Month: September 2012

7am  Game On

Today’s the day!  The competition starts at noon today.  The last time I heard from the team was shortly before midnight.   They’re doing some last minute fine tuning.  At midnight, they called and said they were stuck with one final problem:  the golf balls were being taken to the correct bins, but not the ping pong balls.   They were stumped. I told them they were sleep deprived, and that they should hit the sack and solve it this morning.

8am

I still haven’t heard from them.   I suspect they stayed up all night.   It’s just like talking to your own kids.  You tell them to do something.  They say “yeah, yeah” and then they completely ignore you.  For the last week or so, every time I have told them not to pull an all-nighter, they have ignored me, stayed up insanely late, and then made incredible progress.  Sigh.

9am

Amazing.   They stayed up until around 3am, and got the final bug (there’s always one more bug) fixed.

11am  T minus one hour

The team is sending me raw cel phone video clips; the quality isn’t great, but it’s timely! Here’s a clip they just sent:

Here’s the quote from the text that accompanied the above video: “There is this little kid that is super intrigued by our robot.  Ha Ha!”

1pm

They just finished their run for Round One.   The cel phone connection was less than ideal, but it sounds as if they did very well.  Their time to pick up and deposit the four balls was the best, but they had to give a nudge or two to Aldo during the run, so they’ll lose some points for that.   Instead of the formal oral presentation that they had been told they were going to have to do, there was an oral Q&A session with the panel of judges (which I assume are all Atmel staff?).  The team thought they did well on those questions.   I’m betting they did very well; Furman students are excellent communicators, and the team knows their stuff.

Round Two starts soon.

5pm  They won Second Place!

Just got a phone call and texts from the team; they won SECOND PLACE!   Chaotic phone connection, but here’s their verbatim text:

“After a long couple of days and a lot of hard work, our teamwork has paid off!  We are proud to say that we won second place!  We were able to meet some awesome people, both from other teams and from Atmel, and this trip has been an amazing experience!”

— Furman Robotics Team

… and all I can say, is

“Well done, team!”

— Prof. John R. Conrad

They made it!  Of course the flight was delayed, and it was raining, and there were puddles of water on the floor inside the tent where the competition will be, but they made it.   Here are some pictures that the team has been sending me:

Aldo meets Moustache Man:

Andrea dons a USB bracelet:

When Life Gives You Lemons,…

… make lemonade, right?  Make robots?  Nope, make a mustache and goo, goo, goggly eyes to put on the robot! About a week ago, one of the last remaining problems the team had to face was spurious RF noise from the motor brushes playing havoc with the microprocessor and making the robot claw arm go nuts.  The arm was jiggling so much that the balls were flying out of the scoop, even when Aldo was standing still.  I think this happened either very late one night, or in the wee hours of the early morning.   The problem was a potential showstopper, and they were running out of time.  Could have been a pretty devastating low point.  But did they despair?  Nope.  First they first made lemonade out of lemons by adding the mustache and goggly eyes. Then they fixed the problem the next day.  Here’s a video (thanks to my son Jeff for the editing and original score soundtrack):