Robotathon 2025 Newbie Guide

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Hello!

This guide aims to provide you with helpful information and direction throughout your robot building process. While this guide is broad, it stays mostly within the realm of setup and basic tips since we encourage you to discover your own solutions.

If you have any technical questions or don’t understand a topic, ask the mentors or during TODO: link office hours here! We can help to resolve your problems, or point you to the right person who can. Mentors, office hours, and other teammates are valuable resources to turn to if you are stuck.

Overview

The first section, Getting Started, is about getting familiar with the ESP32 microcontroller, the software build process, and embedded systems development in general. We highly recommend that you at least take a look at Environment Setup, as this page will streamline your development process and prevent a lot of environment errors you may get in the future.

The second section, Sensors and Actuators, goes into detail about the various peripherals you will be using in the competition, which include motors, distance sensors, line sensors, and color sensors. Note that all this information is adapted from sources found off the Internet, so Google is a very good resource for more information or different documentation.

The third section, Designing a Robot, covers the physical construction of a robot, as well as the resources Texas Inventionworks (TIW) provides to students.

Finally, the Robotathon steering committee appreciates your feedback! If you have questions that you think should be clarified here, or topics that you think should be covered in the next revision of this guide, please fill out our TODO: google form!