This is gonna be long and wild. Mostly team wins, can’t talk about work stuff in too much detail.
January: We started kickoff as per usual but we’re given the fun news that our new Building Dean wanted use to move to a new lab by the end of summer. We had a large influx of students from a couple of local area schools without teams. Finally we began the work on frczero.org
https://www.reddit.com/r/FRC/s/MddyU0tknL
February: We had gotten our first custom built complex drive base built called X Drive. This is now an illegal drive train but was such a cool achievement for the students. They had that idea all season long and did make it happen (at the expense of other things). I’m proud of worked.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FRC/s/DwlTYnXPdd
March: The students had a rough event to start and it lit a fire under them for the second event. They came back much stronger and ready to deal with the issues. After that last event they went into full planning mode to not end back up there again.
April: We finished packing up our old lab and began to shut down for the year. This was a big big deal and took a ton of time and weekends to do. We had that space for roughly 10+ years off and on.
May: the team stopped with official meetings, but we began to get into Leadership planning mode. Having students tackle various projects, like Project Management Software, Sponsorship drives, etc. For work I was able to attend the Automated Trade show in Detroit which was a blast.
June: We began to move to slack, we began moving to our new lab as it was finally open and school was out. The new lab was actually the original machine shop when the school first opened so in a way we were coming home again finally.
July: Took a break, my anniversary is in July.
August: Students were at the schools doing summer planning, recruiting and speaking to a group of local businesses at a 3d printing seminar for the county. This was a great outreach event and we made tons of contacts
September: Held our open houses and finished setting up the new lab space
October: worked on Goosebots, 3d printing a swerve drive to play with (we have never done any before), booting up the CNC and learning. We started setting up fundraiser events with local businesses.
November: got the CNC to run sample files but not our own parts. We finally had a breakthrough at the end of the month. At this point we had our first restaurant partnership fundraising events and made roughly $100 for just eating some panda express and sharing on CD. We started working on getting more of these on the books
December: Wrapped up training, got our first Aluminum custom parts cut in house on the Omio. We started GoFundRobots.org for our own use and to help spread what we had been learning in Oct/November. I had an article published that I was interviewed for about Wireless communications and Wireless Charging for mobile robotics. Finally we got to talk to Collin Fultz via Teams which was awesome!
It was a busy year full of transitions and new experiences. I wouldn’t give any of it up and I hope next year will be more stable though. We need some solid ground to just build on this year.
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