Mentors

Dan Rupert

Mr. Rupert has been an integral part of the Midnight Mechanics for approximately 16 or 17 years. He holds a degree in mechanical engineering and primarily focuses on mentoring in mechanical design, including CAD design and gear ratios. Mr. Rupert was introduced to the FIRST Robotics program by the founding coach of Team 812, Rob Mainieri, and subsequently led a team at Rancho Bernardo High School for several years before joining the faculty at Preuss School. Before his involvement with FIRST, he participated in various battle bot events with students from Rancho Bernardo High School. Still, he recognized that FIRST offered a superior platform for promoting engineering education and the principles of gracious professionalism.

Dan O'Neill

DAN O'NEILL is a software technology executive and developer. His positions included VP of Engineering at The Experience Engine and Certona, both big data analytics and personalization companies. Before Certona, O'Neill was CTO and Exec. VP of Mood Media, a worldwide retail media services company. Mood Media purchased Trusonic, Inc. in 2007 where O'Neill was the co-founder, CTO and Exec. VP. During his tenure, the company reinvented the digital delivery of preprogrammed audio to retailers and grew the business more than 30% year over year. Before co-founding Trusonic, O'Neill was the CTO of VU Net USA, a
division of Vivendi Universal responsible for MP3.com, MP4.com, Pressplay (now Roxio/Napster), Rollingstone.com, and eMusic. From 1999 to 2003 O'Neill was the VP of Engineering at MP3.com where he assisted
in a $370m IPO and built the engineering, operations, and analytics teams. Santa Clara University, Leavey School of Business, named O'Neill to its IPO Hall of Fame in 2000, and the School of Engineering named O'Neill the 2009 Distinguished Engineering Alumnus. O'Neill holds both a BSME and an MSCS degree from Santa Clara University.

Ross Turner

Variable hourly rate — Description text. Donec fermentum venenatis ipsum, eu efficitur mi placerat quis. Donec et convallis metus, et luctus odio. Fusce porta quam purus, vel consectetur est luctus vel. Sed ac urna lacus. 

Dave Harry

Variable hourly rate — Description text. Donec fermentum venenatis ipsum, eu efficitur mi placerat quis. Sed ac urna lacus. Donec fermentum venenatis ipsum, eu efficitur mi placerat quis. Fusce porta quam purus, vel consectetur est luctus vel.

Tax planning

Personal: $175/hour — Description text. Sed ac urna lacus. Donec fermentum venenatis ipsum, eu efficitur mi placerat quis. Donec et convallis metus, et luctus odio.

Business: $250/hour — Description text. Sed ac urna lacus. Donec fermentum venenatis ipsum, eu mi placerat quis. 

Shaoni Bandy

I have been mentoring Team 812 for over six years! I double majored in Biology and Human Development at UC San Diego and received my Master’s in Education. While Mr. Rupert handles more of the technical mentorship, I advise the business and outreach side. I first got involved with FIRST through an invitation from another mentor and am so happy to be a part of the Midnight Mechanic team.

Nordine X. Hafidoun

I work at Solar Turbines, currently as the Facilities Engineering Manager for the Kearny Mesa plant.  I have worked for Solar Turbines for 21 years. Prior to working for Solar, I started my career as a race engineer, programming rally cars and track race cars' engines and data acquisitions.  I then moved into some aeronautics as a mechanical systems designer.  I studied Mechanical Engineering in Belgium at the Industrial Institute of Brussels and I moved to San Diego in 2001.   
Mentoring Team 812 is always a lot of fun. The team members are eager to learn the basics of software programming, mechanical design, manual work to create the robot.  As mentors, our first priority is to instill safety into everyone's mind then make sure every activity is a learning experience that will stay with the team member for the rest of their life. These experiences create the foundation of what they might do in the future. 
I also enjoy the fact that the team is not always taking itself too seriously and have a more relaxed attitude towards the competition. The team has enjoyed many wins, with and without the robot. Most of the wins without the robot stem from the team's commitment to community outreach. That is one of the great successes of this team. Last but not least, I enjoy the company of the other mentors. Mr Rupert is a force to be reckoned with, and Mr Lafleur and O'Neil are staples that guide the team to success.

Hao Zhang

This is my first involvement with Team 812. I graduated from West Virginia University with an MSEE degree. I have worked in IT for over 35 years and retired in 2019. I wrote Neural Network training software (C++) for my graduate student project. I wrote MLT (Manual Lane Terminal), VMS (Variable Message Sign) software drivers (C language), and OCR image processing software (Java) for license plate identification for use by toll collection systems. For my most recent 15 years, I was an Oracle/SQL Server Database Administrator/Developer.

I like cycling, photography, traveling and cooking Chinese food. I started learning how to play the piano recently.

Charitable giving

$125/hour —Description text.  Sed ac urna lacus. Donec fermentum venenatis ipsum, eu efficitur mi placerat quis. Donec et convallis metus, et luctus odio. Fusce porta quam purus, vel consectetur est luctus vel.