. This may be the first time in my life I have to actually study if I want to pass the exam too.
Also while my coworker was at my house earlier this week and looking for my iPad pen, she found my duckknife, Atatürk, and turkish flag pins that have been missing for about a year now so that is a big win.
A big win this week is signing up to the Space Cookies Menstrual Equity program! Can’t wait to fulfill my ambassador job at our Week 1and 4 competitions!
Besides that, I also made the decision to buy a pride flag cape for competitions, and (little bit of self promotion) laptop stickers to hand out to people who say hi to me at comps.
Had a fun time at my school’s International Night, ate lots of delicious food.
I also finalized my course selections for next year. I finally applied to take Combating Intolerance, a special class my school offers that teaches you how to fight transphobia, homophobia, sexism, and stuff like that.
I had a friend give me a beautiful gift
I could go on and on, but I don’t want to take up too much space. 
The robot is 95% mechanically together and the drivetrain is wired, marking one of the fastest builds we’ve probably ever accomplished. Lots of refinement to go, but it’s a nice feeling to have a lot of time to focus on that side of things, as opposed to struggling to get anything put together for a comp for once.
One of the AndyMark goats acted as a supervisor to our robot build process, carefully considering if there’s enough space on the robot for him to ride along in…
Thank you for the sympathy everyone. Appreciate it very much. The team is working diligently without me, thought I’d share a slightly late win.
They got their first ever swerve drive. calibrated and programmed. without me! This is a head coaches dream when we’re absent. I’m so proud of them.
Got through a key deadline at work. Only another month until shipping…
And the team is making progress, despite the usual batch of small setbacks.
I got through my senior speech this week! My school has a requirement to graduate to give an 8-10 minute speech in front of the entire senior class about your personal journey and growth throughout high school, and it’s a really big milestone in terms of graduation. I applied to (and was chosen) to do mine in front of the entire school in our auditorium (as the closer, increasing both the honor and the stress) – and it went really well! I talked about how I’ve grown in humility and my ability to work in and form communities through my time in debate and FRC, and focused a lot on my friends in FIRST and how they supported me. It also touched on my journey to discover my identity as gender-queer, which a few underclassmen told me made them feel seen which is just a wonderful feeling.
I also was able to get a recording of it to send to all my FRC friends included in it who weren’t present live – which was super cool.
As someone who lost my father in 2016 during build season then, I still remember how difficult a time this was for me. My father also taught me to work with my hands, lots of good memories spending time in the garage with him.
My best advice: make time to grieve when you’re ready, but it’s also ok to put it on the shelf when it becomes overwhelming. It’s ok to sink yourself in mentoring or work for a while, but don’t forget to return to those thoughts and memories and give yourself time to process, time to remember, time to cry. When you’re ready. Also, remember to be grateful that you had a relationship with someone worth grieving. That’s a blessing in itself.
Our alpha bot was up and driving this week. It’s not the most refined as is, but I think we’d be ok if the competition was this weekend. Now to make sure all the lessons learned get transfered over when we build the competition bot.
This year’s minibot it kicking my bot . We’ve made such a small robot on the 1:1 scale that the 1:2 scale robot is smaller than an FTC robot. The win is the ring note launcher absolutely rips. The first test yesterday launched it nearly half a field.
Comparison of a neo550 and a normal 550
Progress as of Saturday morning
