51 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
51 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: My journey through robotics
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description: 5 years of self-taught robotics development, recapped
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date: 2022-07-02
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tags:
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- story
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- frc
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draft: true
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extra:
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auto_center_images: true
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excerpt: From 2016 to 2021, I dedicated most of my time to robotics and control
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systems programming. This is my journey
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aliases:
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- /blog/robotics-journey
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---
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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](https://www.uwo.ca/). A few years later, I ended up beginning a stint of robotics work through two different competitive robotics teams.
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<h2>Table of contents</h2>
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- [Elementary school robotics](#elementary-school-robotics)
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- [Highschool robotics](#highschool-robotics)
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- [Introduction](#introduction)
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## Elementary school robotics
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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.
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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.
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## Highschool robotics
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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](https://www.raiderrobotics.org/), which later turned into a special-invite full-credit program at the school (conveniently counting towards my college requirements).
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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.
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### Introduction
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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.
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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](https://github.com/hyperliskdev) teaching me how to make a `class` in Python3 (its the weirdest things that stick in my memory..)
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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.
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<video style="max-width:100%;" controls>
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<source src="/videos/posts/robotics-journey/2018_drive.mp4">
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Video not supported
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</video>
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