2022 Engineering and Technology Club

I joined the Engineering and Technology Club at the College of DuPage in my freshman year and was head of the robotics team in my sophomore year from Fall 2021 to Spring 2022. The effect of quarantine the year prior was that only one other member and myself remained that year, but that didn't stifle ambition. At that time there was nothing except school and a will to compete in the 2022 NASA Lunabotics competition. So, we built up from two members, an entirely new team, and designed and manufactured an original mining robot in less than 9 months. The robot would compete against four-year institutions (COD is a two-year institution) and earn a 12th place finish overall and a third place autonomy award at the competition.

Here's a video demonstrating the robot a month out before the competition:

(At that point we had put a ton of effort into building the physical design, and this was the reaction of the team seeeing it all operate for the first time :D)

The team and faculty at College of DuPage were the ones who made it all possible. Thank you to the team, in no particular order: Abdullah Ali, Brenda Amador, Josef Brania, Oliver Burrus, Stavros Dellis, Zachary Egert, Anjanette Francisco, John Greager, Maxwell Harris, Faiza Khan, Nayal Merchant, Soka Suliman, Jaden Tran, Nick Vasquez, Elijah Wilkinson and Giovanni Zavalza. And the the faculty: Tom Carter, William Toldness, and Bob Clark. I'd also like to thank my family for supporting me so much throughout the entire project.

Epic team photo

My primary involvement was leadership. This was my first time seriously leading anything, but I had faith that investing in the team would lead to much better results than neglecting them to focus on individual contributions so I looked for resources to teach myself project management. This book was especially good. It basically covers a wide range of project management topics but then distills each topic down to its most essential points before providing a simple but practical method to apply those concepts. In the end, I think the additional studying payed off since we were able to effectively coordinate the different disciplines and do a lot in a short amount of time despite limited resources and experience. However, the majority of the credit still goes to the team for stepping up. If they weren't goated, than it wouldn't matter how good my leadership was.

I also filled in for programming since I was the team's most experienced programmer as well. We used ROS to build the robotics program and a part of this was building a ROS package to interface with the Talon FX motors from VEX robotics. This all happened in 2021, just before LLM's really became prolific for programming, so learning C++ and trying to get ROS running in a short amount of time from just documentation and forum posts was actually pretty difficult.

It was a lot of work. I was only able to manage everything because I had a lot of strategies to promote discipline and conserve time. Basically, anything that didn't compromise my health, I cut out of my life. I didn't drink caffeine or alcohol. I would sleep 9 hours a day. I would wake up every morning by going swimming before classes every day. I deleted all my socials, not just the apps but the accounts. I stopped listening to music. I used Cold Turkey which is this website blocker which can't be turned off. I think controls like website blockers help because I think distractions defeat us when we are tired and we act more unconsciously. So by preparing for moments when you know you're likely to give in to distraction, you become much more consistent in being able to regulate yourself.

It was a lot, for better and for worse. One thing that's cool though is how well the club is doing since then. In the years since my own, they have only produced more and more impressive results at different robotics competitions and I think that's really amazing considering that at one point the club was at a risk of disappearing completely. So it's been really cool to be a part of that larger ETC legacy.

Some additional photos:

A free Crave Clutch™ box we got from our White Castle sponsorship

High-tech NASA brick technology weighing down the front of the robot

A view of the finished robot from the back featuring ETC-chan

The 2023 ETC-chan redesign commemorating the final moments of the 2022 competition