From an initial glance, it appears more new members came today than last week. Though that does help the team, the room’s limited space fits only so many people. Mechanics demonstrations such as tapping and sawing took place in the main room while Eric instructed inventor to veterans in the computer room. Scott and his tech crew were in the backroom as usual. But, the Labview introduction transpired in the hallways with Winifred resting on top of a recycle bin (Well, it IS getting old and slow). Since Daniel was out sick, Jacob had to improvise on the tutorial. It seemed the flu got to him though as he was more calm than usual. Maybe he should have gotten a cookie.
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I’ve been touring colleges in the North East for a few days now, and, amazingly, FIRST and related things seem to pop up at the most unexpected times!
At Rochester Institute of Technology, I was looking through the list of merit scholarships when one in particular caught my eye. The FIRST Robotics scholarship at RIT awards $6,000 a year simply for being on a FIRST team in high school. I.e., you could come in with a 2.0 GPA (unlikely) to study English (also unlikely), but so long as you were on a FIRST team in high school, you are eligible for this scholarship.
I want to give a shout-out to team 424, whose captain I met today at Cornell. He guessed I was on a FIRST team by my team T-shirt (I somehow accumulated 3 of them this year, so I’m wearing them to most of the bigger name colleges I’m visiting).
In an engineering building at Cornell, there was a display of mechanical devices. One of which was a model of a gyroscope, which had a caption that puts to rest once and for all whether a reaction wheel is more effective than a gyroscope: “…reaction wheels, apply torque simply by changing the rotor spin speed, but CMG (fancy acronym for gyropscope) are far more power efficient. For a few hundred Watts and about 100 kg of mass, llarge CMGs have produced thousands of Nm of torque, enough to flip over an SUV. A reaction wheel of similar capability would require megawatts of power.
Finally, in a nearby hall, I spotted more or less our cart design, except actually fabricated! That’s right, a group at Cornell built a crab drive cart that carries land mine detection equipment. Needless to say, I took plenty of pictures for later review.
I’ll be back sometime after Battle o’ Baltimore. Who knows how many more times I’ll see FIRST related things before then!
For any given weird, seemingly pointless action, you will be able to find at least 3 good, interesting reasons for wanting to take that action (provided you look around hard enough). In my case, the action was calling a cgi script from php, and the reason was to implement a good logging system. I run a bugzilla installation here, and I didn’t want to go editing every page to get a logger. I also didn’t want to use Apache’s own loggers, since a MySQL database is much easier to handle than a super-sized file.
My solution was to create an index.php file and modify the htaccess so that every request to the bugzilla installation went through index.php. Then, I could have index.php log the event, and call the appropriate cgi script.
If you’ve been using unix or linux long enough, you’ve probably found yourself wishing for more powerful permissions management. For example, if your web development group has been cooperating with another group on a somewhat sensitive project, you’ve probably wished you could easily set it so that those two groups – and only those two groups – could read and write to certain files. Or, as in my case, wished that you could allow the web server user to read and write to files without having to mess with any group permissions. ACLs are the tool that lets you do that.
Read the rest of this entry »Week Five: 1/31/09 – 2/6/09
Feb 12
We took advantage of the first full week of school in nearly a month to get a lot done on the robot. The three-wheeled backerman drive was completed and prepared for transfer onto the robot itself. The dumper and harvester were altered to better manipulate moon rocks within the robot and the catapult was completed and tested in conjunction with the camera. Thanks to this, we now have a much better idea of the catapult’s range and ability. The final parts for the gyro were acquired and construction began on it. Our programmers continued to work diligently on the LabVIEW code and made changes to the website. Meanwhile, the public relations subteam worked on the team’s entries for various awards and provided the programmers with additional content for the website.
Fall Training (11/19)
Nov 19
What a fall it has been (and will continue to be for a month)!
Our fall training is now in week 7 of its 10 week duration. New members have learned skills from programming in C to wiring the robot or using basic tools. Thursday meetings have been consistantly drawing more than 50 people, well above expectations.
On the fundraising front, we recieved a 6k project expansion grant from NASA, and are expecting a 10k grant from the Army Research Lab.
Additionally, we have been in contact with Vecna Technologies, which has offered mentoring support for our programming team. This friday we will be talking with Intelligent Automation Inc. about a similar arrangement for our hardware oriented teams.
Start of Fall: 9/25/08
Sep 25
The Fall season has officially started; our first meeting for new members ended a little under two hours ago! Prospective member turnout reached an all time high this year, with over 70 students attending the meeting. Our president showed a 45 minute presentation on what the team is about and answered questions. Next week, new comers will split into subteams to begin training.
Last week, the team presented to the Electrical Vehicle Association of Greater Washington. We also saw Solar Taxi, a vehicle traveling around the world purely on solar power. Read about it at www.solartaxi.com
On labor day weekend, the team brought the robot to the Green Belt Labor Day Parade with the EVA/DC. The robot, with its mecanum wheels wrapped in several layers of duct tape, made it through the full mile parade, while hurdling the ball in front of crowds. Not only was it good publicity and great fun, we won third place in the automobile category! Not bad, considering we heard about it 12 hours before it took place.
Back to School: 8/28/08
Aug 28
Well, much as we hate to admit it, school has started again. On the bright side, activity buses will start soon and we’ll be able to resume our Thursday meetings.
Last Friday, the team brought the robot to freshman orientation to drum up a little excitement. It seemed to work pretty well. Our equipment has also been brought back to our HQ, room 361.
Earlier today we readied the robot and related items for our next bake sale this weekend. We’re trying a different store: the Giant in Silver Spring, 1280 East West Hwy. Silver Spring, MD 20910. We will be there Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 5pm.
Our fundraising parents will have a meeting the on September 6th to discuss our fundraising plans, which appear to be on track for the first time in years.
Regular Thursday meetings will resume for veteran members on September 11th in room 361. New members will be invited to join after the activity fair (still no word on when that will be).
But we’re all counting down to the same date. (Click the link to see the countdown).
Battle o Baltimore: 8/10/08
Aug 12
August 8th and 9th found the team at the Park School of Baltimore competing in the second annual Battle o’ Baltimore. After the practice matches on Friday, we entered the qualifying matches Saturday morning. A series of six matches in less than three hours tested the team’s ability to maintain the robot. The conclusion of the qualifiers left our team undefeated, one of two teams that could make that claim. After lunch, we teamed up with KILROY (339) and PHS Robotics (007) as the second seeded alliance. We won our first quarterfinal match against the seventh seeded alliance led by Blue Cheese (1086), but lost the second match when our hybrid seemingly malfunctioned ant KILROY became entangled in the rack (elimination matches in FRC are best of three). The malfunction was traced not to the programming, but a drive belt that had failed due to the fatigue of three competitions and two exhibitions. Without a belt we were forced to play the final tie-breaking match with only three controlled wheels. To make matters worse, team 007 had power issues and were unable to turn on their robot. Incredibly, we lost by a mere six points.
Moral: Murphy was right.
Summer, Part II
Jul 31
The team attended the first Annual StarryTelling festival on July 19th. The event was a big success, with hundreds of visitors. After an initial setback due to uncharged batteries, we were able to show our robot throughout the day. We hope we inspired a younger student or two (or all of them) to pursue a career in technology. Pictures will be posted when our photographer returns from fencing camp.
The following weekend, we held our first bake sale of 2008. It took place at the Safeway across the street from Blair. The team raised 602 dollars in cookie sales and donations which will be used for building next years robot.
A thank you goes out to everyone who helped out at these events or supported us at the bake sale!
