Taking turns getting sleep, we made great progress over night. By morning, the sensor array was reading distance values.

In spite of all the work on the multiplexer and the fancy motor driver chips, we were not getting them to talk to the Teensy LC microcontroller. 

This is always the most telling point for a team. Things were going great when progress was fast, but we were about to see how things would go when the different parts are not coming together and time is short.  

Everyone was tired.  We were only a couple hours from presentation time and getting no love from the motor driver chips. Time to change plans. 

Looking through the parts that different team members had brought to the party, we decided to go old school and drive the motors with individual transistors. A quick schematic drawing and everyone jumped in cutting wires, soldering, putting on heat shrink tubing, and rewriting the code, while others put the finishing touches on the presentation.

Sure it got nicknamed the "Electric Dreadlocks" but it was beautiful to us. It was our baby.