Last year, EXAIR had the opportunity to sponsor The University of Cincinnati Combat Robotics Club and Teams. I’ve blogged about how I have seen these bots at the Tech Expo, a senior design showcase I volunteer and judge. This group of students ranges from first-year students up to seniors, and they are on a path to winning these competitions. Not just because we sponsor them.
Right now it is a summer session at UC, so the buildings are mostly quiet and the bustle about campus isn’t like a fall day. These 4 students, though, are still pushing through and building, competing, learning, advancing, rebuilding… it goes on and on. They shared the stories behind the bots, some were inherited from past teams, others were fresh designs, and they also shared some thoughts on what they could do for their next fight.
Hearing them talk about these devices they have labored over and listening to their confidence climb when they start rambling off, the velocities the tip of the weapon travels remind me of when I was in a similar position. These students all shared a passion and had similar goals in mind; to be the best team that is in the field. This isn’t just another checkbox for them to complete a grade or a test, it is a vested interest.
This is not far off from most of us here at EXAIR. This place isn’t just a checkbox, it is a vested interest, we want to be good at our jobs and that is why we continue to push to achieve certifications for Application Engineers like CCASS and is also why we continue to attend webinars, take courses, and continue to learn.
If you want to see more of the UC Combat Robots, check them out on Instagram, and make sure to follow the NHRL league for more of their events.
Brian Farno, MBA – CCASS National Business Development Manager
This past week I was able to take part in one of the many incentives EXAIR offers to all of our team members, a volunteer day. EXAIR gives each employee the choice to go out into our community and choose an organization they connect with to volunteer for either a single 8-hour day or two 4-hour shifts. The past couple of years, I have reconnected with the director of the Mechanical Engineering Technology department at the University of Cincinnati where I received an undergraduate degree from to find out how I can get involved with the program and help the department that gave me the knowledge and understanding I use in my career. Much to my surprise, the first thing that came to mind for him was to be a judge at the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences Senior Tech Expo. This expo is where each student will showcase their Senior Design Project which they must complete in order to graduate. The judges are all alumni of their given programs and the students can elect to have their project be judged for various prizes that are donated by local companies and alumni. This was my third year judging for the MET department and there have been several of us that have networked and really get reminded of exactly where we were when we graduated and the amount of experience we lacked at the time.
There were 11 projects total in the MET discipline that were elected to be judged this year. We had 12 judges show up, so we broke into 4 teams. Three teams judged three projects while the remaining judged two larger scale projects. We judge the individuals/teams on different criteria like, communication skills, technical knowledge, presentation, complexity, marketability, and innovation. The projects my team evaluated were a hybrid system that would bolt onto an early 2000s Nissan Frontier and increase the vehicles’ efficiency, a team from the UC Battle Robotics Club, and a company-backed project to increase efficiency on vegetation mitigation equipment to better sustain power within the new equipment designs.
Each of these projects had great goals, highs, lows, oversights, learning points, and yet it was very great to see how truly vested each of these students had become in this project. They knew their subject inside and out and even when they had a pitfall come. This did not derail them, this took me back to when the team I was part of built a Basic Utility Vehicle as our project. We competed in a national competition with a vehicle which was fully funded by sponsorship we obtained and poured hours upon hours of work and sweat into it. The drivetrain which I designed did experience two different failures during our competition. Rather than loading up and taking a loss, we pushed through as a team, we made a new chain tensioner with parts from a hardware store, and found a judge with a welder nearby which permitted us to weld a broken attachment point back on. Ultimately, we took second place. A team of 4 students was only beaten by a team of 12 from Wisconsin. The experience I learned in that process and time during the competition truly taught me that if you are passionate about something you will make it happen. That’s the same level of passion I saw in each of the students that I interviewed during the judging cycle.
In the end, it really builds one of my favorite sayings, “You can’t teach experience.” Each of these students has experienced a lot, and yet they still have so much to learn. Without the volunteer program here at EXAIR, I may not have gotten to go back to my alma mater and participate as a judge for the Tech Expo. That’s an experience I have gained a lot from. Mainly, instead of asking judgmental questions, ask curiously. This often means asking open-ended questions that aren’t so pointed. This generally brings out more reasoning and explanation than one could expect and leads to a more comfortable discussion. These students all helped me to see that, and it let their passions shine straight through. Once the interviews were done, all the judges came together and dispersed $12,000 in prizes for various awards to these 11 projects within the Mechanical Engineering Technology Department. The passion I had for learning and projects still lives to this day. I still keep a list of ideas for EXAIR products that I am saving for rainy days or for the right time to test.
