My Experience at Prototype

Last weekend, I got the chance to participate in Hack Club’s hackathon, Prototype. Our objective at the competition was to use SO-101 robot arms and AI to complete any objective of our choice!

Icebreakers

Before the hackathon, I talked to Maneesh before, so I decided to team up with him since I knew him the best. However, during icebreakers, we learned that each team had to have 3 members, no more and no less. While hunting for a teammate, we met Sean.

The Competition

We began unboxing our robots as soon as the timer ended. The environment assembly was pretty easy but I had to restart around three times because I set it up wrong. That night, as most went to sleep, I decided to pull an all nighter with Maneesh to brainstorm and figure out how the robot worked. Maneesh quickly learned how to use the terminal while I kind of just sat there. After he went to bed, Sean woke up and started working on our idea: A robot arm that would pick up a bat and hit a ball into a goal. Training the robot was quite tedious, we had to repeat the same action 50 times which took around 40 minutes. After, we waited around 3 hours for it to learn off of our data. When judging started, our robot didn’t work, so we didn’t get a high score.

The End :(

Although we didn’t win a prize I had so much fun working with Sean and Maneesh and I hope to compete with them again.

Heres our repo