history.php

<?php
require('template/top.php');
head('Our History', true);

/*
 * Club history page (URW-80). Sourced from the UNT Robotics Discord scrape,
 * the GroupMe archive (2019-2020), the founder's email (reaches 2017), and the
 * shared Google Drive. Photos are the optimized set under /images/content/.
 *
 * Documented lineage: "Robotics Club at UNT" founded 2015 (constitution on
 * file), ran through 2017 under Charles Bido (pres) + Robert Maxson (vp); went
 * dormant; revived Nov 2018 as UNT Robotics by Sebastian King + Nick Tindle
 * (first meeting 28 Nov 2018, Discovery Park rm 201; domain Dec 2018).
 *
 * Still open (see URW-249): the pre-2015 / "1970s" claim rests only on a photo
 * the founder recalls; not located in any archive (UNT Digital Library blocks
 * automation). The Origins block keeps that framed as reported, not asserted.
 * Not yet pulled in: the dated Drive assets (Nov 2018 first-meeting flyer,
 * era logos, Media photo folders) if we want more period imagery.
 */

// Brand green that passes contrast (matches css/accessibility.css overrides).
$eras = array(
    array(
        'year' => '2018',
        'title' => 'The revival',
        'body' => "<strong>Sebastian King and Nick Tindle</strong> relaunched the club as UNT Robotics, kicking off the chapter that runs today. The first meeting was <strong>November 28, 2018</strong> in Discovery Park room 201, with Tindle as president, Juan Ruiz as vice president, and King as webmaster. untrobotics.com went up that December.",
        'img' => '',
        'gallery' => array(),
    ),
    array(
        'year' => '2019',
        'title' => 'CoolerBot, SofaBot, and a first-place drone',
        'body' => "The club threw itself into building. The new Rec Bots crew kicked off two flagship projects the month it formed, CoolerBot (a driveable robot cooler) and <strong>SofaBot</strong> (a driveable couch). The competition team took <strong>first place at IEEE Region 5</strong> with an autonomous balloon-popping drone. Members ran the first <strong>Botathon</strong> that spring (robots popping each other&rsquo;s balloons), wrote a club constitution, and held officer elections. The club stood up its own Discord in October, landed a <strong>SOLIDWORKS sponsorship</strong> (a 30-seat license), and secured a dedicated robotics room on campus. By November, the idea for an Aerospace division was taking shape: fly a rocket and a near-space balloon carrying the club logo.",
        'img' => 'ieee2019/build-5.jpg',
        'gallery' => array('ieee2019/build-3.jpg', 'ieee2019/build-1.jpg'),
    ),
    array(
        'year' => '2020',
        'title' => 'Divisions, and a pivot to virtual',
        'body' => "February brought the club its first taste of going viral: a clip of <strong>Sofabot</strong>, the rideable robot couch, spread across Twitter and Facebook. Weeks later COVID-19 closed campus and Botathon 2020 had to be cancelled. The club kept building online through Zoom and Discord instead, running CAD and OpenRocket workshops and fielding a VEX&nbsp;U team. As the year went on, a roles-and-divisions system let members pick their teams, an aerospace and space community formed, and the <strong>3D-printing</strong> channel that still anchors half the club&rsquo;s builds got going.",
        'img' => 'sofabot/early-build.jpg',
        'gallery' => array('printing/printer-in-action.jpg', 'events/meeting-pics.jpg'),
    ),
    array(
        'year' => '2021',
        'title' => 'The biggest growth surge on record',
        'body' => "Campus reopened and membership exploded, with <strong>153 new members in a single month</strong> (September 2021), the biggest recruiting spike in club history. The club spun up a dedicated <strong>High-Power Rocketry team</strong>, started by <strong>Joseph Moore</strong> (a former Marine Corps EOD technician), to enter NASA Student Launch, backed by sponsors including RESPEC, Mouser, and O&rsquo;Reilly. The <strong>NASA JPL Open-Source Rover</strong> started in October, first as a rocket payload, then as a build of its own. Members competed at HackDFW in Frisco, ran Botathon Season 3 (Pirates), built an eight-foot rocket-shaped trophy case, and teamed up with UNT Fashion Design students on custom club apparel.",
        'img' => 'aerospace/hpr-launch-prep.jpg',
        'gallery' => array('botathon/s3-1.jpg', 'botathon/s3-2.jpg', 'rover/laser-cut-parts.jpg'),
    ),
    array(
        'year' => '2022',
        'title' => 'Rockets, rovers, and a bigger Botathon',
