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| My journey through robotics | 5 years of self-taught robotics development, recapped | 2022-07-02 |
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My very first introduction to robotics was back in 2014, when I took an autonomous programming workshop as a part of a bigger summer engineering event at Western University. A few years later, I ended up beginning a stint of robotics work through two different competitive robotics teams.
Table of contents
Elementary school robotics
Back in 2016, myself and three other friends formed a competitive robotics team at our elementary school called the Star Trekies. My role on the team was both hardware prototyping and single-handedly programming the entire robot.
With very little knowledge of what we were doing, we stumbled our way through the process, and realistically got pretty much nowhere. Importantly though, I ended up figuring out a few key concepts of control systems development in the process that would come in handy later on.
Highschool robotics
When presented with the question of which highschool I would apply to at the end of 8th grade, I specifically chose H.B. Beal Secondary School due to their well-known competitive robotics team, Raider Robotics, which later turned into a special-invite full-credit program at the school (conveniently counting towards my college requirements).
The year before I joined Raider Robotics, most of the members with substantial technical knowledge moved on to other schools, leaving me once again will very little to work off of.
Introduction
I remember in mid December of 2017, this testbed was brought in to the software lab I was working in, thus marking my first hands-on experience with a fully programable machine at this level.
I don't remember a ton about that night, aside from a group of confused students trying to figure out how to load code onto the thing, and @hyperliskdev teaching me how to make a class in Python3 (its the weirdest things that stick in my memory..)
Fast-forward a few months to early February 2018, and I had figure out how to control a newly built testbed with a laptop sending control commands over a WLAN connection.