Team Six/Journal

Revision as of 07:05, 11 January 2013

Day 1 (01/07/2013)

Today was a glorious day for the People's Republic of Team Sechs. We started out by waking up at some god-forsaken hour to go to our initial meeting, where Darthur explained the rules for people who were not paying attention last time. Like most of us. A few questions were explained.

Our previous meeting came before break, and had a nice solid discussion on ideas for mechanical and code design of our robot. Ideas that were tossed out include: Mechanums and omni-wheel drive systems (3 and 4 wheel design), Using an S-shaped roller mechanism for picking up and scoring balls, strategy of dumping every single ball humanly possible over the yellow wall to mess up the other guy while optimizing our synergistic ground-state six sigma endeavorships, discussing the various scoring method and determining that launching the balls as fast as possible into the audience was the best scoring method, and other stuff I can't remember.

We talked about our own special talents and how we're all special snowflakes, and Fred mentioned his superior machining skillz, Steven his talents as the Robot Whisperer, and William and Harry's limitless devotion and enthusiasm that they would fully give to the team, dying selflessly for the robot if they had to.

Various team names were also discussed, including Team Teta Football Club United (TetaFCU) and Team T-9.

We decided on team name T-9. It's obviously the best.

We spent most of our lab time trying to put together a piece of densely-corrugated cardboard with some bolts and some funny pieces of metal sticking out of it. After spending too much time putting the shiny pieces of metal next to each other next to other, shinier pieces of metal and really hot shiny pieces of metal, we had a giant rats nest. The battery caused a great deal of stress as it bent the cardboard severely at the halfway point, but it never failed. After too many hours of tinkering with the wiring, we pushed a button and the wheels spun. We were the fifth team to get this far. Go us. Yay.

After the wheels started spinning, we had a short meeting to discuss some of our previous ideas for a final robot design. We all agreed on a general strategy and mechanism for scoring, but on later review by Fred and Steven, we decided that our mechanism was too good and we needed a crappier one. Fred claimed that he would do some of the CAD work, but I think he's a liar. We'll pitch the new, less complicated mechanism to the rest of the team tomorrow.

Day 2 (01/08/2013)

Today started with slanderous lies coming from Arthur Pentron, saying that he didn't see any journal entries on the wiki. CAN YOU SEE IT NOW DARTHUR? HUH? CAN YOU?!?!?

William figured out how to do wiki headers, which is pretty fantastic. He's some sort of wizard, unlike that Harry dude. It appears that my team has also taken notice that I'm even bothering to fill out our journal entries. Someone has betrayed my trust, and my cover is now blown.

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Figure 1—Note the tail.

Now I'm also bothering to fill out our journal entries. Fred totally showed me the antigravity conveyor belt even though I went to sleep last night instead of drinking beer and playing SolidWorks with him. My keyboard is also getting pretty gross. Maybe I'll go to the bathroom during the break and squirt a bunch of hand sanitizer on some paper towels and clean it.

Most of the morning was spent in a lecture talking about more robot brain-planning and soul-giving, most of it still emphasizing parallel processing over series. We spent two hours messing with a robot to make a bump switch tell it to turn, we were disappointed when we couldn't get this done. I suspect sabotage. The others suspect faulty wiring. They'll try to shove a soldering iron in the thing's brain until it works again. The fools don't realize that the real problem with the electronics lies with the compressed cardboard, not any of the electrons.

I'm going to go get some fun parts from Home Depot after this next lecture, the others will figure out who sabotaged us and mercilessly run them into ruin. Or shove a soldering iron into our robot repeatedly. Frankly, I'll be happy to take a ride on my rusting and falling apart motorcycle in the freezing cold, as it's a nice break from the dark reality of the MASLab LabLab.

The trip was a success! Shelf-liner was obtained, and by 6pm I had a fully working mock-up of our scoring mechanism. Of course, no one on my team came to come visit me and look at it, they had all left after successfully completing the checkpoint earlier. Now all that stands between me and a working model of a robot is a sleepless night of Solidworking. Solidworksing. Solidingwork. Drinking. However you're supposed to say it.

I also grabbed a few motors that I thought were pretty cool, one of which can be seen here (http://www.lynxmotion.com/images/data/ghm02.pdf) and the other of which is over a decade old but has about 70 rpm and hella torque. I've made solidworks models of both.

Day 3 (01/09/2013)

I haven't done one of these journal entries so I am going to try my hand at it. Here goes:

Team Sechs awoke from their slumber. And by "Team Sechs" I mean "Hairy and Will". Everyone else decided to sleep, which made my face rather sad. Nonetheless, we trudged to class at a most ungodly hour, though that seems to be the case for most hours in the daytime.

Our lecture covered the basics of vision, which I don't know anything about. Luckily, the lecture did help and I took detailed, froshy notes.

I on the other hand, awoke gracefully around noon, to the sound of birds chirping, a cat purring, the smell of coffee and bacon in the kitchen, and a warm member of the opposite gender by my side. Then my alarm started screaming at me, and I woke up from that pleasant dream to the cruel realities of my lonesome self in a stuffy, cold, smelly barracks room. It was only after I had trudged my way to lecture did I discover Arthur's slander had infected even the calender, filling it with lies saying that the lecture for the day was an hour earlier than we had been told.

I had spent the previous night working by myself (mostly) on making a spreadsheet to optimize roller/wheel size with the motors I had gotten for us yesterday, and modeling those mechanical systems to form a geometric basis for our robot. I finished a 2D outline that forms both two of the sides of the robot and gives us a good visual aid for the robot. Today I'll flesh it out, and add in locations for all the various sensors and minor parts that we need. We'll also call the manufacturers of the wheels we've picked, and see how long shipping will take for those.

I'm also somehow awake now. I ran some errands and then came here and Fred told me to CAD the omniwheels. I looked online to see if there were any models already available but they were the only ones I couldn't find anything for. I contacted the company and what I assume was an intern replied saying she didn't have any idea but would ask her superiors who would I imagine will laugh at her and tell her to ignore me. I started a primitive model from the CAD sketches on the website, and its adequate for now. I can see how I would make it more accurate so I'll do that now.

Day 4 (01/10/2013)

Today was a bit of a dull day. Most of the rest of the team slept in, but I maintained my faithful watch of an empty table, kept only with the company of my own laptop and the voices in my head. I made a great deal of progress, which now looks like a Goa'uld spaceship that crashed into an office building, but I guess you can't win them all.

When Hairy and Liver-no-more finally showed up, they played with the code until they finally managed to summon The Singularity from the depths of the internet, pictured to the side. This ethereal presence will give us a great advantage over our feeble-minded opponents who will be forced to worship its overwhelming omniscience. As seen in the picture to the side, it has already begun to feed on webcams and requires more to sustain itself. I'm sure team 1 won't notice theirs missing.

Day 5 (01/11/2013)

Team Six: T-9 has now finished building and programming their robot, as can be seen in this real photograph.