        'body' => "The rocketry team flew hard. After a subscale flight to <strong>4,588 feet</strong>, they took their full-scale rocket &ldquo;Sparrowhawk&rdquo; to competition, lost it to a launch-pad anomaly, and turned straight around to start Season 2 with a new camera payload. Rover build nights filled the workshop, the club shipped its automated dues and &ldquo;Good Standing&rdquo; system on untrobotics.com, and an Arduino wind-turbine build went to HackUNT. Botathon Season 4 (Football) debuted the club&rsquo;s own Xbox-controller driver and live 3D printing during the event. Members also ran a model-rocket day for about 40 scouts, and Sofabot came roaring back after two years off.",
        'img' => 'aerospace/nasa-sl-2022-launch.jpg',
        'gallery' => array('rover/frame-assembly.jpg', 'outreach/scouts-stem.jpg'),
    ),
    array(
        'year' => '2023',
        'title' => 'To Huntsville and back',
        'body' => "The rocketry team&rsquo;s biggest year. After passing NASA&rsquo;s design reviews, they traveled to <strong>Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama</strong> in April to fly &ldquo;Phoenix,&rdquo; a 9.3-foot rocket carrying a Raspberry-Pi camera-and-radio payload. Members visited the real Open-Source Rover at NASA JPL that summer. Botathon Season 5 (Mario Kart) lit up the Discovery Park hallway, projects went to Senior Design Day, and the club ran STEM events for hundreds of K-12 students across the metroplex. Workshops covered KiCad PCB design with a professional guest, GPS and radio programming, and Python.",
        'img' => 'aerospace/nasa-sl-2023-1.jpg',
        'gallery' => array('rover/system-integration.jpg', 'aerospace/hpr-custom-paint.jpg'),
    ),
    array(
        'year' => '2024',
        'title' => 'A new flagship, and a competition team',
        'body' => "Members voted in a new flagship robot: <strong>Scrapp-E</strong>, a tracked companion bot with an animatronic head and modular arms, themed after Scrappy the eagle. A full-size wooden mock-up was standing by December. A competition team, the &ldquo;Scrapaholics,&rdquo; formed to enter DJI RoboMaster. Weekend sessions pushed Sofabot&rsquo;s drivetrain and steering toward finished, the rover&rsquo;s software effort restarted on ROS&nbsp;2, and members volunteered with robotics students at a local high school. Botathon Season 6 was Capture the Flag.",
        'img' => 'scrappe/build-hdr.jpg',
        'gallery' => array('sofabot/build-1.jpg', 'sofabot/circle-done.jpg'),
    ),
    array(
        'year' => '2025',
        'title' => 'The rover drives, and Botathon gets tactical',
        'body' => "The JPL Rover moved onto a Raspberry Pi&nbsp;4 running <strong>ROS&nbsp;2</strong> with RoboClaw controllers, with build days every Friday. Scrapp-E&rsquo;s chassis and drive parts came together through the spring. Botathon Season 7 (&ldquo;Keep on Trucking&rdquo;) added an infrared laser-blaster mechanic, where bots lose lives when they&rsquo;re hit and have to return to a station to recharge. The competition team shifted its near-term target from RoboMaster to the IEEE Region 5 autonomous challenge after DJI parts got caught up in tariffs. The club also started working alongside Engineers United, and picked up an old vending machine to refurbish.",
        'img' => 'botathon/s7-1.jpg',
        'gallery' => array('rover/bench-work.jpg', 'scrappe/first-chassis-mount.jpg'),
    ),
    array(
        'year' => '2026',
        'title' => 'Still building',
        'body' => "Scrapp-E&rsquo;s 3D-printed gearbox drove the tracks for the first time, and a working animatronic hand joined it. The club&rsquo;s large-format Modix printer ran its first test print, a from-scratch arcade claw machine went into CAD, and a filament-recycling project got funded. The refurbished vending machine powered on and got stocked with the lab-day essentials students always forget. Botathon Season 8 is set for March, and the workshop lights are still on.",
        'img' => 'scrappe/build-progress.jpg',
        'gallery' => array('printing/prusa-xl-print.jpg', 'rover/raspberry-pi-wiring.jpg'),
    ),
);
?>
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<main id="main-content" class="page-content">
    <section class="breadcrumb-classic">
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          <div class="shell">
            <ul class="list-breadcrumb">
              <li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
              <li>History</li>
            </ul>
          </div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </section>

