Christchurch Robotics Challenge
2002
| You could say this year was like our 'introductory'
year to robotics. Personally, I felt that I was thrown into a pile of mess/**** and told to clumsily roll myself out. Advice, resources I reckon were OH SO shiet! But hey! no pain, no gain. We were told that if we didn't enter the competition will a decent robot, that we'd have to dish out $400 for the robot kit. |
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| Heres a track of sorta what happened... |
Week 1:
"Ohhhh guys! This robot stuff is so awesome, look I can make this LED flash!"
High 1 to output 5V's to pin1
Low 1 to output 0V's to pin0... sssheessh this is soo awesome - AND EASY!
(by the way readers, I reckon we were slacking off soo much more than the other
teams that we hardly
got much done in one week :p)
Week 2:
"WtF??.." Ok, so how dO we get the motors to go? MAAAARVIN, please tell us!!!!!!
Shuffling away with the resources and being too impaitent lead us to panicking
like headless Adrians.
Looking at the other teams, (namely the team Marvin was in) we were so jealous -
as they had acutally
deciphered how to work the motors. We couldn't even get our motors to go forward
\ backwards
without short circuiting the motor with an external battery supply (duh!).
| Week 3: **SIGH**, still no where. Finally after hours of begging Marvin to 'tell us'. He finally, well I can't quite sure what he did... But I'm sure it was no help as we were still waddling and wallowing in a pile of well, you know what. >>PANICK!!<< |
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Week 4:
Ok, this is ghey, nothing. Lets play chess.
Week 5:
Second to last week off from the competition day, and looking at what we had
(the robot all made up,
but no programming done, and an empty breadboard, meaning nothing).
Ok, it's to time pull ourselves together and get something done! Besides, no-one
wants to pay $400
for not coming up with a decent robot. And thus started the
'2-Hours-after-school-club'.
Company: Excellent
Fun: Medium
Progress: Slow
Atmosphere: "When can I go home?? - I'm hungry!!"
Ideas: We're actually getting somewhere
I distinctly remember myself asking Marvin: "MARVIN!
HOW DO I GET THE MOTORS TO
WORK?"
And which a reply of, "Use the H-Bridge" came sweetly, but numbly to my ears and
mind.
According to Marvin, the H-Bridge is a device which 'converted the digital to
analouge'. This made
a bit of sense, considering that the motors were 'analogue' and the chip we used
to program it was
'digital'.
| So, how did we get this thing going? It was easy.
SIMPLE. A TOTAL PUSHOVER! And what did we do to allow us to get it to work? SIMPLE! You'd have to be an idiot not to know given our resources. (That technically makes me an idiot... meh) Answer: Read the small manual given to us. /me reads manual |
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Week 6:
Competition is THIS WEEK, THURSDAY! (OH ****). To add to our troubles of NCEA
assessment & robotics, our team also had to put up with Marvin and his ghey
taunts.
"Ohhh, wow, $400"
"Wow guys, I didn't know that you's were that rich..." whadda dik.
After getting thru the manual (5 minutes) we were finally on our way to
STaRdOM!!
Kudos to Marvin for helping us with placing the H-Bridge where it was required.
"Where do I put the H-Bridge?"
"You put it here"
And there we were, copying our the code from the manual we were already 70%
completed.
Down @ da club,
Marvin had his Infra-Red Boe-Bot, (oohh man thats good)
The chicks had their IR Bot too thanks to Marvin's 'helping hand'
While us 'dolts' had a bot which relied on it banging into walls. These devices
which detect the bumps
are called bumper switches or a.k.a whiskers.
Code Copied...
Yuss! Its FINISHED! And 4 days out. (don't we rock?). GOOD, now were don't need
to pay $400.
Little did we know that the robot only wanted to turn left. It went forward
until it hit something.
If it detected on right = Turn Left
This bit worked good
If it detected on left = Turn Left
(OH WTF? It should turn right!!!)
Okay, for the next 3 days after school, I stayed until like 5:30pm working on
it/asking marvin how to do
it. Too bad he was too busy with the girls ;). I remember these nights well.
Marvin was always fine
tuning is bot to perfection, trying to get it as good as possible. Forward was
the only way for him. With
no luck for the next 3 days, we were going into a competition in which our bot
could only turn left.
Competion Day
Okay, this sux. I couldn't be stuffed working on the bot, so I played chess @
lunch. Finally after
explaining the situation to my teamates (they weren't really up with it...
either that or I was too hardcore
) anyway, I asked Jevon (who hadn't done A THING) to take a look at the code.
| Ok, the last lunch time before the comp, we went down to teh science block and
one way or another we were gonna come out of the room with a bot which could turn left AND right. Awesomely enough, Jevon (with his leet math and problem solving skills) worked out how to turn the damn thing RIGHT! If detect on right = Turn left |
 Jevon Carding - Life saving stuff! |
Jevon you lifesaver!!
Results (and what happened):
Successful: Yes
CCC - some computing college won
Burnside - Second. Angelo someone... I will not forget grrrrsfdfsd (another
story, will explain elsewhere)
What Happened:
| Can you see the arrow? "Here" is the point where our wheel of the bot got stuck and is the furthest we got. We were quite happy anyway... Considering that Marvin and the Girls' bots only got to about the 3rd corner. |
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| Anyway, as I was saying, this year was our 'intro' year. Going into the comp, not knowing anything, I was quite happy that we actually got something decent. Btw, if you were wondering about the crappy 'resources' and 'advice' we got well read on. I'll add some links to the eXact stuff we got :p |
Links:
The Intranet resource
Note that this is pretty much all we got to work with. The
code we pretty much straight copied from
the bottom of the 'Robot Chassis Kit'. The information about the H-Bridge was
there too, only we were
too ignorant to read about it.
I also REALLY recommend Marjan's code (under 'Robotics coding that might be
useful').
I cannot express how *USEFUL* it was... Really! without it we would have copped
the $400 for the kit.
And that concludes the projecht of:
Christchurch Robotics Challenge
2002