Captain's Log: Four Years from Breadboard Rookie to Tokyo World Open Podium

My freshman year, I let go of a 7805 regulator with the heatsink pointed the wrong way and set off the lab's smoke detector twice in one week. Dr. Sterling still brings it up at every officer meeting.

What changed things was getting handed a broken sensor board sophomore year and told to fix it instead of replace it. Debugging someone else's PCB traces under a loupe taught me more about signal integrity than any datasheet did.

Standing in Ryogoku Kokugikan this August, watching the readout freeze at 1.84 meters per second, I kept thinking about that smoke detector. Every burnt regulator was still on the way to this.