By Ishak Jama
Yesterday afternoon, a team of engineers from Texas Instruments joined us at the ITKAN Innovation Hub to meet our robotics students and coaches and to offer their support for the upcoming FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) season. Gathered around the team's robot, they walked through its electrical system with our students and offered to lend their professional expertise to help us get more performance out of the machine.
What TI Offered
The engineers volunteered to coach our team and study the robot with us to optimize its performance, focusing on the areas where our students need the most guidance heading into competition: power supply design, signal filtering, networking and the communication bus (CAN), power budgeting, and troubleshooting and debugging. These are precisely the disciplines that separate a robot that works from one that performs reliably under match pressure, and the TI team brings deep, directly relevant experience in each.
The TI Volunteer Team
The engineers who signed up to mentor collectively cover the full electrical engineering stack:
A Power Systems Engineer with approximately 15 years of experience in analog/mixed-signal, power electronics, and PCB design — a natural lead for power supply design and power budgeting.
A Systems Engineer from Power Design Services, specializing in power electronics and PCB design, supporting power supply design and the wiring and control-system review.
An Applications Director in USB-Power Delivery with more than 15 years in embedded systems, analog/mixed-signal, and DSP.
A Validation Engineer from the transceivers group, bringing analog/mixed-signal and validation expertise plus prior FIRST event experience — well suited to the communication bus and troubleshooting work.
A Software Development Engineer with a background in DSP, RF/wireless, and ML/AI, adding a signal-processing and software perspective.
Our sincere thanks to the Texas Instruments team for giving their Saturday afternoon and their expertise to our students. This is exactly the kind of mentorship that elevates a program, and we are grateful for the partnership as we prepare for the season ahead.