The ballad of Bean Supreme: Refried

Razi and I have done what we thought was impossible. In April, we qualified for the 2025 NHRL world championships. I should have written about it here, but I was walking through the clouds for a few weeks after, and it just never happened.

Our newest bot, Bean Supreme: Refried, is a stout little bot and to date, has never been knocked out. More often than not, our opponents damage themselves trying with all their might to take Refried out. As Razi says, “we beat your fist with our face”. We started designing Refried in November of 2024 and have been competing with it since December.

Refried is a lifter bot, and can’t hurt you or your robot. It’s really up to Razi and his driving skills to control and therefore win a match. Another important element of the equation is our various configurations. The wedge on the front of the bot can be replaced with a multitude of front ends. We have 4 or 5 different sets of forks and wedges that we swap out when we match up with different kinds of opponents.

April was our fourth event with Refried, and the seventh or eighth event with it or its 1-lb predecessors—Sour Cream. The whole time we’ve been grinding away with the design—changing this, optimizing that— any way we can think of improving it, we do. Throughout the year the both Razi and the bot were getting better and better.

In March, we upset Caldera, one of the most legendary bots in the game.

The win against Caldera was satisfying not just because NOBODY saw it coming, but because we created a titanium front end specifically designed to fight horizontal spinner bots like Caldera. Titanium is pricy, and learning how to bend titanium was never on my list of things to learn, but that win alone made it worth the stress and money.

Later that day, Katie pointed out an older teenager running up to Razi and asking, “Tell me how you did it, how did you knock out Caldera?!”.

Even though we were knocked out of that competition in the round of 32, we were very pleased with the day and hoped we hadn’t peaked.

Initially, I thought we were cursed for this event. We had burned up two servo motors on the bench preparing for the event, and a third the night before during safety checks. At $60 each, I was not happy. We had one servo motor left to power the lifter. Our friend Julian lent us another in case we needed a spare as the day went on. Thankfully, we wound up not needing it.

Even so, while driving to Norwalk Saturday morning, Razi declared he had a good feeling about the event. I grimaced silently.

I have to be honest, none of the fights were pure domination. We proved that doing just a bit better than your competitors six times in a row is a recipe for success. We weren’t making any highlight reels, but we made sure our opponents didn’t either.

We fought a lot of great bots, and there wasn’t an easy win in the bunch. Refried was dialed in the whole day. Razi had an uphill battle learning how the bot drove with some of the new configurations, but he did so in style.

Our first five wins were all close, and we felt like we were on the edge of a wave all day.

That fifth win secured us a spot in primetime, where we’d compete in “the bowl” in front of a few hundred spectators. Additionally, NHRL has you move to a new pit area so everyone is in a more photogenic space, well-lit for the cameras. During the day, the primetime pits sit there empty, taunting you. We’ve made it to the top 16 before, but you need to break into the top eight.

This alone exceeded our wildest dreams, and from that point on, we declared the day a success, with anything else being icing.

To add to the magic of the day, we had made up tiny 3D-printed bean can shakers—with real beans inside—complete with custom labels. The original idea was to hand them out to fellow competitors and kids in the audience, but I’m glad we had enough to hand out to people in the primetime audience and help put on a show.

Bean chants commenced.

We also printed a wildly oversized bean can in case we got to record another hero shot. We did! (Thanks for the idea, Dwight!)

The quarter finals were a fight between two father and son teams with different preparation strategies—one deciding to rebuild their entire bot, looking at a deeper run, and the other deciding that the bot is working; change NOTHING.

To be fair, there is no right answer. Coming from Florida, and since it was likely their only trip this year to NHRL, Big-G had more on the line. They saw frightening monsters lurking in their future and took the extra time we had before primetime to rebuild the whole bot.

We put in a fresh battery.

During the fight, Big-G had a wire wrap around a motor, and they lost a drive side. I don’t know for certain, but I have a sneaking suspicion that had they run the bot as is, they might have avoided the issue and won. In the end, there wasn’t a dominating performance in the fight, and we won the judges’ decision based on damage.

Semi-finals: the point where you’ve officially earned a spot at the championships.

World! Championships!

For Razi and me, the idea of qualifying for championships seemed like a plausible thing, eventually. We knew we had a competitive bot and driver, but qualifying in less than two years was never a reasonable goal or expectation.

Doing it with an original bot that we dreamed up and built—having no blueprint to follow—well, all the sweeter. I would NEVER say that building a meta bot is easy, but you do have something to reference and evidence of what works and what doesn’t. Refried pays homage to some bots (Wicked Wedge, Hodor, Ratfish, Crashfest, among others), but we are writing our own story with Refried, and the consequences of every decision are relatively unknown.

Loading into the cage at the semifinals had a strange feeling. We knew we could win this fight. We’d already upset Caldera once. With Razi driving Refried, anything was possible, but winning this match was actually possible.

Until it wasn’t.

About thirty seconds into the match, Caldera’s weapon caught the corner of our titanium lifter and threw us into the house bot. One of our wheels slammed in the 3/8-in. steel chassis. That energy went straight into one of our drive motors and took it out.

The game with Refried is to outdrive the opponent. That is just about our only chance.

Losing half of our drive means the last hope is for our opponent to kill themselves trying to finish us off. For the last minute of the fight, it seemed like a distinct possibility, but alas, our night was over. We went the full three minutes but rightfully lost the judge’s decision.

We were ecstatic with the day’s results and drained, both emotionally and physically. We wandered back up to the pits, celebrated with some of our fellow competitors, packed up, and went home.

The whole ride home, one of us would say “I can’t believe it” every few minutes.

Word is out on Team Dummy Bros’ Robotics now. There is certainly more pressure to perform well since April. We’ve competed twice since, and both times we were knocked out by big wheel bots, a particular type of bot that we’re still trying to find an answer to.

We will.

After April, Bean Supreme: Refried’s ranking went from the 150ish range to #18 of all active robots in NHRL. We’ve seen posts by people trying to figure out a game plan should they match up against us. Kinda crazy.

I’m getting a line drawing of Bean Supreme tattooed on my arm to commemorate the day. Razi’s birth, our wedding day, and then April 5th, 2025, are currently the three most memorable days in my life.

I can think of very few sports or hobbies where a father and son can compete like this and have it be a true partnership. The robot was dreamed up and designed by Razi. I figured out how to make it work. We build it together. He drives it at a world-class level.

It just plain doesn’t work without either of us. Combat robotic days are amazing for us; for a time, we’re suspended in a weird place where I’m not the dad and he’s not my precious little cherub. We’re equals, and I think it’s wonderful.

*thanks to NHRL for allowing competitors to use event photos and footage