This is our our feeble attempt at remembering our experiences during 6.270. We hope these comments are entertaining and may provide insights to those planning to take this class in the future. We apologize if you have to scroll down a really long page. We were hard at work building our robot. Really!
Day 25: Thursday, 1/27/05Lab cleanup. Never want to see Legos again! Tian's going to the Super Bowl next week. Frederick apologizes for trash-talking so much. Eddie, well, he's still sick. 6.270 was a very intense but educational experience, and it was definitely worth it in the end. Good luck to all of the contestants in the future!
Day 24: Wednesday, 1/26/05 (CONTEST)2nd PLACE TROPHY!!!
Congratulations to Team 26 "This is Mike Lin" on whooping our robot in the final round robin 2-0. We still got the most points overall, but that didn't matter in the head to head. Oh well... Wow...what a day! Awesome work EVERYONE who was in the competition. Today was unusually nervewracking, even though we didn't really have to do anything besides put our robots on the boards like we had done a million times in lab. The early rounds were a bit uneventful, but man, the finish was craazy. We had thought some random team would swoop in and win the tournament, and that's exactly what happened, no offense to Team 26. After everyone has put in the work in lab, its amazing how everything still comes down to having a lot of luck. We want to say to all of the people who we basically lived with in lab that the experience wouldn't have been the same without them. In the end, its all about teamwork and the people that you spend time with, and it was relaxing to vent about our problems to people who actually understood what we were talking about. This short list includes the organizers: Vimal and Ziggy (who both screamed at us for soldering our chips onto the board), Dave Wang, Ross, and many contestants: Omar and Adam, thanks for ordering pizza; Shirley, Somin, and Wei-wei, you go girls! scoring a whopping 28 points in just one round; Matt, Z (a magician!), and Marge, Z's got some mad skills, and you all beat us too because our robot pushed the wrong color balls into our own bin; Yun and her group, who made us feel like lazy bums, and everyone else that we met and can't remember at the moment. We also want to recognize Team 19 "Ragnarok" because they would have probably been standing where we were at the end of the competition. They were probably the most prepared, and after winning the mock competition by a landslide, they still kept pushing us to think of more ways to get around their robot. It was a shame that they ran into an infinite loop while going down the table twice. How was it that Vimal was the organizer for the 1st and 2nd place teams? I think we've come a long way since being the first group to screw up an assignment in the class.
Day 23: Tuesday, 1/25/05 (IMPOUNDING)WE'RE DONE!!! We continued working on the code to try to beat the strategies of some of the other teams. There are some really fast robots out there that we don't know if we can really beat, but we'll see. Hopefully we don't have to go against any of them during the morning rounds so that we will be able to show off our robot at night. Almost anything can happen on the board, and that may be good or bad for us. Pray that our motors and servos are reliable tomorrow.
Day 22: Monday, 1/24/05 (1 day to impounding)DO YOUR WORK EARLY. We're putting the finishing touches on our robot code. To account for the actions of our opponents. Actually, its quite funny to see all these teams that we have never seen in lab trying to finish their stuff as quick as possible.
Day 21: Sunday, 1/23/05 (2 days to impounding)4th RANK after QUALIFYING ROUNDS.
We stayed up all night but disaster struck in the morning. It didn't seem like we're going to be as lucky as Friday since we had to reload all of our code after our Handyboard ran out of batteries right before the contest started. We zap-charged our handyboard, and it worked! During our first round match, we scored two points, but as we turned around, our robot stopped moving for no apparent reason. In the second round match, we barely scored 5 points. Our robot didn't turn very well so it drove way off course. However, it had enough push to get a couple more scoring balls into our scoring bin!
On another note, here are some pictures of the aftermath from the blizzard:
PATRIOTS WON THE AFC CHAMPIONSHIP! Patriots won 41-27 IN PITTSBURGH. Tian gets to go to the Super Bowl now, that lucky guy. Meanwhile, we're sleeping for the rest of the day.
Day 20: Saturday 1/22/05 (3 days to impounding)BLIZZARD DAY. Forecast says there's a blizzard tonight, and the qualifying rounds happen tomorrow. Meaning, we're going to be pulling our first all-nighter for this project. Our robot is starting to look like it can work. We realized that this class is all about learning to make the robot drive straight and turn correctly. After that, you just have to tell it what to do, and its pretty simple. While Eddie and Tian were working on the code for qualifying rounds, Frederick made some additional enhancements to the robot to make it audience friendly. Look for us on competition day on the 26th! Some pictures of us testing our robot:
Working on our robot overnight:
2nd PLACE at MOCK COMPETITION.
