Overview
This robot wasn't built from a kit designed for the task. It was built from
what was available: LEGO pieces from a LEGO Boost set, motors and lighting
components from Circuit Cubes kits — gear originally picked up at a LEGO expo
for my kids — and an Adafruit microcontroller kit from class. Nothing was
purpose-matched. Everything had to be made to work together.
The central challenge was electrical: Circuit Cube cables and Adafruit cables
aren't designed to connect to each other. I had to cross-wire them myself,
figuring out what was compatible and what wasn't by testing, not by reading a
guide that existed. That forced a different kind of thinking than following
a tutorial — you have to understand what you're working with before you can
make it do anything.
Process
The build started with physical assembly — chassis structure, motor placement,
and stability — before any logic was written. Once the hardware held together,
I worked through the wiring: identifying which Circuit Cube leads could interface
with the Adafruit connections, making my own cable crossovers, and testing each
connection before trusting it in the system.
From there, programming the behavior: how the robot reads its environment,
makes decisions, and carries out sequences of movement. The iteration cycle
was entirely physical — run it, watch what breaks, figure out whether the
failure is in the wiring, the logic, or the mechanical build, and adjust.
There's no shortcut for that loop.
Outcome
A working robot built from hardware that wasn't designed to work together,
with documented wiring decisions and programming logic. The project demonstrated
that physical computing is as much about problem-solving under constraint as it
is about code — when the components don't match, you have to figure out why
before you can figure out how.
It's also the most hands-on build in this portfolio, and the one that made
the most visible the gap between "I understand this in theory" and
"I understand this in my hands."
Project Materials
Documentation and demonstration video available upon request.
