MIT maker portfolio [Deferred EA, Rejected RD] (Class of 2030)

Hello! I’m Sebastian Kazakov, and here’s some stuff I’ve made: I started by integrating circuitry into legos, which I used as practice to make an affordable automated gate for my chickens, keeping them safe at night to this day. Predators ate them by day, so to repel them, I used common materials, hospital bed actuators, and C++ based Arduinos to make automated scarecrows, which moved randomly by day to frighten hawks. The best of them I repurposed into infiltration machines, helping my father get onto the HOV lane & avoid traffic during his commute to work. I made a few mobile games during COVID to teach myself Swift & Objective-C, my own website to learn HTML & CSS, a computer game to learn Python, got my first job as a developer with a startup, and hacked a Tesla Cybertruck to learn about bluetooth. My schools robotics team valued the skills I learned, and given the opportunity, I led my team to win several state level competitions and sponsors. I tried making rovers to help defend my chickens, using vision as a cheaper alternative to LiDAR, but larger models proved ineffective on harsh terrain. So, I taught myself CAD, and made a few leg prototypes until they were able to hold the robots weight, and with a few hundred lines of C++, I got the dog to walk. I made a custom gear in Onshape because the joints kept shattering, which served as an affordable alternative to metal parts. I implemented inverse kinematics instead of explicit angles, developed my own balancing algorithm to handle intense conditions, and a custom step cycle generator. LiDAR is quite expensive, so I used two cheap webcams for binocular vision to distinguish edges, objects, and the distances to them. Two button microphones let my parents talk to the dog in German, until it drowned on a beach. Several thousands of lines of Python later, and a new snap - fit battery pack made of discarded toys, the dog visited festivals, partnered with a recycling company, got into news headlines, and garnered a YouTube following. Now, I'm building a 140lb socket joint - based successor. Thanks for watching!