Birth of a gearhead

In 2008 I was feeling I needed to stretch myself technically. The opportunities to do that at work were not enough, so I decided to get a Master's in Computer Science to add to my Bachelor's.

Along the way, I got involved in a computer vision project on a grant to explore using color to track a person and follow them with an autonomous robot. I ended up writing all the computer vision and control logic, except the low-level CAN interface, which Paulo wrote.

I was hooked.

Dr Tarokh and me testing the robot

I worked at Illumina doing manufacturing software, customer-facing instrument control software, and other things. Along the way I got to work with electrical and mechanical engineers ("real" engineers) and longed to learn how to do what they did.

Eventually at Illumina I no longer worked on hardware and began to miss it. So I decided to give myself a project as a learning experience. As a SCUBA diver, I spend a lot of time in the water, so I thought it would be fun to build a robot that could follow me while I was diving. Not terribly useful, but educational ;-}

And by "build" I do not mean "assemble from a kit". My goal was to learn, and so I wanted to build the pieces from scratch as much as possible.