Wisconsin Robotics - 2021-2025
I was heavily involved in Wisconsin Robotics starting at my first semester in UW-Madison. I started on the electrical team as one of the few members on the team after COVID-19. I had to get myself aquainted with the team and its practices very quickly, and there was no remaining electrical engineer to mentor me. I had already learned Autodesk EAGLE, so I was able to look at some of the designs of the boards that the graduated students had made for the rover as it stood.
Using that as a reference, I designed my first PCB for the rover called WReaper2. It was the motherboard designed to hold the IMU, GPS, Raspberry Pi, and a logic level converter for serial communication between the Pi and the motor controllers. It also held some solid state relays to control auxillary devices like solenoids.
These were just a few of the PCBs I designed for the rover. I became more heavily involved in the team as the years went on and it grew in size. Once I became president for the 2024-2025 season, we felt confident enough to do a full redesign of the rover. I took more of a leadership role in the electrical team and started to be more of a mentor to the other members. I influenced the design of the new rover heavily and assisted for the more complex PCBs. I also did PCB reviews to ensure that the designs were sound and that the PCBs would work as intended.
With the new year I designed a large portion of the swerve mechanism of the rover, as well as the control system for the drive and arm. We used open source VESC controllers for the drive with the idea of expanding our capabilities into custom motor controllers in the future.
There is so much more I could say about my time on Wisconsin Robotics, but I’ll leave that for another time. I had such a wonderful time and I am so grateful for the experiences I had and the people I met along the way.