EPIC = GLADIATOR (which we watched more than 10 times over the building of our robot) = 3 P I C = 3rd Place In Ceeding [ceeding from Middle english ceede, from French cedoie, from Latin cedere, aka Modern English seed. Besides, EPIS doesn't sound as cool].
It was early in December when it was decided that we weren't going to do this stuff. It was just not worth it. None of us needed the credit, and the fall term was tough.
But IAP came along and Jomar and Chris decided that since we didn't know how to get off the mailing list without an awkward encounter, we should just go for it. We told David two days later, who didn't really care, so he went for it.
We started off by throwing some legos together for assignment one. It was awesome. Then for assignment 3, we made a robot that made right turns - two days past the deadline. But when we figured out how to do the right turns, we were psyched.
So like, Bermejo and Chris spent days writing the code for this thing. Well, they spent days thinking about the code, drinking the code, living the code, being one with the code, dreaming of code, but spent less than 10 hours actually writing code. They couldn't do much coding and debugging anyway because Jomar hadn't finished the robot. When Jomar remade the robot, we put on some sensors, and made a new robot that makes right turns.
That's right, our robot uses a medium range gear ratio, two motors, and all it does it make right turns. But man are they some sweet right turns. It's simple, but it's good at what it does. Did we mention we were seeded third?
Now, you're probably wondering why we didn't build some more advanced systems, but we did. We have a fighter docking bay for X-wings and a ball tracking system. We also have lasers. Sexy lasers. But these things ran for about 10 milliseconds before the batteries drained, so we turned them off for competition. Also, DARPA liked them so much they paid us to take them off our robot and further develop our devices for them. We are not supposed to talk about that, so pretend that you never read this. Ever.