Eddie has been sick for a little bit, so we haven't been able to do as much as we had hoped. Frederick annoyed the heck out of the coders while they were debugging cause he wanted to have the robot compete in the mock contest. We brought our robot to the contest, but we had never actually tested out our code. Turns out that only 5 teams actually entered in the contest, and somehow, we got 2nd place. WAHOO! The top three teams got Star Wars mini Lego sets and these Lego pens, so we were happy. Here's one of our Lego sets after we put it together:
Gates need to be changed, and we need to figure out how to drive straight again. We got checked off for our last assignment, Assignment 6, after proving that our robot could score points.
Day 18: Thursday, 1/20/05 (5 days to impounding)YAY SNOW! (NOT). Snowed a ton last night. Streets are nasty, and our shoes are filling up with salt water. Mock contest is tomorrow. It'd be nice to compete, but we gotta work like crazy. Maybe if there's only 3 teams that compete, we can all get prizes by default.
Day 17: Wednesday, 1/19/05SCREW WINNING, and have some FUN. It's IAP. All we have to do is push four balls into our scoring area at the start and sit around or try to destroy our opponents. Now we can enjoy ourselves and have some fun. On another note, we installed the sensors for line following on the bottom of the robot with hot glue. We ran into some problems with the ports on our Handyboard, but they disappeared magically, so we're not complaining about that. Due to lack of camera, we didn't get to take any pictures of what we have done for the past weeks, but hopefully we'll get some more pics up soon. Frederick came back late because his connecting flight back to Boston was cancelled. Four more hours in the Cincinnati airport (which is actually in Kentucky), and he's convinced that he needs to have a law degree as well so he can defend his ass when he's being sued as a doctor. Accident prone = lots of lawsuits.
Day 16: Tuesday, 1/18/05LEGOS SUCK. Plain and simple. Everything they say about how flimsy the pieces are and how they aren't meant for 6.270 are completely true. Blasted wheels kept falling off or jamming when we were trying to collect balls. Therefore, we decided to go back to KISS. Keep it simple, stupid. Making the double ended ball collector with one way gates now. Broke a couple of the crappy servos...lesson learned: they're completely worthless.
Day 15: Monday, 1/17/05Martin Luther King Day. Lab was CLOSED! NOTE: take robot and Lego pieces home if you want to work on the robot on a holiday. Maybe we can get some work done if Vimal comes into lab. Our organizer, Vimal, emailed and said he would go into lab to work on some stuff today, so Tian and Eddie went in for a bit. Since lab was closed, Frederick left early for his flight to St. Louis for an interview at Washington University. During the long wait at the airport, he updated the website with the progress from the past week.
Day 14: Sunday, 1/16/05We figured out a way to mount the gears for collector arm from the side, and we put the ramp and collector parts into the robot. The side gearmount avoids the issues of balls hitting the top bar, and balls can't get stuck in the middle of the ramp anymore. However, we need to create a way to funnel the balls into a narrower ramp now. Also, green and red balls are different sizes! We need to figure out a way to let our robot deal with this as well. On a completely unrelated note, PATRIOTS WON! They whooped the Colts 20-3...it was pretty sick. So much for Manning's 49 touchdown passes this year...choker... Well, one more game, and Tian will have to go "work" at the Super Bowl. Aren't we all jealous?
Day 13: Saturday, 1/15/05Trying to mount the collector arm from the top, but the balls keep hitting the top supporting bar. Also, there are no good ways to support such a huge structure without bending our gearboxes around, which would not be good. Also, balls get stuck under the support structure.
Day 12: Friday, 1/14/05Assignment 5 is complete! And...people think our robot is "cute." Too bad we have to make it all huge and bulky for the final design. Tian and Eddie spent a lot of time working on orienting the robot for the assignment while Frederick continued to work on seeing if the spitting collector arm and ramp would be feasible to work with. Since the example group had their spinning arm extending from the middle, we tried that idea as well. It seems promising, but the motor might not be powerful enough for what we need. Also, the balls that do not make it over the hump get stuck spinning and never go anywhere, potentially disrupting future balls to be collected.
Day 11: Thursday, 1/13/05Tian and Eddie are in Boston working on Assignment 5. Hopefully, the robot will be able to orient itself by tomorrow. Frederick comes back from NYC exhausted and is very impressed with the coding tha that has been going on while he was gone. Great teammates!
