build18 - 2026

In the August of 2025, four friends and I decided that we loved the vibes of a DnD hackathon, but we were looking for something more... real. And so, the five of us decided to enter a hackathon in real life. This was Build18, a hardware hackathon organized by a committee of students and funded by the ECE department. 

We formed our team and attended the first few meetings, but when the time came to decide what exactly we would make, we kept drawing up on blank. One of my friends is really into controls, and so she wanted a robot, and two of my other friends are really good with AI and computer vision. We figured, why not combine all of these interests into one! The easiest way to do so was a robot. But, what exactly would this robot even do? 

That's when we stumbled across the apps and websites that are supposed to help you lock on by keeping you off your phone. The only problem? You need your phone to run them. An easy way to bypass this problem would be to make something physical that isn't controlled by your phone (I'll give you a hint: its a robot). 

 We received the parts for our robot (printer filament, raspberry pi, arduinos, and the like) in early January, during the first week of classes. The showcase for our completed project would be on the Sunday of the first week of classes. Our team began working on the various different parts that would go into our little buddy, we split off into 2 separate teams: the hardware and the software. Our software team worked on our computer vision using YOLOv8 to get that working and a few pretrained data sets as well, just to get us started. Alongside this, the hardware team began working on the body of the baby (the robot- we referrred to it as the baby) making sure it could host the LED screen that would act as its eyes, as well as all the necessary hardware needed to run the programs themselves. 

We put both components together the night before, soldered what needed to be soldered and taped the rest, and got the baby working for the first time in the iDeATe makerspace. The joy I felt and I know everyone else felt was truly a feeling I have come to adore when the baby started singing Your Idol as soon as it "saw" a phone in the frame during working time. It was a beautiful feeling, but our work wasn't done yet. Building the baby in the iDeATe makerspace meant we would have to transport it across campus. We did not know how strong our baby was, in our view the poor thing was on life support, so it broke our hearts to unplug it, but we were really pleased to see that the only thing that stopped working was our singular collective brainell at the smell of food. 

The showcase was an amazing sight to see, with so many teams creating such wonderful projects, and with all the professors and visitors coming to take a look at what we had put our blood, sweat and tears into. We had comments from people working in the industry going, "Wow! I need one of those for my desk!" 

We even got similar comments from an ECE professor who also took part in the hackathon, and he even asked for a photoshoot, which is where a lot of the pictures in this page are actually comming from It was truly amazing to seen that people actually liked our baby and the idea we had. 

I'm proud to say that we did not need to pull a single all nighter despite all our roadblocks and it was an incredibly fruitful hackathon, even if we didn't win anything like we did in-game. I wouldn't change a thing even if I did it all over again, it truly was an experience of a lifetime.