FRC was an incredible experience. Like you said, the fast pace round table discussions and develop as you go was a lot of fun and inspiring. The biggest takeawa

FRC was an incredible experience. Like you said, the fast pace round table discussions and develop as you go was a lot of fun and inspiring. The biggest takeaway for me was the positive energy and great sportsmanship I saw in every team and competition. Hope that still rings true 10+ years later. Coming from traditional sports and previously disconnected from the "nerds" and band kids, I came in with a very different headspace than I left with. Thank you for mentoring!! I know every team needs all the mentorship they can get. I've thought about coming back too but cold feet so far. Oh and a bit of fun technical story to relate to yours. Back then touch screens on consumer devices was still pretty new, I remember a couple kids on the team had the original Android and iPhone devices. A couple of years earlier I had followed an Instructables guide for a "touch" device with infrared/glass/webcam and in the process learned how cameras can see infrared after removing a filter. Then in my competition year there was a goal of autonomously interacting with some stage elements and this question of how do we do vision processing to make that work? Maybe it was implied somewhere and I don't remember the details anymore, but I immediately recalled that webcams can see infrared and the stage elements had reflective tape. So we butchered a webcam to remove the IR filter and add a near IR filter and then we slapped some IR LEDs on the front. Of course the software side (we used LabVIEW) was a whole other thing but the hardware side was captivating to the whole team and was a lot of fun to put together organically. Other great memories of replacing 4 motors, soldering heavy gauge wires and all, 15 minutes before a match and walking around the pits with a deep cycle battery wired to a car AC transformer to keep my batteryless sponsor hand me down laptop running.