Mechatronics Showdown

The setup

24 hours. A hardware competition, an agile pod, and a full end-to-end robotics build against a stack of challenge requirements. Oh, and I had never touched the platform before. And this was my first timed competition in years. And did I mention I had never touched an arduino before this?? That last part felt like a bigger deal at hour zero than it did by hour twenty-four.

How it actually went

• Learned fast, out of necessity. No time for a leisurely tutorial binge, I dug through Arduino frameworks and docs from scratch and got productive on brand-new hardware inside the deadline. Baptism by hell-firmware.
• Wrote the specs before the sprint. I wrote out specifications for the sub-routines up front so the pod could work in parallel without stepping on each other’s wiring (literally and figuratively).
• The judges scored it 9.7/10. For code quality and documentation, which, for something built in a single day, I’m genuinely proud of. Good enough for 2nd place overall.

What it demonstrated

That I can pick up an unfamiliar stack under real time pressure and still hold a high bar for how the thing is built and documented, not just whether it technically works. Cowboying it together would’ve been faster. Doing it right, almost as fast, felt way better.