| | The tournament went well. We came back with no awards but placed well none the less, after all, there were 57 teams we were up against. Here are the placing award results. We placed 7th on the table with a score of 285. That was good because almost all of the programing was done in 4-5 days, in a row. Yep, the LAST five days made the most programing progress. The first place team scored 350. We got 7th over all, 7th on table score, 13th in research project, 10th in robot design, and 31st in teamwork. You can view the score results for all the teams here and the table performance for all the teams all the rounds here. (PDFs) There are more pictures here and at my photo section.
Now down to details of the pre-tournament hours. We were having lots of trouble with NXT-G, mostly trouble with the computer slowing down so much that the work flow became impractical. I talked with people from Lego Education, my biggest thanks to them, but didn't get much anywhere with it, so we changed to Robolab 2.9, which I wanted to use in the first place. Then the troubles came with the NXT. The robot was doing things I'm sure that it wasn't meant to. We got to a point where if I stuck a motor reset block somewhere in the program, it would affect the program in the past. Or if I took two programs that worked and put them in subroutines without changing the code, they would magically stop working correctly and do something completely different. Other teams at the tournament were have similar problems. That made us break from the original plan to do everything in one program. So in the last week, I programed everything in little programs. I will now work to recreate the problem with as little blocks as possible with as simple a robot as possible so I can send it to the bug fixers. I respect Lego, Labview, and Tufts University, (especially after Tuft's Neal Hirsig's little blender thing he is doing which also is right in my area of interest), but I think they rushed the release of robolab so it now has a few bugs that need fixing.
Merry Christmas,
Amos Manneschmidt
 Another team's robot from the tournament 
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| | Posted 12/24/2007 7:00 PM - 12 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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