Robotics Team Structure

Getting Close to Robo-Time...

Robot Shipped, one last pic

This was taken well before the robot shipped but I didn't get around to uploading it. It's one of my favorites, so I thought I post it anyway. It shows the chain drive that powers the shooting column. As the moon rocks travel up the shooting chamber, each roller it encounters is moving faster than the previous set, thanks to the gearing shown here. With the creative routing of the chains, a single motor is able to power both sides of the rollers (one rolling counter-clockwise, the other clockwise).

Winter Driving Season Almost Over...Please?

I'm about done with this. And this photo was from the previous snowstorm. Since that one, we've had another that arrived at the perfect time to scramble traffic.

Robot Construction Update, Integration Test

The robot subsystems are getting close to being integrated. As a visualization exercise, we stacked the parts close to where they will be on the finished bot.

Starting from the bottom, the drive train assembly (this was taken a bit ago but provides a good "baseline")


Next comes the electronics board "drawer". This was originally conceived to be a slide out drawer for easy access, but has since been redesigned with doors around the robot allowing access to reach in to the components rather than sliding the drawer out.


Next comes the Collector. This subsystem picks 'moon rocks' up from the floor and lifts them into a storage area. The rollers seen here will be underneath a band of material the 'moon rocks' (Orbit Balls) cling to.


Finally, the shooter. Still mounted in the plywood prototype, the shooter is a geared assembly, with each roller increasing speed, propelling the 'moon rocks' out of the top. Not shown is the hood and turret assembly, controlled by a camera to target the direction the moon rocks are thrown.

Robotics Drive Test

Just a quick note on robot construction.

The team hosted a programming workshop for 5 other teams. 4 hours of coding hands-on and idea sharing followed by tours of the construction process; everyone seemed to have a good time.

Build on the robot's test frame wrapped up with a quick drive test. The programmers were testing out several different acceleration algorithms to cope with the slippery surface the 'bot will see in competition.

Robo Prep Continues...

Preparation for the FIRST robotics build season continues. A test board has been assembled and refined. Tomorrow the game will be announced, then the plotting, planning, designing, constructing and revising will begin.

For now, this is how the test board looks. The actual robot is not expected to look anything like what is seen here, this is just a test platform.

Robotics Update

On a totally different note, the robotics team is transitioning to C++ this year from straight C. The communications system between the robot and driver control station is 802.11n. Each robot forms an on-board network between its controller (cRIO from National Instruments), camera (etherlink connected), and uses a game controller to talk back to the hub (Linksys/Cisco 802.11n wireless router). The router sits back at the "driver station" so it has access to line power to drive the router. Two USB joysticks (logitec) provide operator control.

I beg to differ

I had a backlog of InformationWeek newsletters to browse and had a slow moment so I dove in. Here is what popped up:

Google's upcoming Android mobile platform could spur consumers to widely adopt smartphones, according to new research from ABI Research.

The report, titled "Smartphone And OS Markets," said Google's platform could push smartphones toward standardization, which could eventually push smartphone adoption beyond the 14% market share it currently holds.

Maybe that is an idea that can only be accepted as true if the reverse is also true. The reverse would be that the lack of standardization has impeded adoption. I'm not buying it. Standardization in this context is referencing the operating system of the phones. We (referring to people of the planet Earth) have several operating system choices for phones; Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm, Blackberry, Apple, and Android (probably others too, but you get the idea). The research seems to imply that if we could only have one more people would buy them.

When has that ever worked?

Neglected for NaNoWriMo

This blog is being neglected due to National Novel Writing Month. The normal level of neglect will resume after the month of November.

In the meantime, please enjoy this image of the Pages icon from Apple. I don't have a Mac at the moment (actually, I have a Mac Plus in the closet but even I don't think that counts), but tell myself that if I did it'd be easier to write a novel.

An unneeded photo, thankfully

I've been saving this picture for a while, waiting for an incident to write about that would match the photo. Thankfully, none have. So I gratefully dump the photo now and move on.

Hitchhikers Guide to make a Fowl stop?

Children's author Eoin Colfer has been commissioned to write a sixth instalment of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series.

Mostly Harmless, the last Hitchhiker book, was written by its creator, the late Douglas Adams, 16 years ago.

Now Adams's widow, Jane Belson, has given her approval to bring back the hapless Arthur Dent in a new book entitled And Another Thing...

Eoin Colfer, 43, is best known for the best-selling Artemis Fowl novels.

More at: BBC News

Fairwell to the Great Minnesota Get Together

With summer winding down and the days getting shorter I thought I'd jot something about the traditional 'end of summer' trip for us to the Great Minnesota Get Together. It's a big crush of humanity, all wandering around eating things we don't need to eat, buying things we don't need to buy and drinking things to survive the end of summer heat, and mostly just people watching.

With the fair's status as a swan song for summer, I thought this picture I caught as we headed home pretty much said the rest.

Live Update - Right Now.

Wow, Windows LiveMail apparently updated while I was reading a message, causing this notice to appear. What are the odds that they'd push an update in the middle of the afternoon? Isn't that something that should be done off-peak?

BTW, no - the update did not change the "We only spell check the first 2,000 characters" issue.

=====

ETA (November, 2008). Hotmail has done another update. This time the 2,000 character spell check limit has been removed. Good on you, HotMail, LiveMail, Microsoft, or whatever you're calling yourself these days! Nice job.

What Makes a Good Blog

I added a new post over at Where's Adam's iPod, it has been a while. Merlin Mann from 43Folders.com (and various other endevors) wrote about what makes a good blog. I applied his thoughts to Where's Adam's iPod and rated the site (no surprise- it scored low).

Regardless, I thought Mr. Mann's points were good, and worth repeating:

1. Good blogs have a voice
    
2. Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things.
    
3. Good blogs are the product of “Attention times Interest.” A blog shows me where someone’s attention tends to go...There’s a story here.
    
4. Good blog posts are made of paragraphs. Blog posts are written, not defecated.
    
5. Good “non-post” blogs have style and curation. Some of the best blogs use unusual formats, employ only photos and video, or utilize the list format to artistic effect.
    
6. Good blogs are weird. Blogs make fart noises and occasionally vex readers with the degree to which the blogger’s obsession will inevitably diverge from the reader’s.
    
7. Good blogs make you want to start your own blog.
    
8. Good blogs try...A good blog is written by a blogger who thinks longer, works harder, and obsesses more. Ultimately, a good blogger tries. That’s why “good” is getting rare.
    
9. Good blogs know when to break their own rules.
    

Spell Check Limit? Please...

I really don't get it. I've used web based e-mail from Yahoo, GMail, Comcast, even Netscape back in the day. Why oh why does Hotmail (aka Windows Live Mail) have a 2,000 character spell checking limit?

Advocacy for Good Enough

"Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they please."
-- Pythagoras

Minnesota Summer

After work on a summer day.

Debugging Quote

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
-- Brian W. Kernighan

Ambitious, for what...

"To the ambitious, for whom neither the bounty of life nor the beauty of the world suffice to content, it somes as penance that life for them is squandered; that they possess neither the benefits nor beauty of the world, and if they are unable to perceive what is divine in nature, which is all around them, how will they be able to see their own divinity, which is sometimes hidden?"

-Leonardo da Vinci

Defining the Vatican

The Vatican at Large: Mysterious, secret, even slightly paranoid, but at its heart, a place of simple beauty & piety.

- Me.