Botfunder - About Us

BJ Black, mentor for the Astoria High School Robotics Team since 2021, started Botfunder as a side project to use technology to help fundraise for FRC Team #6845.

Want to check out the Switch System Info concept demo? Click here to jump down to that.

The Riverbots

(Who's Being Funded)

Located in beautiful Astoria, Oregon, Astoria High School is Astoria's only high school and home to the FIRST Robotics Team #6845: the Riverbots. With an annual season running approximately from January through March (longer with playoffs if we're lucky), around a dozen students every year learn STEM skills such as:

Mechanical Engineering and Fabrication (designing and assembling the physical bits of the bot).
Electronics (wiring up the robot for both power distribution and control).
Computer Engineering (learning the FRC's bespoke runtime environment and writing custom code against it).

Additionally, this is a great opportunity to create projects for community service, outreach to other local schools, and marketing and design.

Switch Info

Being avid Switch/Switch2 gamers ourselves (some of whom have first-gen Switch consoles that are several years old), we realized that there's one kind of application that's sorely missing from the Nintendo ecosystem: System Information in Gory Depth! The goal of the Switch Info app is to:

Expose system health info that's in the Switch API, but not exposed fully in the GUI, such as battery charge speed, health, and connected devices,
Expose network info, such as ping times to common Internet sites, the external IP of the Switch, etc, and
Any other system or environment information.

The general plan is to use the Switch/Switch2 Port of the Godot Game Engine to create a 2D game engine-style display of the hardware and network info across several screens and to make the utility available at low cost via the Nintendo Store for digital download.

Concept Demo

Want to see what this looks like when run in a browser? Check out the conceptual demo below: