In my Interface and Digital Electronics class, there was a class wide, car-race. The professor was a hardass, and his exams were completely unfair, and whoever placed in the top three didn't have to take the final exam, so the pressure was on! He was fired at the end of the semester after me, so no it was not just me being salty.
The car was based on a TI MSP432 with a Parallax TSL 1401 Line Scan Camera. as our one source of "input" data. Every team custom implements, and tunes a PID control algorithm. Using the camera's output, a "center of track" is calculated, as well as a steering error, which is fed to the PID algorithm.
The entire project is done in bare-metal C, with the course's labs each being a different portion like writing the drivers for the UART, I2C, timer based PWM, and more!