Atharva Arbat
Atharva Arbat is a Computer Science student at MIT World Peace University, Pune. He has spent two years building real-time control systems, desktop applications, and full-stack software. As Navigation and Control Lead at Vegapod Hyperloop, he led a team of 9 engineers and represented India at European Hyperloop Week in Zurich and Groningen. He enjoys building things from scratch - from a 32-bit operating system to gym management software now used by businesses in India. He works primarily with C++, Python, and Linux, and believes the best way to learn something is to build it yourself.
Vegapod Hyperloop
Navigation and Control Lead
Session
Building real-time control software sounds exciting until your WebSocket connection drops mid-run. As Navigation and Control Lead at Vegapod Hyperloop, I built the base station software that monitors and controls our pod during test runs. This talk covers the mistakes I made - choosing the wrong communication protocols, underestimating latency requirements, and learning why reliability matters more than fancy features. I'll walk through our architecture using Rust, Qt, React, and UART, and explain how we achieved 11ms latency between pod and base station. If you're building anything real-time, this talk will save you months of debugging.