Team Three/Journal

Contents 1 Day 1 2 Day 2 3 Day 3 4 Day 4 5 Day 5 6 Day 6 7 Day 7 8 Day 8 9 Day 9 10 ...

Day 1

Bowler came in with basic red-ball-tracking openCV code that slowed to an unusable crawl (<1 fps) as soon as we tried it on the acer netbook. Need to optimize. At any rate, everything on the software end is all configured now.

Lesman came in with a sexy CAD design, did most of the pegbot assembling, and is working on custom Arduino firmware.

Jorge did most of the wiring and soldering, only blowing out one voltage regulator in the process. (Thanks to this incident, the contest admins now have the correct spec sheet uploaded to the wiki.)

We got through two checkoffs on the first day, so we're making good time so far.

Day 2

Bowler: got vision code running in C++, detecting balls. Wrapped C++ vision code to run in python.

Jorge: Worked on/read up on mapping. Wired up 2 additional IR sensors and began working on wall-following

Lesman: Worked on robot CAD. We've got a general picture of what the robot will look like, need to various mounting and assembly details.

Generally discussed game strategy and robot design. We're largely "done" checkoff 3, and are hoping to hit 4 and 5 and wall following tomorrow.

Day 3

Jorge got safety trained and wrote a wall follower like a boss

Bowler got vision code working and calibrating like a boss

Lesman wrote a PID class, Utils class and Ballfollower like a boss

Team discussed software design and iterated on CAD model like executive board

Day 4

By popular demand (and Will's request), here are instructions for getting OpenCV configured on your Acer netbook:

1. Install Synaptic Package Manager. (Either "sudo apt-get install synaptic" in a terminal, or find it in the Ubuntu Software Center.) Open it.
2. Filter-search for "opencv". Mark "python-opencv" for installation. All dependencies will be marked automatically. Hit the "Apply" button.
3. You're all set.

Bowler continued working on vision code. Implemented multicore processing. Got into minor argument with fellow ginger Will over the merits of different image processing strategies. Might have to significantly change algorithm. Late that night, started writing out our general software framework.

Jorge continued teaching our robot how to follow a wall, helped with the CAD effort, and is reading large volumes of texts about SLAM as he formulates our mapping algorithm.

Lesman created the basic structure of our software framework, helped out with wall-following, and continued CADding.

We got Checkoff 4 and would have gotten 5 if the staff had the right equipment on hand.

Day 5

laser cut

Day 6

Day 7

Laser cut last parts, assembled bot

Day 8

Mock 1

Day 9

Fucking nothing

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