Memoirs - course 3 - week 1

 Over two pages or so, write about a meaningful mistake that you made. Provide the setting and provide the information necessary to understand the process in which you were involved. When you are finished describing how you made the mistake, write about why you made it. Draw on at least one or two of the nouns you came up with earlier in this module as you think about your story.

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During my studies at university, I constantly worked on electric circuits and electronic boards. My bachelor’s degree is in mechatronics, which is the union of mechanics, electronics, and software development. It was the last days of the semester, and everybody knows what that means: it is time to deliver the projects that will determine a passing or failing grade. In my eighth semester, I was taking the most famous and difficult subject, robotics architecture.

There is a me before and after this specific subject. Children become real engineers. The project consisted of providing a fully articulated robot arm with four degrees of freedom. The project required a team of students to design the mechanical arm, then develop the electronic circuits, and finally create the software development. The robot’s main tasks were twofold. First, it had to move the arm on the x, y, and z axes, also known as direct kinematics. Second, it had to reach a specified position in space, requiring inverse kinematics calculations to determine how to move the arm. For this, the arm needed to know its own dimensions.

The project involved not only physically moving the arm but also simulating it through SolidWorks and MATLAB. This made it a truly difficult and challenging project because of the careful motor selection required.

Servo motors were forbidden; the professor insisted on using direct current motors. He was a terrible teacher. Everything went wrong with this project: logistics, administration, design, and everything else.

I asked my dad to lend us the credit card. We spent almost a thousand dollars on materials. The rest of the team repaid me, and I returned the money to my mom. My team was awful. My friend Angel designed the robot, and I had to purchase the parts. My dad bought materials. My friend Ruben developed the code for the robot. I spent all day trying to make sense of it all. I should have bought a book and fought against the teacher’s bad decisions.

The robot could not perform inverse kinematics because we were using encoders with the motors, which was almost impossible to manage. We didn’t know how to correct the direct current motors with encoders.

My heart aches knowing how terribly I failed this subject. I felt completely alone. I saw everything going wrong. I should have focused from the beginning on the mechanical design of the robot and learning new things at Home Depot and hardware stores. Instead, I put everyone through a terrible experience.