In terms of drive, it looks like bumps aren’t nearly as difficult as we first thought. A simple 4wd kitbot easily clears the bumps. We’re also looking into mecanum drive so we can line up for goals… assuming mecanum actually behaves itself better than it has in the past (where strafing was rather jerky).

We had some success with a surgical tubing powered kicker, which we’re working on automating (we can’t exactly put Doyung or me in the robot to pull back!)  After lots and lots of testing with different tensions and striking angles and many other parameters which I really don’t want to list out, we could easily clear two bumps.  Check it out:

On the programming front, we have camera tracking of a vision target.  Amazing!  Hopefully it’ll work on the robot…  We also have the benefits of a (nearly) full sized vision target, printed out complement’s of Blair’s Mr. Kaluta, who has the run of Blair’s poster printer (bought with money the school won from Intel STS over the years, I suspect).  Thanks, Mr. Kaluta!

Our electricians have 2 working electronics boards, which lets us use one board for programming experiments while the other board is used to test drive frames.  This should solve a lot of problems we had last year regarding competition for cRio time.  The second board is ugly.  Very ugly.  Extremely ugly.  The members who wired the board were under instructions to make it “as ugly as possible.”  Why?  So that we have no interest in putting it on the final robot.  An electronics board should be designed to fit with the robot, not the robot designed to fit with the board (a-la 2008) , the board added as an afterthought (a-la 2009), or (god forbid) holes drilled in the board so critical elements can be mounted (a-la 2007).  Hopefully, we’ll have none of these issues.

We also have a super-secret awesome plan for finale.  The idea is also between somewhat and completely insane, so no details yet, but I will tell you we plan on scoring 5 bonus points, so long as one of our alliance members’ robots can drive [evil laugh?]

We’re taking tomorrow off (school is closed) and then we’ll have a busy week with both midterm exams and prototyping going on.  Feel free to drop in on us if you’re in the area.

Go 449!

We’ve also been working on a new index page, which would look somewhat better, have more content, and be more inviting overall.

Finally, we should have breadcrumb navigation soon.

This cable needed to cross two walls, one of which had never been unprofessionally penetrated before. Like usual, we taped the wires to the end of a fiberglass pole (the bendy kind used for road markers) and tried to poke it through peacefully with the bundles of ethernet cables. The pipes they passed through were gummed tightly, and eventually we gave up. We ended up pushing it through the oversized hole for a ventilation duct (though not oversized enough to make it easy for us.)

When we got into the back room, myself and others completely covered in bits of tile and ceiling dust, we tugged on the end of the cable. It fed through nicely for about three feet before being pulled taut. We were left with the two wire ends dangling 8 feet in the air. So much for the ten feet of slack I had been sure to allocate.  Fortunately, This new predicament forced us to place the stereo unit on an elevated platform, saving valuable floor space in our tiny backroom.

We then assembled an audio patch cable to connect the backroom server, quentin, to the stereo. I brought in an old cable with salvagable Radio Shack jacks on it, and we hacked it apart. After some soldering difficulties that destroyed the plastic hoods for both connectors and some greuling tests of the cable (“ohming-out” if you will), the cable passed QC and was installed.

“Okay, playing, turn up the volume slowly!”

And voila, music from the other room.

For ten seconds, then it cuts out.

“Dang, my Java program crashed. I’ll work on that later.”

While Stephen continues to work on that, I will have fun using mplayer wirelessly via SSH from my pocket-sized tablet.