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Last night, Gage and I stayed up to finish up the team Moonbots Documentary, while Karlin went out with his parents and stood in line for 3 hours for a “Midnight Madness” fish sale. (Is there such thing that could be more important than the Moonbots deadline?!)
Just wrote the robot return code, and went for a midnight robot test run. I have been putting in 10 to 14 hours a day programming this week in LabView, trying to reconstruct our code. Way too trigger happy with the delete button last weekend.
Our team’s two other programmers Brian and Stanley are out of the country, so no help there. Jeffrey and Gage have been very busy with their documentary, but amazingly they still have the time to comment on an occasional robot spaz. Hopefully I can finally get out of the house for the first time this week when the code is in the final stages.
Come to think of it, with our luck on the day of the live robot broadcast, there will be the biggest solar flare in the history of mankind to mess with our compass readings. The EMP from the solar flare will also wipe out all our programs AGAIN. Apparently, Murphy never takes a vacation.
For now, check out this 250 point run. The robot video cam recording is in the second half of this video. Good Mornin’ America!
Still doing some iron-coding here day and night….well, more like nights only, brain-dead and asleep during the day. Gage and Jeffrey are busy putting the documentary together. There are only the three of us left now to finish up everything. We are making progress, about as fast as our robot runs….somewhere between a snail and a slug. I think our robot needs another minute. Take a look.
A weekend of non-stop re-programming in LabView after losing all of the NXT-G programs. From being able to get 5 to 7 loops, down to picking up 2 loops, here are some of the robot cam footages of our “progress”.
It has been an eventful two weeks with two major setbacks!
First we designed and built a masterpiece claw robot complete with EOPD, compass and ultra-sound sensors paired with an IR-transmitter, power function motors and a battery pack. This robot can pick up loops in any placement.
Then our team had to make a heart wrenching decision to disassembled the claw robot for a better balance between function and feasibility, mainly considered the time constraint and maneuverability. The result was more redesigning, rebuilding, and reprogramming for a simpler robot.
The new robot was working nicely collecting 5 to 7 loops, going over the ridge, taking on-board videos and come back to base.
On Friday evening, we found out that the latest Moonbots Q&A prohibited the use of playfield edge as a navigation aide, so we rewrote the program to comply.
As we refined the code and added safety precautions, the code became too big for the NXT-G compiler to compile. The program crashed on Friday night. The next debate was, should we switch to another program like LabView which we never used before?
Thankfully, LabView gave us a copy of the LabView 2009 Evaluation DVD to try and helped us installed it on Saturday 8/14/10.
However, while installing LabView, we accidentally wiped out NXT-G v2.0. That night, while trying to reinstall NXT-G v2.0, I did not back up the programs to the server properly and lost all of the Moonbots programs. The last automatic backup I had was from 4 days ago, without all of the latest MyBlocks and code.
So now I have to be proficient with LabView to rewrite all of the Moonbots program in one week. These two major setbacks (rebuild and lost programs) in the last 2 weeks have been the low points of our Moonbots season. If we can pull this off and make our deadline, it will be amazing!
Last week was my first week back on the team during Phase 2, I have been away at summer camp so far. When I walked in to the meeting, the very first thing I saw was this giant behemoth of a robot that had rubber-bands, counterweights, wheels and supports everywhere. It looks like something from Jurassic Park, but apparently it can be folded up to fit in a A-4 size box. The team has done a lot of work without me and I will need to catch up and work on the team documentary. So on Saturday, we sat down tried to finish up the documentary video. Well, that was wishful thinking, see our video blog.
Finally, after several weeks of building and rebuilding our robot’s arm and claw system is finished! So we thought!
Different robot designs were tested. This is a video of how well our robot ventured off the base ramp.
Last night, we finally finished building the side panels of the Moonbots field. The photos are 3″ shorter than the LEGO base plates, so we used black construction papers to fill in at the corners. It shouldn’t affect the robot performance or the missions one way or another. The field looks pretty cool, all of our robots had a get together party on this simulated moonscape.
