Tufts Blogs

Hi readers! People enter the School of Engineering with all kinds of experience. Some students arrive with backgrounds in robotics, coding, and fabrication, while others come in with no experience at all but are eager to learn. If you’re like me, someone who had zero robotics experience but wanted to dive in, I have a crazy story for you.

The time had finally come for me to take my first electronics and controls class, typically your third year of your mechanical engineering journey. I had never even heard of resistors, breadboards, or circuits before. Looking back, though, it has been my favorite class so far. The course was extremely beginner-friendly, and my professor did an amazing job making the content digestible and hands-on.

On the first day of class, we were given these adorable orange boxes filled with all the electronic hardware we would need. We were required to bring it to every class so we could practice building different types of circuits. The course was entirely project-based. While that might sound intimidating, I personally love working on projects and building things with my hands, so this class was perfect for me. We completed a variety of projects like arcade games, soldering assignments, even designing and fabricating our own printed circuit boards. All of these smaller scale projects were building up our skills for the final project, our very own functioning robot. 

We were tasked with building a robot that we could control via the internet. The robot had to pick up a weight, identify what type of weight it was, and place it on a seesaw in the correct location so that if another group’s robot placed a weight on the opposite side, the seesaw would balance. I had never done anything like this before. Suddenly, I was thinking about motors, torque, weight, and power in ways that were both intimidating and incredibly exciting.

My partner happened to be one of my good friends, which made the experience even better. She’s an electrical engineering minor involved in robotics, so we were able to lean on some of her prior experience as well. Many of my classes involve group-based projects, which I’ve found to be incredibly valuable. It’s a great way to build friendships and learn from each other.

Now for the part you’re probably wondering about: how did we actually build the robot?

We started with sketching ideas, talking to our professor and senior friends who have already taken the class. Additionally, we were given certain constraints on dimensions and materials, but overall, the robot was entirely our own design. We ran calculations to determine things like: Where should we place the lever arm that would lift the weight? How large could the wheels be? How tall should the robot stand?

Then we moved into CAD. I had learned SolidWorks in my Materials and Manufacturing class, so don’t feel like you need prior experience before coming into the School of Engineering. We went through several revisions because once we assembled the full robot in CAD, some components didn’t fit together as nicely as we had hoped, so we went back and made some adjustments.

After finalizing the design, we headed to the laser cutter and cut all of our structural pieces out of acrylic. We spent hours gluing everything together, sharing laughs, and inevitably getting super glue stuck to our fingers, which is a very common experience at Nolop, one of our campus makerspaces.

Next came the electronics. We installed the motors, wired the load cell (the sensor that measures how much weight the robot is lifting), and connected everything together. But after assembling it, we realized the lever arm wasn’t at an appropriate length away, to lift the weights. As frustrating as it was, that’s engineering for you. We went back to the drawing board revising the CAD, cutting and gluing more pieces, adding counterweights and kept iterating.

Finally, after many trials, final presentation day arrived. Our robot was performing exactly as it should, and we had one hour left before demonstrating it to our professors. I stepped out of Nolop to grab a quick bite to eat. When I returned, my partner looked at me with a face of pure shock I’ll never forget. She said to me the worst words you could possible hear right before a final: 

“It broke.”

Our beautiful robot had snapped in half right down the middle, the cut was like a sandwich at a deli shop.

Instead of crying, I laughed for a second and said, “Okay. How do we fix it?”

We had one hour. This was the real test.

We drilled holes into the base, poured on as much super glue as we could, reinforced it with a new acrylic bottom plate, and hoped for the best. When it was time to present, we explained to our professor what had happened. She was incredibly understanding. And somehow despite the universe against our side, our robot successfully read the weight and placed it correctly on the seesaw.

At the time, it felt like the world was ending. But looking back, it’s honestly hilarious. More importantly, it showed me something valuable: perseverance matters more than perfection. Engineering isn’t about everything working the first time. It’s about problem-solving under pressure, adapting quickly, refusing to give up and having fun while you do it.