Inky Ganbold
Cited for original work at the seam of hardware and software — neural interfaces, autonomous robots, and the systems that let machines read and act on the real world.
Abstract
Inky Ganbold is a hardware and software engineer working at the boundary of the two — neural interfaces, autonomous robots, and the systems that let machines read and act on real-world signals. He has won eleven prizes across twenty-six hackathons, among them Stanford TreeHacks, HackMIT, the MIT Energy Hack, and Columbia DivHacks, and has organized four events of his own. In 2018 he founded Mongolia’s national teen robotics team and led it to thirty-second place out of one hundred ninety nations at FIRST Global 2019 in Dubai. He placed third at the IEEE All-America Micromouse Contest, won the Snap AR Challenge, and was selected as a Google I/O delegate in 2024 and 2025. He serves as JLCPCB’s North American campus ambassador, has judged at Cal Hacks, and contributes to open source — including the Model Context Protocol TypeScript SDK and an open brain–computer interface.
Record in brief
- Hackathons
- 11 prizes across 26 events, plus 4 hosted
- FIRST Global 2019
- Founded and led Mongolia’s national team — 32nd of 190 nations
- Open source
- Open hardware on OSHWLab; contributor to the Model Context Protocol TypeScript SDK and Warp
- Recognition
- Google I/O delegate, 2024 & 2025 · JLCPCB North American campus ambassador
Selected work
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NeuroFocus V4 · bci-mcp
A single-channel neural interface (Seeed Xiao ESP32-S3 + ADS1220 ADC) that acquires real EEG and exposes it to LLMs over the Model Context Protocol — open-sourced as bci-mcp.
Authoring the protocol layer that lets an LLM read live neural signals in real time over MCP — early work in direct human–computer interaction.
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GreenMate
AR plant-health ecosystem: an ESP32-S3 sensor payload streams soil/light/humidity to ThingSpeak + MATLAB, visualized live through Snap AR Spectacles built in Lens Studio.
Won the Snap AR Challenge at Columbia DivHacks 2024 — AR, embedded firmware, and cloud executed end-to-end across one stack.
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NeuroMouse V2.0 · RoboTrace
Maze-solving micromouse and line-tracing robots on ESP32-S3 / STM32 with custom PCBs, flood-fill search, and position-PID motion control.
3rd overall at the All-America Micromouse Contest (IEEE @ UCLA, 2026) — deep embedded + hardware design, iterated fast on a hand-soldered prototype board.
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INKY · inky-gigachad
Open-source repo-intelligence tool that maps a codebase’s style and spins up a local MCP daemon enforcing architectural consistency across Cursor, Windsurf, and Claude Code.
Selected for VibeCon, an invite-only vibe-coding hackathon; reached 100+ users within hours of launch.
Roles & appointments
Founder & Team Lead — TTF Robotics · Mongolian National Team
Founded the robotics club and led Mongolia’s teen national team to FIRST Global 2019 in Dubai.
Ranked 32nd of 190 nations (per the official FIRST Global archive) with a Java/C++ semi-autonomous, PID-controlled robot.
North American Campus Ambassador — JLCPCB
Appointed by the global PCB manufacturer to lead hardware workshops on schematic capture, routing, and PCB-layout optimization.
Organizes and hosts competitive regional robotics events across North American campuses.
Technical Lead — De Anza College · ISP Office
Built and deployed a live production transfer-fair app upgrading internal institutional infrastructure.
Engineered localized RAG chatbots automating onboarding for incoming student workers.
Hardware Engineering Fellow — Beelog Technologies
Designed production-ready PCBs for IoT water-well grids and computer-vision reverse-vending recycling machines (ESP32 + OpenCV).
Honors & awards
- 3rd Overall — NeuroMouse V2.0 All-America Micromouse Contest · IEEE @ UCLA
- 2nd Place — CTF / Cybersecurity Cloudathon · San Jose State University
- Hackathon Prize Dedalus Labs Hackathon
- KnotAPI Sponsor Prize HackMIT · MIT
- Best Student Life Hack — Naccent UC Santa Barbara
- 1st — Snap AR Challenge — GreenMate Columbia DivHacks
- Best use of Multi-on Agent Ops Hackathon
- Best use of Groq Agents Ops Hackathon
- Best Hardware — Clean Mars San Francisco State University
- 2nd Overall — NeuralNurse Hack For Impact · UC Berkeley
- 1st Place + Best Environment Hack De Anza Hackathon (EnergyMate)
- 1st Prize — Creative Thon Huree University · TTF Robotics
- Excellence of Innovation TESO Corporation · TTF Robotics
- Certificate of Excellence FIRST Global · Dubai
Judging & service
Official Project Judge
Judged submissions at the largest collegiate hackathon (~700 projects, ~3,000 hackers).
Tech Lead, Organizing Team
On the organizing/tech team for both events; built the judging tooling used to run them.
Workshops Taught
Algorithms & Data Structures · Interactive Data Apps with Python + Streamlit · Arduino hardware.
Writing & open source
- Medium ↗ Long-form writing on robotics, hardware, and building in public.
- OSHWLab / EasyEDA ↗ Open-source PCB schematics published for public reuse.
- Open Source ↗ Contributions to warpdotdev/warp and modelcontextprotocol/typescript-sdk.
- YouTube 70+ videos building hardware and software in public.
Recent writing
- We Placed 3rd at the All America Micromouse Contest — Here’s What Actually Mattered
- my cursor rule for ios app development using swift
- From first hackathon to winner: lessons from doing 26 hackathons, hackathon 101
- day 2 of my 30 of coding challenge!
In the press
Education
- San Jose State University
- B.S. Computer Science & Linguistics — incoming junior (transfer)
- De Anza College
- A.S. Computer Science & Engineering Physics
