The Chesapeake regional is coming up in about 12 hours, so here’s a quick summary of the team’s progress:
- We built and programmed two scoring devices in one-third the time it took us to build one (and we rebuilt most of the robot, too)
- The scouting network was finished. (Once again, the developer disagrees, and claims that it’s nowhere near. But since the binary is ready for publication, I consider it “finished.”)
- I made some progress on the website, despite being instructed not to use
sshdon the server because the system load was too high
The third bullet kind of annoys me.
In two weeks, we managed to build both a dumper and a shooter (an improved version of our old catapult). The stats are uninteresting, the point is that both performed well, unlike the old system, which didn’t work. I mean, didn’t “live up to our expectations.” It couldn’t predict motions, it broke a lot, and it wasn’t accurate. But both of the new systems worked. The dumper dumped (no, it couldn’t predict the motions of moving targets), and the shooter/catapult was accurate. We can predict motions, throw the ball, and the ball actually goes into the shooter (instead of from the harvester onto the floor) every time, thanks to an “unbreakable, but don’t try to break it” extension of the shooter’s orbit ball holder.
The team voted on which system was best, and the shooter won out. This lends itself to the strategy of focusing on collecting empty cells and passing them to the payload specialist. Our payload specialist is abnormally decent (hence the fact that we placed 23 out of ~60 at D.C. with a robot that could barely score), so if the robot can manage to get him some orbit balls, that should help.
The developer of our scouting software, “Scout 449″, has released version 4 of the software, which he says is ready for release. The source code (according to him) should be available soon. The funny part: he’s not willing to give me the source code at any point in the visible future, but he’s going to have it ready for the website, where anyone can download it, “soon.” He doesn’t see any incongruity.
The website will be redesigned (general interface and content) after Chesapeake.
