Daniel Sabian

About

I started the robotics club at Greene Middle School in 6th grade and ran it for three years — every semester I manned the table at the club fair and signed up new members. One year we built a small servo car and filmed it for the school news network. The arm I am finishing now began there as a club project, and I am completing it myself: three degrees of freedom on stepper motors and GT2 belts, with a microservo gripper. What I like most is drawing something in Fusion and then watching it come together and actually work.

The turntable the whole arm bolts onto is 1/8 inch mild steel. I designed the hole pattern in Fusion, we cut it on the metal laser cutter at Maker Nexus, then drilled and tapped every hole M4 and M5 and sandblasted it. That machine had been cutting rectangles as parallelograms until I worked out that one stepper was driving two belts that had drifted out of step, and fixed it. The turntable exists because the laser cutter got repaired first.

Things go wrong constantly, and that is most of the work. I have redesigned about three quarters of the arm's printed parts — when one breaks I look at where it broke, work out why, and print a better one. Before this I spent two years building an 8-bit computer out of logic chips, following Ben Eater's videos. He explains why a circuit works rather than showing you which wire goes where, so the wiring was mine. I stalled somewhere in the middle, came back to it, and got it running a Fibonacci sequence.

My first FIRST Robotics event was Dream Machines in spring 2023, where one of the teams let me drive their robot. That summer I spent two weeks helping a solar car team of Paly and Gunn high schoolers, mostly soldering — I was a rising 6th grader and never officially on the team, but I turned up every day. I have been soldering and building circuits since I was five.