Citrus Circuits bring Rotting Robots to Community Park on festival day, Saturday, October 31, from 11am to 3pm. Real competition robots, out on the pavement, driven by the students who built them.
Citrus Circuits is FIRST Robotics Competition team 1678, more than 100 students in grades 9 to 12 from Davis Senior High School, Da Vinci Charter Academy, Holmes, Emerson and Harper. Steve Harvey, a math teacher at Da Vinci, started the team in 2004 with 15 students under the name EnGen Robotics, and it became Citrus Circuits in 2007. A robot called Lemon Drop won them the FIRST World Championship in 2015, and they reached Einstein, the closing matches of the world championship, ten years running from 2015 to 2024. Away from the competition field they have started more than 100 youth robotics teams and mentored another 75, including three nearby ones: Digital Minds and Kaprekar's Constants in Woodland, and Electronic Eagles in Sacramento.
They arrive off a very good season
Their 2026 robot is called Limestone and the game was REBUILT. Limestone won the Half Moon Bay and Sacramento district events, took the FIRST Impact Award at Half Moon Bay and an Autonomous Award at Sacramento, then finished as finalists at the NorCal District Championship with a second Impact Award. At the world championship it won the Milstein Division and another Autonomous Award, and went back through to the Einstein field, which the team had missed the year before.
They also started a second team this year, Team 1857 Citrus Sparks, where ninth and tenth graders build and compete with a robot of their own.
What happens at the station
The robot does at the festival roughly what it does at a competition. It collects playground balls, launches them across the pavement, and goes back for more while the team works the controls. Children can send a ball in and watch the machine deal with it. The students are there in their 1678 jerseys the whole time and are entirely used to being asked how any of it works.
Rotting Robots is a regular on the Community Park line-up. Citrus Circuits ran it in 2022, the year the festival first spread across a whole weekend, and the ROTTING ROBOTICS sign was wired to the fence again in 2024. Which robot comes out on the day is up to the team.
What their robots have done in past years
FIRST announces a new game every January and teams get a few weeks to build a robot for it, so the machine on the pavement is different each year, and so is the trick it is good at. The names are all citrus jokes. Recent ones:
- Limestone, 2026. Takes in balls, called fuel, and shoots them into a hub, and climbs to the first level of a tower.
- SubLime, 2025. Collected coral and algae game pieces, lifted them on an elevator to score on any level of the reef, and climbed a deep cage. Three regional wins.
- Nik, 2024. Picked up foam rings, called notes, with rollers and shot them into the speaker, then hung from a chain on a hook.
- Tangerine Tumbler, 2023. Rolled up cones and cubes, and could get itself docked on the charge station in the closing seconds of a match.
- Margie, 2022. An intake, a color sensor and a launcher for the cargo balls, and a climber that got up the traversal bar in ten seconds. Margie is the one with her name on the side in our photographs from that year's festival.
Older ones were called Buzz Lime-year, Emperor Pulp-atine and the E-Lime-o-Nator, which should tell you most of what you need to know about the team.
Free, and no booking
Rotting Robots is free, like everything else at Community Park. Turn up, watch for a while, have a go.
Find the station on the festival site map, and the team at citruscircuits.org.
