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Blog

Not really appreciating Shakespeare very much... I should try reading him in the original Klingon.

Posted by Anna on March 10, 2010

Well here we are in Milwaukee, and in less than nine hours we will all be boarding the bus to the arena to begin practice matches! Although chances are we'll be busy rebuilding stuff so we may not get to test Zazu out on the field right away. Hopefully he'll be up and running pretty soon though.

Right now there's not a whole lot to report right now except that the bus ride was really long, and now I'm exhausted, which makes absolutely no sense considering that right after resting and sitting on a bus for six plus hours theoretically one would be perky and upbeat and ready to rumble, but no, everyone's dead.

What the heck am I doing awake at 11:30 when I should be asleep so I'm well-rested for tomorrow?!

Anna

Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads.

Posted by Anna on February 28, 2010

Well, Zazu is shipped off to Wisconsin, all alone in that little dark crate... Poor Zazu. At least he's not broken.

So yes, we successfully got Zazu mostly finished in time for shipping last week! We're still planning on meeting all next week to fine-tune stuff and add said fine-tuning finishes to Zazu once we get to Milwaukee (mostly it's just details with the wheels and sizing and kickers and such).

No, I'm from Minnesota. I only work in outer space.

Posted by Anna on February 14, 2010

One week left? Seriously? Jeepers. Well, yay for three day weekends at least.

Actually we're in pretty good shape, and I think we're even a bit further ahead than we were last year at this time. We actually got Zazu running (after an incident with magical smoke and wheels not going the right way), so pretty much everything has been wired up except a few motors for things other than the wheels that need motoring.

Computer, compute to the last digit the value of pi

Posted by Anna on February 7, 2010

Nothing too exciting going on this past week, except the usual progress with the robot build. Chassis is almost done and is awaiting electrical components, the kicking mechanism is in the process of being mounted on the chassis, along with the lifter thing, CAD is pretty much done, animation is busy animating (apparently they have a guy walking on a treadmill, but the guy is kind of slow and keeps falling off), and programmers have successfully gotten Zarthan to track the target and is working on a code that can determine how far the bot is away from the goal (and once we have the kicker finished determine how hard the kick the ball). That was a really long sentence.

Current game strategy: let the wookie win.

Posted by Anna on February 1, 2010

Over half way done, and crunch time is just around the corner! Well, maybe not quite yet, but it sure is coming up in a hurry. Of course we're making very good progress; the chassis is just waiting for a few parts and should be done this week and the kicker mechanism is done being prototyped and finishing up final details on how it's going to be mounted on the chassis.Tomorrow we don't have the building available because of some political thing going on, but fortunately we have all day today to make up for the time lost since there's no school!

myRobot.TIMETRAVEL(BlackHole Device, FluxCapacitor);

Posted by Anna on January 24, 2010

So.... we're already 1/3 of the way done with build season! I think that the space/time continuum actually does get skewed ever so slightly during build season because of the increase in energy of robotics people which results in a slight temporal shift and an increase in the rate at which time flows.

Zazu just can't wait to be king

Posted by Anna on January 15, 2010

So within the last week, we've come up with too many robot designs to count, CAD drawings of much of said designs, a prototype of the kicker, overall game strategy outlined, updates from LabVIEW and Windriver downloaded on as many computers as we can scrounge up, and we've still got the busiest part of build season ahead of us. Whew.

Breeeeeakaaaaawaaaaayyyy!!!! Isn't that a song?

Posted by Anna on January 9, 2010

So we got our annual game challenge! And it is... a bit confusing, but definitely exciting :) It's also impossible to explain without drawings or hand gestures, soooo either youtube "FIRST Robotics breakaway" or check out the website. Basically think soccer plus pull-ups. Sounds like gym class... Yeck. One thing's for sure; this game is going to be lots of fun to watch. Unless all the robots manage to fall over when trying to get over the bumps and can't get back up.

It's beginning to look a lot like (the day after) Christmas...

Posted by Anna on December 26, 2009

Alas, I did not receive any hovercrafts or artificial intelligence chips for Christmas... I did get a tribble though, and he is absolutely adorable (I named him Ianto) <3

Ho hum... There's not much going on robo-wise, since everyone's off enjoying their breaks/catching up on schoolwork. I guess lots of people are trapped in MN because of all this darned snow, which is unfortunate (but hey, it saves energy on travel because we're all stuck at home!).

Wonderful winters with ... What else starts with w?

Posted by Anna on December 19, 2009

Whooooo, winter break! Two weeks of rest before the pandemonium that is build season!

Splash went really well; we got lots of people (especially rookies) who came to the seminars, which were all quite informative of course, so hopefully they gained a bunch of useful information from that :)

This past week most of the subteams had various mini-seminars for the rookies on the team to get them a head start for the build season. It'll definitely be weird losing two thirds of the team after this year to college, so our new rookies must be extra prepared.