I am an experienced firmware engineer helping companies developing autonomous systems building production-grade firmware, low-level-device drivers and robotic control software. I am a systems thinker, for me any given feature does not exist in isolation but needs to be tied to a tangible goal and business impact.
I regularly participate in robotic competitions gaining invaluable real-word experience and keeping tabs on the state of the art.
I believe in the value of using advanced C++ standards (C++11 and forward) for writing software for bare-metal, RTOS and OS based applications.
Currently contracting as a Senior Firmware Engineer for a well-known company within the embedded industry. Previous engagement was team lead of the embedded systems group of a large European AGV company. Recently assembled and led a volunteer team to design and build a six-legged electric/hydraulic hexapod robot and participated in a major European competition. Details can be found under https://107-systems.org/l3xz-hexapod-robot-elrob2022/ .
Creator of Pika Spark, an Arduino Portenta X8 based micro robot control system combining an unprecedented amount of computing power and interfaces within an extremely small form factor ( https://pika-spark.io/ ).
It's quite astonishing that they thought that throwing 6000 people at the problem would work, then subsequently deciding to cut 2000 ...
Throughout my career I came to believe that the best achieving teams grow organically from the inside-out. A top-down "forced" innovation approach rarely seems to work.
Your guess is pretty much on point: Total BOM was around 16k€.
A not insubstantial amount (for me) and entirely financed out of my own pocket -
107-systems is a private team staffed with volunteers financed by donations.
I'd preferred to stay below 10k but at the end it was do or die ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Since you write of having participated at such events I suppose you understand ;)
The most expensive parts were the miniature hydraulics as well as the custom CNC milled parts, which were created using a service for the manufacturing of custom front panels (a plate is a plate). But also all the small parts start to add up: cables, connectors, batteries, power distributors, ...
Mostly about my ham radio related activities ;)