The University of California, San Diego requires that every mechanical engineering student complete two robot-building projects. The first is a manually-controlled robot, the second being a PIC-controlled autonomous robot.

For the second project, the challenge was to construct a machine that would accurately sketch the profile of a 4x4 wall of child's blocks in random configurations.

The simplest way to complete this task, I imagined, would be to simultaneously scan & draw the wall's configuration column-by-column. (We were the only team to attempt such; all other teams scanned & drew in separate processes.) The resulting robot was decidedly simple.

The Big Black Snake (named for the...humbling...bundle of cables running from the read head to the PIC) was the second-fastest at completion of the drawing task (average time: 5.34 seconds), although it had a tendency to scream its way outside the lines, resulting in errors in graphing (lines that deviated from their designated location by >2mm) that cost the team its silver medal.