FIRST Robotics - Reforging

 

School starts in about a week.  So also starts another FIRST robotics campaign.  Actually that's not entirely correct, we've done three outreach visits and had a work day in our new HQ.  Or our old one, it depends on your perspective.

Not counting the weird Covid year we spent one entire season working in the High School.  There were issues with storage space and shop access, and the general "mood" was less serious than one would prefer.  High School at the end of the day is a silly, silly place and some of that carried over.

So we pulled up stakes and moved.  To the middle school shop area.  Back in fact to where it all began when I started teaching Machines Behaving Badly in the middle school after school program.  I think that was 22 years ago.

In an antilogical sort of way it just makes sense.  High end equipment you are not allowed to use is worthless.  Sturdy, lower tech machines we can use, are.  We are increasingly designing the tricky stuff virtually and sending it out for laser cutting anyway.  Oh, and we found this:

This is a CNC router, an enormously helpful machine for FIRST robotics teams.  It essentially can be programmed to cut holes and shapes precisely in the very materials we use the most.  Aluminum tube, polycarbonate, sometimes acrylic.  We found it lonesome and abandoned at the Middle School.  It appears to have been bought, never used at the High School level, then handed off to just take up desk space for a year or two before we came along.  Refurbishing this is one of our early priorities.  The prototyping sub team is very happy.

Some things just don't photograph well.  So I can't show you that which made me very happy.  Oh, its just a large storage closet.  But it has a lockable door and banks of shelving reaching to the ceiling.  Much old junk has been cleared out.  More will be.  I'm normally not given to emotional outbursts but I stood there in the Promised Land of access and felt a sense of excitement that was largely absent last year.  Did my eyes tear up just a little?  I'm not sayin'.

Our biggest crew ever, most of them now seasoned veterans.  And we'll be putting better tools in their hands.

Never settle for mediocrity.