Micromouse

A micromouse is a small robot that has to find its own way to the centre of a maze, with nobody steering it. It's one of the oldest challenges in robotics, and the Dublin Micromouse Open, run by UCD ElecSoc with Hack Club, was billed as Ireland's first national competition for it. The twist was that the build was the competition: every team got the same box of parts and six hours, then raced whatever it had on a classic 16 × 16 maze the same day.

We built ours as a team of four: Tanmai Hanumanthu, Daniel Kaminski, Shaurya Kapoor, and me. The box held an ESP32-C6, motors with encoders and a driver to run them, an IMU, distance sensors, and a battery pack with its own battery management and a buck converter to bring the voltage down for the electronics. My part was the wiring and the firmware. With six hours on the clock, everything went onto a breadboard on the mouse's back, wired by hand with jumper leads and the ESP32-C6 pinout open on a laptop beside it. The firmware was MicroPython, so a change could go straight onto the board and run without a compile step in between.

It raced, and it didn't make it to the centre. It started the day as a box of parts on a table and ended it carrying more jumper wire than robot, which is about what six hours from a standing start looks like. The event's own pitch was to turn up with nothing and leave having raced a robot, and that part we did.