In my junior year I took a class called Fundamentals of Engineering. I didn't know what to expect. The teacher, Mr. Henriques, slightly changed his course and syllabus each year. That term we began with soldering and basic electronics. After we practiced soldering, we moved on to building a robot vehicle with two motors, a microcontroller, a line sensor, a sonar sensor, and a servo.
While building the robot, we were also studying for our amateur radio licenses. Balancing both tasks meant I often stayed after school to meet deadlines. The robot's assignment required it to navigate the room, avoid obstacles, follow lines, and pick up and drop off rings at designated locations. I did most of the robot work in class and studied for the radio exam at home. For radio I learned about wave propagation, modulation techniques, and the different frequency bands.
The robot project involved weeks of trial and error. I treated lines and obstacles as checkpoints and programmed the robot to move between those checkpoints in segments. Breaking the problem into smaller pieces let me test each segment individually before integrating them into a complete navigation system. When merging segments, I focused on smooth transitions and handling unexpected situations. Because the robot started and ended at the same points, I could rely on a known state at the beginning and end of each segment.
Halfway through the project, our teacher presented a new challenge. Because our robots were battery-powered, we normally charged them periodically. After a period of poor class performance, he removed the charging station and gave each of us a solar panel and a solar charge controller to power our robots. We had to arrange the panels to maximize voltage and current and integrate the controller into our robot design. An additional complication was that our batteries used nickel–metal hydride chemistry (NiMH), while the controllers were designed for lead–acid and lithium-ion batteries. To charge our NiMH packs safely, we experimented with different wiring and charging profiles and monitored the process closely to avoid overcharging or damaging the cells.
Despite these challenges, I successfully navigated my robot through the course and completed the tasks. It was rewarding to see the results of the problem solving.
I also passed the amateur radio license exam, which felt like a major accomplishment. For my final project I built a Yagi antenna, a directional antenna useful for long-range communication. I designed and built the antenna from scratch, calculating element dimensions and spacing, soldering the elements, and mounting them on a PVC boom. I tested the antenna with an analyzer to ensure it was resonant at the desired frequency and had a good impedance match. The most memorable moment was using that antenna to contact an ISS repeater — hearing a response through hardware I built was unforgettable and solidified my interest in amateur radio and space communication.