Derek Foster Email and Phone Number

• Supervision of Engineering Technicians, Field Maintenance, and seasonal employees.• Yearly design of playing field and transportation cases.• Ensure that field mechanicals are ordered, manufactured, prepped and packed in time for competition season.• Support GDC activities by building prototypes of field components and robots.• Responsible for cost control within the FRC Field budget.• Worked as a FIRST Technical Advisor at regional competitions. Instruct groups of volunteers in building and teardown of FRC field. Ensure that the competitions meet quality and schedule requirements.

• Responsible for component design and modeling. • Thermal growth calculations, tolerance studies, stress analysis and bolt loading calculations. • Communicate with other disciplines to ensure that designs meet cost, air flow, weight, and strength requirements. • Work with casting vendors to guarantee product quality and ease of manufacturing.

• Responsible for complete sub-system design, modeling, assemblies, details. Worked with other team members to assure that subassemblies fit and functioned together as an entire system. • Redesigned inserter chain and drive for a saddle stitcher. New design had fewer parts, and reduced cost of sub-system.• Problem solved repetitive belt failure by designing and building torque transducers using strain gauges and an Astro-med chart recorder, to investigate torsional loading on the main drive shaft of a newspaper inserter.