Hunter's Page

Quick note: If you’re going to read anything, scroll to the bottom and read about competition season.

FIRST Robotics Competition

FRC, short for FIRST Robotics Competition, is a worldwide competitive robotics league for high school students. Most robots usually weigh in at around 120 pounds and are two-and-a half feet wide with varying heights; they’re pretty big machines. My team, 696 Circuit Breakers, was founded back in 2001 at my local high school and has competed several times every year since then. Throughout those years and with the help of our industry-grade machinery, our team became known for precision-machined parts and beautiful crafstmanship.

696’s 2014 competition robot, SnapDragon.

Progressing as a first-year member

First Year

Having not much skill, I didn’t have much to provide for the team. As an early year member, I quickly adopted a learning mindset and deep-dove into the world of computer-aided design. However, by the end of my first year, my only designed part on the robot was a 3D-printed radio mount.

Second Year

Moving on through my second year, things started to pick up. Many of our existing skillful senior year members had left, leaving only three of us on the design team. It was during this time that I mentally took ownership of a design project and set out on my first creation- the Spindexer.

Spindexer revision D (or fourth revision) after being installed on the robot chassis

This was my first time experiencing the engineering process:

Design

Build

Test

Repeat

It was incredibly eye-opening to see my design evolve from nothing more than a design of plastic sheets to a stand-alone module that performed as well as it did.

With all of the several hundred hours of work that year, we didn’t make it far in competition. For many reasons that I’ll hold back to keep this page readable, we had big culture problems which caused our failure at competition. This really bugged me and, after a brief pause from covid-19 junior year, it was something I set out to change for my last year on the team.

Our finished 2020 competition robot “Zenith” at the shop.

Fourth Year

This year was a curve-ball: our long-time lead mentor who served the team for over twenty years had left, and a gap-year from covid-19 meant that over 80 percent of the team had never seen one of these robots before. In my mind, while seeming terrible, this situation was the first step in changing our culture: everyone in our organization was new.

Engineering

I designed most things on the robot this year, and I’m quite proud of all of them. We spent lots of time developing our monkey bar climber, which turned out to be the overall fastest in the world.

Ventura competition: robot climber destroys itself during a climb. Ultimately caused by failure to account for variance on the field.

The revision one week later that ensures the robot does not destroy itself.

After that break (and hundreds of others on our own field), here’s a video of the robot successfully climbing at the next competition.

Organization

In short, our team changed two things at an organizational level very well:

Every member (at least those who did stuff) knew the team’s overarching mission, and that same member knew that the person to their left or right understood that just the same. This mission was to win first place.

We had fun in each others presence. This doesn’t seem obvious, but it is hard to describe how amazing it feels to work near those that you have a great time with, even while not working.

These changes (and a few others) created the most insane workaholic and enjoyable culture I’ve ever participated in.

Competition Season

Later that year, our team suffered a humiliating defeat at our first competition in Ventura, placing in the 20th or so percentile of all teams at the event. As a team, we knew our robot could perform way better (had some bad luck at this competition), and kept our heads up.

We ended up winning first place, undefeated (19-0) at our next competition in Los Angeles, and set our team’s all time record for the highest performing robot and only undefeated competition.

This win earned us the opportunity to compete at the world championships in Houston later that year. While we didn’t win, we finished with the following statistics: