For my freshman spring IoT class final project, my team designed a smart fishing game consisting of a fishing rod, on which was mounted an ESP-32 along with components such as a digital compass for motion sensing, a rotary encoder for a reel, IMU, speaker and buzzer. The user orients themselves towards any given heading and swings the fishing rod. If the line falls within the vicinity of a fish, the user has caught that fish and their points are incremented in a database hosted in a remote server. To communicate with the server, the game was supported by server-side scripts written in Python.

I thoroughly enjoyed the material of the class. I’ve always been really interested in physics and combining it with code to making a product from scratch was amazing. I learnt to navigate team dynamics- how to balance out making people work on things they were already comfortable with doing, with working on something out of one’s comfort zone.