twoplustwoequalsblog

Today at Robot, Karl and I and Pelan were attempting to determine the field of view for the color detecting camera we are going to be using on this year’s robot. This proved fruitless. Our trig produced three different values, 30, 40, and 50 degrees, as the field of view. I can’t do anything with angle measure unless I know how much the camera can see.

Earlier today, one of the mentors, Lynn (sp?) told me that they were going to practice driving later, and I told her that I wasn’t so sure I was interested in driving anymore. Allow me to lay out to you my thinking at the time: This is my first year, so I figured I lacked tenure. I heard I got the second lowest score on the driving test (to be fair, out of six). I figured if the drivers practice a lot it might be more important for me to spend my time on another project. I lacked confidence in my ability to handle the robot, particularly after almost running over Mr. Gaston the week prior.

Mr. Mo called me to see him in his office, and there he and Lynn were like “Please try driving.” They want to have at least two really solid drive teams this year, so since only six people tried out, and a drive team is two people… They also said that they thought that my strategy writeup for the strategy section of the test was really good. I mean, really good. I basically regurgitated what the strategy people had came up with and then did what I thought anyone would do. (Bad robot = block enemy good robot, turn a disadvantage into a break even.) They said how this year it was going to be important to have someone who can think on their feet, listen well, and understand strategy. They said to at least stick with it, so I agreed. Mo later told me that he didn’t care if it was my first year because we want to win, senority or not. I think they were afraid that somebody bullied me out of wanting to drive.

It was funny, because afterwords both of the apologized for it. To be honest, they did kind of browbeat me back into driving, but I am glad for it. I was playing with the 2005 chassis while some other people were driving the 2003 bot, and after about 5 minutes I could control it really well. It was pretty natural, I was pushing a box around and hitting the tetra some. At one point Eric went to pick up the tetra with the arm right over it, so I dashed under and pushed it out of his way. Hehe. It’s a lot harder to control the arm though, but since I get to write the code that controls it, I can make it just the way I want it :D. We just need to get a prototype up and running, and we need to practice driving for 903352 hours and then they’re going to have some sort of selection based on skill or something.

I rewrote some code so that the robot will use different LEDs for feedback, and it literally took me like half an hour. How lacking of skill I am.

Three weeks till scrimmage. It’s getting tight, kids.

[edit] I forgot to mention this before, but Friday in photo I was playing with the long-view camera, which is like the kind they used in the 1800s with the hood to go under and all. I had it hooked up to the flashes in the studio, and when I went to use the hood and cover up the camera the flash went off like three times. Then I went to remove the hood and it went off like twice more. I wasn’t sure if I was bumping the camera and setting if off or what, so I went to touch the lens, and I literally saw a spark jump from my finger to the camera and then the flash went off. It was really cool. The whole school was staticy though, it made my hair all stand up and it was shocky to take my hoodie off. [/edit]