competition day

c&e went to the seeding competition this morning while i sat around at work and did...nothing. but i did get paid to do nothing. apparently, a motor port on the happyboard (#4) did not work so c&e tried to run the gear train using only 2 motors (instead of the usual 4). that meant that the robot basically did not move, so we didn't do very well. BUT it didn't really matter because we got seeded anyway because everyone gets seeded. :D

c&e then went to greg to fix the problem, and he gave us happyboard #5. 5 happyboards!!! we were only supposed to have 1 for the entire month!

competition started at 6pm in 26-100, and jeremy, cindy, emily, and i trekked down there in our "way awesome" matching 6.270 tshirts. who designs these shirts anyway? we had an awesome group of people who came out to cheer for us -- meagan, jen chu, alex, ben, josh, jen fu from church, doris, keith, liver, jason, marcus, john from smite/hockey, and laura and karina from mccormick 3w. YAY FRIENDLY FRIENDS! :D

unfortunately, our robot had stage fright during the competition, and the happyboard panicked both times. here is video of one of our runs... :o(

so we didn't make it very far in the competition. we tested the robot at the end to prove to ourselves that the robot actually worked, and it worked like a charm. it even scored in our 1 point and 2 point bins!

to drown in our sorrows (or to feed our appetites as this competition ended at 9:30pm) cindy, emily, jeremy, ben, meagan and i went out to sunset cantina for dinner. but even the nachos didn't console us for gene simmons choking. cindy says that we should've called the robot tony romo....and unfortunately, i don't have much of an argument against that anymore. :(

gene simmons

we have officially named our robot gene simmons. thank you, ugly betty, for your inspirational music videos. :)

taiwan cafe! :D

no videos from the rest of the day in lab -- my camera died. :(

BUT the robot finally started launching the balls into the scoring bins. some of the guys on team 08 saw what we were doing, and i *think* they attached a green board to the back of their robot to cover up the scoring bin because of us. apparently some of the teams think that our wack-o strategy is intimidating.

the robot went under some liposuction today, aka we shrank the butt (battery and happyboard portion) so that the robot would be more in balance. emily got a little annoyed at cindy and me because she wanted to test it rather than rebuild, so we speed-built and got it done in about 45 min.

we also went through 3 happyboards today. the go button on the first happyboard stopped working properly, so we couldn't calibrate the robot very quickly (we only have 60 seconds to do it). we asked michael about the problem, and he gave us a second board. unfortunately, that board kept restarting randomly in the middle of our run, so we talked to greg and he gave us a third. we didn't get to properly test it because we had to impound the robot, but hopefully this 3rd board will work.

cindy and i got our pictures taken by this woman who had a big fancy schmancy camera. we're kind of curious as to where our picture will turn up...

after we impounded our robot, we took a trip out to taiwan cafe for dinner!!! this trip had been planned for the last 3 weeks, and the food tasted especially good since we hadn't eaten since 6am (d) and 9:30am (e&c). yay for dirt-cheap taiwanese food! :D

impounding day...

its 6:30am.

we should not be allowed to be in lab this early in the morning. i am totally breaking the rules and I have my morning muffin and coffee here.

some people have definitely not gone home yet, as they are still wearing the same clothes from yesterday. no wonder people say course 6-ers smell bad....

T-10.5 hours.

jess ho is home! :D

jess ho came home from zambia today! hopefully, she didn't bring any additional friends with her (aka tapeworms and TB and such) so that we can still remain friends with her. :)

we spent a bit of time in lab tonight to purchase some bump sensors and solder wires onto them. on the way out, i grabbed some wires and made cindy some earrings, which she happily modeled:

(if you look really closely, they are red drop earrings. and believe me, she likes them a lot!)

kelly (from team 07) "built" a game board in the simmons hallway out of tape and amazon boxes to test their robot and they happily let us use it as well. old man jeremy sat "in a wheelchair" with jake down at their end of the hallway:
the night ended with emily modifying our gyro so that our robot finally drove straight and turned properly. i'm not sure how she did it -- her programming skills are *whoosh* way over my head. anyway, cindy and i left at around 1:30ish, only to meet up again at 6am in lab.

p.s. emily was inspired by this halls commercial to make another video: unfortunately, i didn't catch the cough drop, so our robot got a bit of vapor action. :)

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easy mac

easy mac in a cup!

after playing a hockey game (c&e) and practice (d), we all went back to simmons to work on our robot at around 11:45. since i had not eaten a real dinner (i downed a yogurt before practice, but that doesn't count as a meal) i was kind of hungry, and i spotted emily's costco size box of easy mac by her bed. easy mac already freaks me out because cheese in a packet is not normal, but these packets were "special" because they expired march 2007. i ate it anyway. :) dave, who lives across the hall, also ate one, so we will both find out tomorrow if it was ok.

here is a little glimpse of our new strategy:

snickers dark

we've seen this snickers dark commercial about 50 times in the past two weeks. at first, it really confused us because we can't figure out why there is a viking and a pilgrim, and now we crack up because the commercial is more ridiculous every time we watch it. SO RIDICULOUS that we did a little reenactment of the commercial --

cindy got so excited to throw the trashcan that she hit our robot. :P its because of that weightlifting class she's taking -- she's becoming too buff. cindy -- which way to the gun show? :oP

we decided to rebuild the ramp so that the balls would shoot up and over the other robot. we figure that a lot of the teams have now seen our strategy and might program their robot to block our four point bin. our new strategy is a high-risk, high-reward method to get around the four point bin robot blockade -- we'll see how well it works. cindy is the master of rebuilding ramps.

me and the rebuilt ramp

emily is still working on getting our robot to drive straight. we're attempting to use the gyro, and hopefully we will get the robot to drive straight by tomorrow. *crossing fingers*