Aside from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665611, way back in my engineering classes in university we had this design project... I'm not sure I've ever told the story publicly before and it brings a smile to remember it more than 20 years later.

My group (and some others) had to design a device to transport an egg from one side of a very simple "obstacle course" to the other, with the aid of beacons (to indicate the egg location and target, each along opposite ends) and light sensors. There was basically a single obstacle, a barrier running most of the way across the middle. The field was fairly small, I think 4 metres across by 3 metres wide.

The other teams followed tutorials, created beacons that emitted high-frequency light pulses and circuitry to filter out 60Hz ambient light and detect the pulse; various robots (I think at least one repurposed a remote-control car) and feedback control to steer them toward the beacons, etc. There were a few different microcontrollers on offer to us for this task, and groups generally had three people: someone responsible for the mechanical parts, someone doing circuitry, and someone doing assembly programming.

My group was just the two of us.

I designed extenders for the central barrier, a carriage to straddle the barrier, and a see-saw the length of the field. The machine would find the egg, scoop it into one end, tilt the see-saw (the other person's innovation: by releasing a stop allowing the counterweighted far side to fall), find the target and release the scoop on the other end. Our light sensors were pointed directly at the ceiling (the source of the "noise"), and put through a simple RC circuit to see that light as more or less constant. Our "beacons" were pieces of construction paper used to block the light physically. All controlled by a 3-bit finite state machine implemented directly in TTL/CMOS (I forget which).

And it worked in testing (praise for my partner; I would never have gotten the mechanics robust enough), but on presentation day the real barrier (made sloppily out of wood) was noticeably wider than specified and the carriage didn't fit on it.

As I recall, in later years the obstacle course was made considerably more complex, ruling out solutions like mine entirely. (There were other projects to choose from, for my year and later years, that as far as I know didn't require modification.)