FIRST Robotics isn't just about the robot, it isn't even mainly about the robot. It is about hands on experience showing students that careers in engineering can be fun and rewarding. Along the way the students pick things up, like how to combine whatever resources you have on hand to solve (sometimes complex) problems.
One of the programming students set up a camera to take time lapse photos of a build session. He had worked out the system outside of robotics, cobbling together pieces from Ubuntu Linux, gPhoto, Python Scripts and cooked it all together to capture pictures from a digital camera.
But one problem remained. Occasionally the camera would freeze up. Some more scripts were put together to detect the camera hadn't sent photos in a particular time frame and triggered an Arduino board to cycle power using a relay hacked into an extension cord, forcing the camera to reboot. More scripts renamed the last cycle of files (to prevent overwrite) and the entire system was underway.
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