A.R.C. Personal Command Terminal
An RFID, display, Bluetooth, light, and audio terminal built around an Arduino UNO R4 WiFi.
The short version
A.R.C. was my final project in Columbia University’s Arduino Fundamentals: Programming and Hardware Essentials course, August 3–7, 2026. The finished system combined RFID, two displays, Bluetooth, a custom phone app, LEDs, audio, and remote input—but its final architecture was not the one I began with.
Component explorer
A.R.C., layer by layer.
Select a component to see the role it performed in the final terminal.
MFRC522 authentication input
The short version
One desk, seven connected systems.
The terminal reads RFID, communicates state through an LCD and OLED, accepts remote input through Bluetooth, and responds with light and sound. I also built a companion phone app called ARC-Terminal.
Things that went wrong
When the input system failed, the architecture changed.
Earlier keypad and MPR121 input approaches caused repeated issues, so I changed direction and moved remote input to Bluetooth. That solved one problem and created new integration work.
Then flash memory became tight. Audio had to be aggressively compressed and simplified, while compile, sound, and LED issues competed for attention. The final system worked because I stopped protecting the first architecture and rebuilt the weak parts.
What I learned
The best fix was sometimes subtraction.
The most useful lesson was not about one module. It was learning when to debug, when to simplify, and when to replace an approach entirely. Hardware makes that judgment visible very quickly.
Context
Built in five days; learned far beyond the syllabus.
I built A.R.C. during Columbia University Pre-College Programs’ Arduino Fundamentals course from August 3–7, 2026. It connected my interest in software systems with the physical constraints of components, wiring, and memory.