My Exploration of Tech:

I started exploring tech at the beginning of the summer before freshman year. Before that, most of what I cared about was economics, politics, food, and tennis. So honestly, it was a pretty late start.

My real, almost logarithmic boost into technology came in the fall of my sophomore year. Through Tech and Innovation I, I found a class that gave me much more freedom to access and experiment with different areas of technology.

A lot of times, I would watch YouTube videos and see the fabulous designs and mind-blowing projects that other innovators created. And with that, there was always this little voice in my head—un poco “I suck”—floating around my ears.

Still, the first semester of sophomore year was probably the most dedicated I have ever been to any field.

I started the semester with a CAD project: a nameplate. I tend to think of it more as an artistic project than an engineering one, but it was still my first real step into making something.

Then I moved on to a robotic arm. Through that project, I learned about G-code and just how complex a 6-DOF arm can be. I even managed to get it to place Jenga blocks. But when I tried to go deeper, I ran into my own limitations.

That deeper dive was inspired by FTC AprilTags. I started wondering whether I could make the robotic arm automatically adjust itself and stack Jenga blocks. But I was still unfamiliar with OpenCV, and I did not yet have the software maturity to actually make that happen.

The next project I jumped into was a 3D IR scanner. I worked with a microcontroller board, stepper motors, and breadboards. We built a 2-DOF system that could do yaw and pitch. Sadly, I was not able to transfer and tune the data efficiently, so the graph ended up with way too much noise.

After that, I returned to another CAD project, this time using topology optimization in the design. That project taught me a lot about the importance of design constraints and safety margins, mostly because I got myself into a lot of trouble by underestimating them.

During winter break and the first half of the spring semester, I overestimated myself again and challenged myself to finish an underwater ROV. It was definitely a reach for me, but I had a great time doing it.

Meanwhile, I was also working on CAD models for FTC 358 and BLUEBIRD, which gave me more chances to apply what I was learning in a more real and collaborative setting.

What is next?

I would like to return to some of my earlier projects. Rather than explore, I would like to engage with the skills that I have in hand. As a personal rating, I feel confident in CAD and design and would like to work more with electronics and code.

That is why I am returning to April tag based Jenga block stacking project.