If you have a problem you can’t get past, need a curious question answered or need someone to share in your passion that involves industrial compressed air, moving, cleaning, cooling, coating, eliminating static, spraying, or conserving a resource, share it with us, we’ll be genuinely curious.
Brian Farno, MBA – CCASS National Business Development Manager
The school year is in full swing here in Cincinnati and all three of my daughters have different extracurricular activities they partake in. This fall, that equates to divide and conquer for my wife and me 4 nights of the week for practices then the weekends are also separate and conquer, but mainly on Saturday. This eats away at times we would typically use at home to get some walking in or even just generally getting stuff done. This schedule combined with working earlier has caused me to lose almost all workout desire. That is until I got to the first practice my oldest had which just happens to be held on my alma mater’s campus and is right next to Nippert Stadium.
When we arrived I noticed most parents were just hunkered down in their cars and watching movies or doom scrolling social media. I try to avoid doing that for 90 minutes straight if I can and so far I have. I started hitting the stairs at the University of Cincinnati’s Nippert Stadium with my 35-pound ruck on my back. While my goal is to be able to complete the standard they have for their 9/11 memorial event I also want to get back into the shape I was in when I did back-to-back GORUCK events and could crank out burpees without crying on the outside. After going up one column of stairs from the field to the concourse level I go across and down the next set until I have done every column of stairs that go from the concourse to the area directly. For their event, I have to complete two laps which will equate to the number of steps within one of the towers.
So to train, I started with seeing how many sets I could do without feeling like I was going to not be able to reach the top and walk to the car. Surprisingly, I was able to get about half of the stadium done. Then I still had another hour to kill, so I hydrated a bit and rucked on over to the track/soccer field where I could walk the track and watch co-ed intramural flag football games while I did laps. Finally, I threw in some ruck PT exercises as a cool down and ended back at the building her practice was in. When I got to work the next day I felt like I got beat with a sack of oranges from my waist down. Then, on Thursday the thought crossed my mind as I hadn’t slept much the night before to just relax, then I had a buddy ask if he could come do stairs with me, and so we did it again Thursday night.
So from now until the end of the school year, I will more than likely be rucking on or around UC’s campus and Nippert Stadium to ensure I get back into a reasonable condition without having to lose more time with my family. This isn’t always easy and doesn’t come without pain. That pain though comes with added energy and increases in my mental position as well, so I am open to more things.
The same thing can be said about an industrial compressed air system. If you just trudge through every day and don’t look at any part of your facility, it is going to cause some pain when you first start to look at it. The first step is to acknowledge that something needs to change, and you have to have that finished goal of more capacity and capability available. The best place to start on your compressed air system is at the start with mapping out the system and getting a base measurement of where you are at for consumption.. This is the first step in our 6 steps of compressed air optimization, and we can help with every step along the way, You just have to reach out to us, your accountability partner for efficient compressed air.
Today I had the honor to participate in a local memorial event to recognize 9/11/2001. This was the fifth year for the event in which participants climb 2,071 stairs within Nippert Statium at The University of Cincinnati. This number symbolizes the stairs of the 110 floors each of the World Trade Center towers had. The amount of time to complete the event is 56 minutes. This was my first time attending the event and I must say, I was awestruck.
The calm before the majority of attendants showed up.
The number of people that attended the event was amazing. The event started at 6:34 this morning, I arrived around 5:30 and met with a local group that were going to ruck the stairs rather than simply running / walking. We each carried a pack, ruck sack, with us with a 30 lb weight plate. The goal was to complete the 4 laps that the event required.
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As I was going through the repetitions up and down the stairs, they were making announcements of the events that transpired on that day in history, and the names of those that lost their lives scrolled across an electronic screen I began to recount where I was on that day. I was actually on that exact campus just a few hundred yards away. I walked right through that stadium on 9/11 to go to class.
The stairs began to wear on me quickly and I was only halfway through my first lap. Then I saw a group of young ROTC students with Xavier University’s Air Force ROTC program. That picked my hopes up for a bit and I went on. The harder it got for me the more details I remembered about that day. The more flights I did the more I thought about those that lost their lives, seeing the names I began to take a step for each one just to push on to the next. At the end of the time I did not complete the 4 laps needed to commemorate the total number of stairs. I did complete two full laps of stairs knowing that after that event was done I still get to go home and hug my family.
This day is always going to be a day of remembrance in my family. Today, I was lucky enough to commemorate it among some amazing veterans, active duty, and future military and first responders.