    <section class="hist-hero">
        <div class="shell">
            <h1>Our History</h1>
            <p>UNT Robotics was revived in 2018, but robotics and engineering culture at North Texas runs much deeper. Here&rsquo;s the story we&rsquo;ve been able to piece together.</p>
        </div>
    </section>

    <section class="hist-origins">
        <div class="card">
            <h2>Origins</h2>
            <p>Our roots run deep. Students have been building robots at North Texas since at least <strong>1977</strong>, when the Eagle Robotics Society got its start, back when the school still went by North Texas State University. A UNT Robotics Club carried the torch forward in 2007. We&rsquo;re proud to be the latest to pick it up, one link in a robotics tradition here that stretches back nearly fifty years.</p>
            <p>Our own chapter takes shape in <strong>2015</strong>, when the &ldquo;Robotics Club at UNT&rdquo; was founded. It ran out of Discovery Park and the university library&rsquo;s Factory makerspace, holding officer elections, workshops, and Fall kickoff meetings. Members built laser-cut meArm robotic arms, and by 2017, under <span class="founders">Charles&nbsp;Bido</span> (president) and <span class="founders">Robert&nbsp;Maxson</span> (vice president), the club was working to charter an official IEEE Robotics &amp; Automation Society student branch. In 2018, a new generation of students took the reins and relaunched it as the UNT Robotics you see today.</p>
            <div class="hist-fillin">
                <strong>Help us fill in the story.</strong> We&rsquo;ve traced our roots to 1977, and there&rsquo;s surely more out there. If you have old photos or stories from the early days, especially the 1970s and 80s, we&rsquo;d love to see them.
            </div>
        </div>
    </section>

    <section class="hist-timeline-head">
        <h2>The modern era</h2>
    </section>
    <ol class="hist-timeline">
        <?php foreach ($eras as $e): ?>
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                    <h3><?php echo $e['title']; ?></h3>
                    <p><?php echo $e['body']; ?></p>
                    <?php $imgs = array_merge(!empty($e['img']) ? array($e['img']) : array(), !empty($e['gallery']) ? $e['gallery'] : array()); ?>
                    <?php if ($imgs): ?>
                        <div class="hist-media">
                            <?php foreach ($imgs as $g): ?>
                                <img src="/images/content/<?php echo htmlspecialchars($g); ?>" alt="UNT Robotics, <?php echo htmlspecialchars($e['year']); ?>" loading="lazy">
                            <?php endforeach; ?>
                        </div>
                    <?php endif; ?>
                </div>
            </li>
        <?php endforeach; ?>
    </ol>

    <section class="hist-people">
        <h2>People who shaped the club</h2>
        <p>UNT Robotics runs on its members and an elected officer team. The earlier Robotics Club at UNT was led by Charles&nbsp;Bido and Robert&nbsp;Maxson. The 2018 revival was started by Sebastian&nbsp;King and Nick&nbsp;Tindle, with early officers including Juan&nbsp;Ruiz, Alex&nbsp;Ferguson, and Michelle&nbsp;Victoria. Joseph&nbsp;Moore founded the Aerospace and Rocketry division in 2021. Faculty advisors and mentors over the years have included Dr.&nbsp;Keathly, Dr.&nbsp;Hassan, and Mark&nbsp;Wasikowski, along with rocketry mentors Jack and Suzy&nbsp;Sprague. Guest speakers have included NASA engineer George&nbsp;Salazar, Dr.&nbsp;Amir&nbsp;Jafari of UNT&rsquo;s Advanced Robotics Manipulators Lab, and roboticist Terrence&nbsp;Southern.</p>
    </section>

    <div class="hist-cta">
        <a href="/join/discord" class="btn btn-primary">Be part of the next chapter</a>
    </div>
</main>

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