Day 10: Wednesday, 1/12/05We spent an entire morning trying to design a ramp so that we can test the ball collector idea. Doesn't work too well yet. The balls are actually placed very far apart from each other, so we have to figure out a way for our robot to be able to collect the balls effectively without making it bigger than the one cubic foot size limit. Frederick leaves for NYC in the afternoon for his interview at Columbia.
Day 9: Tuesday, 1/11/05Why is driving straight such a hard task? We could do so much more with more reliable parts. We are thinking about implementing a ball sorter now after seeing the example done by another team. This way, we would be able to score points more accurately. Eddie thinks we should add a cupholder on our robot because all cars have cupholders. Maybe we can sell some boba tea with that. Anyways, we finished Assignment 4, after we got over our little "accident." One of our LED indicators for battery charging on the Battery Charger did not work, but that was fixed with an easy soldering job. Make sure you solder your connections firmly!
STUPID IDEA #2: Frederick didn't attend Lecture 3 when the organizers warned us about cutting wires with live batteries. While he was working on connecting the batteries, he accidentally shorts out the battery with his wire cutters. Do NOT line wires up after they are connected to a battery to try to make the wires even. You WILL encounter sparks and smoking. Fortunately, he didn't set off a fire.
Day 8: Monday, 1/10/05Talking about Assignment 4 and strategies is not really all that fun when other teams have already made working models of stuff. Out of nowhere, a camera was pulled out to take pictures of what we had done in the last week. Boredom at its best.
Day 7: Sunday, 1/9/05Assignment 3 is complete. After hours and hours of debugging, 'Robot1' finally works! since we needed the RF system to tell us where our robot was on the board so that we could find a certain spot, it didn't help that the RF system kept breaking down. Hopefully that won't happen during competition. On a higher note, we finished soldering our second expansion board WITH sockets, so we don't have a delinquent expansion board anymore. Check it out:
Tian and Eddie are code monkeys. Frederick was so bored waiting for 5 hours at Washington Dulles for a flight back to Boston that he decided to start working on the website so that he can get the 6 EDPs to put him closer to graduating by this June.
Day 5: Friday, 1/7/05Tian and Eddie working on code trying to finish Assignment 3 which asks us to use the RF signal to drive our robot to a certain point on the board.
Day 4: Thursday, 1/6/05Tian and Eddie chill out in Boston during snowstorm. Frederick packed his bags for an interview at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Since Texas just beat Michigan in the Rose Bowl 5 days ago, he, as a Texan, hopes that the admissions people do not burn his application because of the game-winning field goal in the last 2 seconds of that game.
Day 3: Wednesday, 1/5/05Lecture 2: Second of three lectures, and Eddie and Frederick have already overslept a class. Tian and Eddie went to Workshop 4 on basic control and robot skills. Pretty boring stuff. We finished the second part of Assignment 2. We got a robot that spins around and goes forwards and backwards. It even backs up when something hits the hideous looking switch that we taped on the front, kinda like the robo-vacuums. Pretty sweet. Our organizer, Vimal, was nice enough to give us a second expansion board. Since Frederick was the retard who screwed it up in the first place, liked the smell of solder smoke so much, he decides to put the second board together.
Day 2: Tuesday, 1/4/05STUPID IDEA #1: Frederick started Assignment 2 and didn't read the instructions for assembling the expansion board well enough. ***On the assignment, read section 2, point 2.: Every year there is one team that forgets to solder the IC sockets onto the board. Don't be that team. Do not solder the IC chips directly onto the PCB. Although nothing harmful happens if you do, if one of your chips blow out (such as the motor driver chips), desoldering the IC be comes an arduous task.*** Yeah. Check out day 7. Organizer David Ziegler flipped out big time. Our organizer, Vimal, says we should have gone to his workshop on soldering. Meanwhile, Tian and Eddie got instructions for making the RF board and finished perfectly.
Day 1: Monday, 1/3/05Lecture 1: What is 6.270? Dang. There are a lot of teams. 90 of them to be exact, and everyone seems all gung ho about the class too. We had fun catching up with our friends and talkin' a little trash to the other teams. We got our kits and went to the first two workshops, Basic Lego and Gearboxes. These were quite useful as they actually came up with terms for different parts of the lego and showed us how to build things so that they will not fall apart. Finished Assignment 1 today (Front End Loader and testing HandyBoard) and will get it checked off tomorrow.
Day 0: Sunday, 1/2/05We cannot believe we had to come back to campus so early. Parts sorting was today, and we have never seen so many lego pieces. The actual jobs weren't that bad. We only had to stay for 20 minutes of it, and we couldn't find much to do in the last 5 minutes of that.