FRC Team 5419 - Lead Technical Mentor

This year, our team made it to the championships in Houston! We were on a division-winning alliance, which was a great experience for all the students.

In the initial design process, we narrowed down the game to key tasks that we thought our team could achieve, and to keep things mechanically simple, we built two independent shooting mechanisms - one side for the cones and one side for the cubes. It certainly was more challenging than expected to transition from our shop-tuned high accuracy to our initially low accuracy at competitions. The process taught me what to expect (or not expect) when running the robot in new environments with different lighting conditions and game piece wear & tear.

We still built a memorable and creative robot, and that brings me the most joy :)

Here’s some video from a practice match this year (links to YouTube):

Robots from my era of FRC

Saved here for my own fond memories :)

I was one of the leadership students and specialized in design and scouting (competition data analysis). In my senior year, I led the frisbee intake subsystem design (hacked together prototype from old robots on the left and final robot on the right).

We were World Finalists in 2010 and 2013, and Michigan State Champs in 2010, 2012, and 2013. Much love to the older female students on the team for making sure I immediately felt welcomed and valuable on the team!

In our off-season tournament, robots were fully designed and built by students, with only safety guidance from mentors. This was a great opportunity to prove that you had learned to take an idea from your imagination to reality. And learn which bets to make and step away from…