2025 Year in Review

November and December in the shop!

November and December in the shop have been spent continuing preparation for Build season. We have been training up on the tools in the shop, learning some of the pitfalls of our Autonomous driving program and setting up our team goals.

We have also been learning to prototype, and after drawing our battery boxes and shooters up on paper, we tried our hands at cardboard mock- ups.  One or two of the students have even moved to CAD design.  In addition, we have rebuilt two robot carts, continued cleaning the robotics room, and elected team captains! 

Our Captains for the 2026 Build Season are:

• Team Captains are Laura (Hulk) & Jaclyn

• Programming, Electrical, and Controls (PEC) Captain is Jaclyn

• Safety Captain is Jaclyn

• Design Captain is Trinity with Maggie as backup

• Mechanical Captain is Sean, with Tyson as the vice captain

• Scouting Captain is Alanah

• Business Captain is Maggie 

• Drive team:  Laura will be a Drive Captain, Jaysun is our Technician, and other positions will be decided by the team once we know the game.

Congrats to all of our new leaders.  

The Shop: October

This month so far in the shop has been busy: 

the Programming, Electrical, and Controls Sub-team (PEC) has been learning how to use Path Planner to create autonomous driving paths for our robot using April tags in last year's game.  We have made some progress with Guilli, last years robot, while it is up on the cart, and we may be ready to drive it out this week.   

Our Business Sub-team has been canvassing the community to seek sponsorship for this year's competition and also updating the website and media packet.  We have also been working to produce the newest SoundBYTE newsletter, which should be ready for email distribution this week.  Other students are taking on organizational tasks, sorting and organizing the shop to pare down our extra supplies and get it in good shape for Kick off.  Students are submitting their applications for leadership this week as well.

The Design & the Mechanical Sub-teams have been working on the theme for this year's upcoming robot game (Rebuilt) and have started working out our T-shirts, badges, and some costuming ideas for the year.  Design & Fabrication on the robot side is working through learning to CAD a simple fastener board, and another group of design students are working on a scaled wiffle ball shooter for our DEMObot DEBBY.  The rest of the students are cleaning off the trailer to see if we can repaint and resurface the sun-damaged side.

Tool training continues for all students this month as well.  Live demonstrations of hand and power tools are happening through November.

Robotics Outreach

October is the month we focus on Outreach, Sponsorship, and Learning.  This month is focused on tools and coding.  pop over to our outreach page to learn all about our community coding challenge for October, "If you give a Coder a Cookie".  Vernonia and Astoria Schools have been invited to help celebrate coding with this activity.  We encourage other schools in the area to join us with their own version too.  

FIRST LEGO League Mentoring

September 16 was the first day of FIRST LEGO League (FLL) for South Columbia County sponsored by PCC OMIC in Scappoose.  This fantastic program allows local families to experience LEGO robotics for children from 4th grade through 8th, and due to the tireless work of the Fab Lab, it is offered to families for free.  Byte Sized Robotics helps supply volunteers for this endeavor with student support from the High School and adult mentorship.  On opening day, Byte Sized Robotics had a student, an alumni, and a mentor there to support the two FLL teams this year.

Homecoming Outreach & Club Rush

It is time to recruit some new team members at our annual club rush in fall.  We had fun showcasing our current project, TEE REX our prototype tee shirt shooter which kind of resembles a dinosaur.  

Homecoming in a rural High School is a pretty big deal.  Byte Sized walked in the parade, had Senior Homcoming court representation and generally supported our school in an age-old Fall tradition. 

Girls Gen Oregon

Girls Gen is a friendly competition at Wilsonville High School in the off-season to give focus to the female and non-binary students on the team. We had seven students come out and one come later as a visitor.  

Driving week: Robotics and Sponsor

Late September: In the shop this week, we are practicing driving for Girls Gen, heading out to the neighborhood to seek sponsors, and preparing some shirts for our last year's sponsors.

FIRSTFare Sept 20

A couple of the team managed to make it to Portland State University for a day of workshops and classes in robotics.  One of our senior students, Sean, even taught a class on Swerve drive maintenance and upkeep to 30 high school students and mentors.

September 2025:

School has resumed.  We are turning our attention to gearing up for Oregon Girls Gen on October 4, 2025.   We are working this week on getting our robot to see the April Tags, getting some updates to the website, getting our sponsorship packets ready to go out, and getting our yearly thank you packets out to our amazing sponsors!