amoose136's Xanga

And so I start a new blog....

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 19:40:24 GMT

Since FLL last fall I haven’t really been blogging. I intend to change that. Now that I have a WordPress blog I will continue. My new site, amoose.psoplayer.com, is rapidly changing. I am still posting but if you visit this site you most likely won’t see the same thing you saw last time you were here. I have decided to change from Xanga to WordPress because WordPress gives me the following:

Custom CSS
Widgets
Ajax
Better spam prevention
No ads
External editors
Custom HTML
Better themes

So you see this site looks much more promising than my Xanga. Thanks goes to psoplayer for the domain name and hosting.

Full report

Mon, 24 Dec 2007 23:00:30 GMT

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

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 16:45:57 GMT

I'll give the full report later. About half way through this video the round starts. It was cut off just before the robot does the power lines because of SD card memory.

The moment has finally arrived

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 00:03:29 GMT

Good luck to all other teams out there. We're keeping our fingers crossed.

The path of the robot

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:05:23 GMT

Mission order planing. The robot never gets resent out of base. Those times it comes back it picks up its own attachments.

Start: programing and research

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 02:46:31 GMT

Last Saturday we walked around First Cumberland and looked at the energy aspects of the building. I'll give the full report later. Last Monday we started programing. In one night we were able to make the robot consistently do the satellite and a wind mill in one move. The wind mill sits on four communities. Also, I summited a shirt design pictured below. Thursday I and one or two others will finish the program and make it do the solar panel, hydrogen car, and wave turbine in one move. In the same night we will make it bring to truck back to base.

Meet the robot

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 21:38:33 GMT

We have been working on a robot for a long time now and I think we have a design close to what will be used in tournament. This robot is fast, slim, precise, and it never has to come back to base, something that this team has never tried in past years. This model is out dated but is close to what we have right now. It lacks sensors so that will be one thing we will work on next. It has a grabbing device that allows it to hold something and turn at the same time. It also has a loop for corn, uranium, and truck captures. Our robot uses windup toys to do two tasks. As it stands now; we know how we are going to do every task and are approaching programing. I've found out how to do some cool things with the robot. (see second image) In other news, the site background might be what we use as a tee-shirt design and we are going to meet someone from KUB to tell us how do an energy audit tonight.

Team 24: Name decided

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 21:25:41 GMT

I haven't been updating for a while so here's the latest. At the meeting right after the last update we got a name. The Flux Capacitors. (New site theme.) For anyone who doesn't know, the flux capacitor is a device that "is what makes time travel possible" in the movie "Back to the Future". In real life, wikipedia says "U.S. Patent 6,084,285 describes a "lateral flux capacitor having fractal-shaped perimeters,"". A real flux capacitor is simply a capacitor with high fluctuation. I'll post about the resent meetings in a little bit.

YAY for missing parts!

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 02:40:28 GMT

We are missing a number of parts. The bright side is that we are done with the building. But on the other side, a large amount of the buildings, minus the trees, have substitute pieces in them. Next meeting we will be working on robots. Among other things, there is a point bonus if you use an RCX so we might not use an NXT. On the other hand, we have thought of some things that will give us an above perfect score if they are legal, so in that regard, we might use an NXT. One of the things we did was use a Large TV to build things. (Thanks but no thanks to psoplayer) Prepare for......BLURRY PICTURES!

One of the pieces we were missing was hair for a female Lego figure. We made a few substitutes.

The next meeting is a week from now and possibly Friday.

There are more photos in the photo section.

And....it's out!

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 15:00:52 GMT

Head over to http://www.firstlegoleague.org/default.aspx?pid=29550 to see the challenge.