I grew up taught that I could do anything, so every chance I had I wanted to see the extreme limit of what I could do. Sometime during my sophomore year of high school I was frustrated the robotics team wasn’t doing anything really that novel or interesting. Why did it take a team of 30 to put together mostly off the shelf parts to ultimately face against other teams in an effectively zero sum game?
I wanted to challenge what I could do with a stripped down RC car, Google, a few Raspberry Pis and an Arduino. I spent most of this summer learning how to properly interface compute, microcontrollers, cameras, sensors, CAD, and budgeting.
By the end of the summer I built a sensor-fusion system for a RC car to be able to navigate a track with a neural network trained end-to-end. This was probably the most transformational period in my life, realizing that if I wanted to do anything I could with enough intensity, with no funding or serious mentors.