Video tutorials
A video series on programming and electrical setup for FTC, to get beginner teams’ robots moving. I made it to make easy the things I found hard when I started.
Mechatronics Engineering · University of Waterloo
Armaan Sengupta
I work across embedded firmware, controls and mechanical design. Most recently I wrote implant firmware at Neuralink and vehicle lighting firmware at Tesla. Below is a selection of projects, starting with a ball-balancing Stewart platform.
More projects
Stewart Platform
Redesigned a ball balancing platform for a 200× heavier ball: a topology-optimized plate, stronger links and a ball-joint-free manipulator.
Rocket Airbrakes
Designed the cam mechanism that drives three panels from one servo, and co-wrote the firmware that steers Borealis to its target apogee.
Automated Measurement System
Led the firmware for a station that measures parts to 0.3 mm, including a custom 2-wire protocol to the VEX brain.
Neuralink
Led firmware for a 1st-gen neural stimulation implant: interrupt-driven, DMA-fed, high-throughput code coordinating waveforms and sampling for 3k+…
Tesla
Brought up all ~20 exterior lights on the Tesla Semi and their current-sense ADCs, from the hardware layer through to app-layer integration, writing the C…
Ixana
Built video streaming from smart glasses to a smartwatch over Ixana's Wi-R body-coupled silicon, using the body as an ultra-low-power data bus.
Magna
Streamed strain-gauge data from a hydraulic press over MQTT into PostgreSQL, with a live web dashboard for operators.
FYELABS
An autonomous back-up safety system for industrial garbage trucks: 10 LiDARs, 3 depth cameras, an IR camera, IMU and GPS across 6 microcontrollers.
The Trashminator
Designed and built an autonomous surface robot that collects floating trash, meant to work in swarms.
Radial Engine
Modelled twenty-plus parts from orthographic drawings and assembled them into a working six-cylinder linkage.
Clamping Hub
Designed and FEA-tested an ultra-low-profile clamping shaft hub, now sold commercially by Studica.
Contact Localization
Built a MuJoCo–ROS 2 bridge for the Franka Panda, with force injection to benchmark contact localization.
Beam Balancer
Took a 1-D ball balancer from linkage design to working firmware in two weeks.
Segway Dynamics
Derived the equations of motion for a human transporter by hand and checked them in Simulink against SimulationX.
Two-Axis Gantry
Wrote the STM32 firmware: interrupt-driven endstops, homing, UART positioning and an ADC-characterized pot.
LiDAR Point Clouds
Wrote filtering, voxel downsampling and a fast furthest-pair search for millions of points.
FTC 16397 Robots
All software, solo. Control Award at the Asia Pacific Open Championship.
Robot in 3 Days
Organized the event and built a ring-launching robot in 48 hours with five people.
Off-Road Tank Tread
Designed a tracked drive concept for rough terrain, shown here as a CAD render.
The Gooseminator
Sweeps an area and sorts bird eggs by whether they are an invasive or protected species.
3-DOF Robotic Arm
Built in under 8 hours from a Tetrix kit to pick up oddly shaped bones and sort them.
Skills
Hover one to see where it was used.
Volunteering · Mentoring · Teaching
Robotics, beyond my own builds.
Mentoring
I personally mentor other FTC teams, most closely 18846 and 17003, with everything from mechanical design to programming reliability.
Outreach
Robotics demos for companies and schools beyond the robotics community, including Sheridan College, the City of Brampton, BGC Peel, OpenText and middle schools.
Summer camp
With FIRST Canada we gave 38 robotics kits to schools without a robotics club, then taught them over two summers, from building to programming robots.
FTC Sim
I beta tested and then publicly demoed FTC Sim, a virtual robotics simulator, and was then hired by FIRST Canada to teach classes on it for two years.
FRC lessons
As captain of my high school’s FRC team, I created and organized the lessons for newcomers, and taught the mechanical design lessons.
