The Beginning/What already happened.

               Welcome to Frankly Engineered

Hello and welcome to the first post in my Frankly Engineered series in which I take you along with me on my journey to grow as a young engineer in highschool. I am part of my local school's robotics club and I have just gotten familiar with the Arduino and Micro bit platforms this year. This blog will be updated weekly as I shift into the summer season and time becomes freed up.

The Goal:

Share my findings in all my electronic/robotic journeys with the internet to motivate others to join and to keep track of my progress mostly learning to code and other aspects of robotics and engineering.

The week of 4/7/25:

I will split this up into the different projects I worked on this week and the challenges and problems I grew from. I will try to keep a timeline to keep sense of the progress during the year.

Who/What am I working for?

In our robotics club we participate in both the Square One Robotics Program which is in Michigan mainly along with our yearly First Robotics Competition team which I was lucky to shadow this year. Currently, as we are towards the end of our robotics season we are out of the "rush" from FRC (First Robotics Competition) and each of our individual teams really lock into their own space and get done with their tasks. Our club consists of a Remote Control Car team (MINI IVD), an Underwater IVD team, an Autonomous IVD team, and a Vehicle to anything team (V2X). As a growing code student I was excited to help anywhere I could so I dedicated myself to a code centric team: V2X. I spent most of my time testing and experimenting with mini bots used in V2X:

These bots although tiny could do a lot and I dove into them which sparked my code journey. The Cutebot

as seen above is one the tiny bots our school purchased for the school-day mecatronics class. They are very simple to use and can be coded with a simple windows program, the boards they use called micro bits have many functions and their program on the computer has many extensions to fit each bot. Now, let me organize my journey and then bring you to the present day so things become crystal clear. 

Pre-Season V2X:

Pre-Season V2X this year started off strong with our first task being to create something to bring to our STEM-day at the middle school. Square one requires some sort of ambassadorship each year so our robotics coach choose to bring us to our biggest middle school. We got setup in an empty room and each of our teams brought something unique with them. I took charge of creating a fun activity with these mini bots, I used Micro bit game controllers, black electrical tape, and my code to come up with a fun challenge. 

The concept was relatively simple; create a course to show off the tiny bots and find a way to incorporate STEM. I used the radio function in the block code (an alternative to line code the micro bits can use to make code easier to understand) and then planned out the obstacle course for the bots to follow and for the bots to block. I then handed off two controllers and let the kids race for as many laps as they could complete. One thing to note is how I wanted to make a more engaging station however I need to make things simpler as some of the mapping on the controllers were confusing. Anyways, the day turned out pretty good and all the kids enjoyed it. Next on the Pre-Season V2X list was understanding the parameters of Square One (rules for competition) and how teams were going to be formed. 

This is going to wrap it up for this weeks blog but I hope you guys look out for more to come in the future. I have a lot of fun RC Arduino related work I am planning on sharing soon and I can always make separate posts explaining some of the tools we use. I hope you all enjoyed reading and leave feedback on how I can improve and what you would like to see out of this blog.