Checksum Arcanius

I am returned home, all in one piece, and with still a decent chance of passing my classes (I think). The combat robotics trip was enlightening and fun, and my big brother is all graduamated from college, making me the only member of my immediately family who cannot (yet) claim a bachelor’s degree. Interestingly, the ceremonies at BYU were absent of tradition: no tassel flip, no hat throwing, no wild celebration. It all seemed very utilitarian, as much as a ceremony can be that way. I got to see Bradford again, and we had a good time seeing Hidalgo and then playing Starcraft until 4 am (we won!). After eating some barbeque with the Sullivans, I was dropped off at the airport and flew to John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California. There, I was picked up by Larry, and we made our way to the hotel, a very nice, new hotel just a block or two from both the Anaheim convention center (where the RC Exhibition was) and Disneyland (to which I�ve never been; this is the closest I have come). The interesting thing about this hotel is that while it was overall quite nice, it had the most bizarre accents in the form of drain pipes sticking out of the walls occasionally. Also, the ice machine room was extraordinarily warm. After Phaw, the combat robot that was Tim�s senior project went 2-3 in competition (the match I drove, we won, and the first two matches the drivetrain wasn�t working well [but we won one of those matches anyway]). The club was also interviewed by some tv camera and reporter lady. However, the most interesting thing about the competition for me was to compare it to a FIRST event. FIRST regionals are many times better organized and ran � perhaps up to 10 times better in presentation and organization, and having its own venue as opposed to sharing with another event. However, the entrance fee to this competition was $150, and the entrance fee to a FIRST event is $4000, well more than 10x more. It got me to thinking about where does all that money go? Even at a small regional with just 36 teams (like the PNW regional), that�s nearly $150,000 brought in. At the nationals, the budget is 1.2 million dollars from entrance fees alone. Yet FIRST says that only covers about half the cost of putting on the event. So I�m wondering, how can it really cost that much? I talked with Larry about it, and from that conversation it seems to be that there is a lot of waste going on between FIRST and the final production. I�d like some hard figures to know for sure, though. Let me know if you have any.

Right now, I’m headed to Utah, using the internet at the incredible rate of 9.6 kbps! Its good enough for this, at least, as well as IM and text-based email, so I’m heppy. Its still pretty amazing one can get internet at all hurtling down the road like this…

I’m headed to Utah because my brother is graduating from BYU tomorrow. But it gets more excting than that, becaus Friday night I’m flying to Anaheim for Steel conflict. Sunday I return home and my life returns to some semblance of reality, except that I’m on my own in a huge house for three weeks, which will be kinda wierd in and of itself.

I seem to have left my glasses in Atlanta, I’m going to have to call the hotel to find out for sure and hopefully have them shipped to me.

Recently, I have created a stir on the Chief Delphi forums, the de-facto meeting place online for FIRST teams. If you want to see me being inflamatory, head on over there and search for threads that include the number 492. I also have some legitimate posts, which have had the unintended consequence of making my reputation (which was at one point the second lowest on the board) positive instead of negative. Oh well, I can’t win all the battles.

Well, the TRC didn’t win in Atlanta… They didn’t win anything in fact, making this the first event out of eight that the TRC has not won an award at. So the streak comes to an end… which is a bitter pill to swallow. That was one of my favorite statistics to quote about the club.

On the other hand, a new era may be starting for the club – more people are interested, and for the first time since the first year, it looks like girls are going to be in the club leadership. And more people seem to be catching the idea that very cool thing can be done with the club. I hope the momentum stays up.

I’m currently in Salt Lake City, having accepted a $400 voucher to change flights. AndI’m about to board, so I’m outta here!

After a rocky start going 1-2, the TRC won three games in a row, pulling themselves from the pits into the spotlight with three excellent matches. The reasons for the turnaround are numerous; the most important is pure luck: Our first three matches were with robots that could do precious little (which at this level is rare). Our next three partners were each capable hangers, and we routed our opponents in each of those matches with scores of 150, 150, and 110. One of these matches was with the current umber one seed, and we hope we caught their eye. We think with us and one more hanger, we could go far in the finals, just like in the pacific northwest regional.

Catch the webcast on Saturday from http://robotics.nasa.gov. We could very well be in the finals and perhaps even the next national champions.

;-)

Today, we met at Sea-Tac at Nine, got everyone checked in around Ten, made it though security by 11:00, and arrived in Atlanta around 7:15. We all made it to the Hotel by using the MARTA, which was extremely easy. Most of the kids went to McDonalds to eat, the “Adults” (except for Bobby and I) went to other, more expensive, better food places. I figure there will be plenty of time for expensive food tomorrow (er, later today if you’re in Atlanta) when we are traveling the city.

So far, Atlanta has impressed me. The people are generally nice, the panhandlers are gentle, and the hotel, though getting old, is well maintained and clean. And getting free internet from the much nicer hotel a half mile away through the window is nice too. Thank goodness for high power WLAN cards and directional antennas.

Tomorrow we tour the city, the center of commerce in the south. Then the competition begins. With 295 teams, the pits are a ten minute walk away from the playing fields. It will be intense, and I still have to finish my scouting program.

Perhaps the best part of the new computer is that I’ve been able to use my Sound Blaster Audigy again. While I haven’t gotten around to setting up the 4.1 surround sound again yet, the sound quality is so much better with the Audigy than the poor, poor amps in the laptops that it is truly a different experience both in headphones and on the Stereo.

Work has been good, but it is hard to get into a homework mode afterwards. Angeringly, but perhaps fortunately, Comcast is sucking it up in the ping and packet loss department (I ran some ping tests last night to confirm that it wasn’t a wireless link on my side), so counterstrike is a pain for me and those playing me with all my teleportation.

I started work on a scouting database program for nationals. I hope I’ll get it done in time; If not, there is always the plane ride and wednesday and thursday before the finals begin. T miunus one week until we leave. I can hardly wait.

But before then, I have three photography assignments to complete and probably a bunch of computer programs to write and lots of diff.eq. to study. Fun stuff!

Last night I enabled Magic Quotes so Bobby’s Uberblog-powered site would work properly. Its unfortunate that Dris doesn’t instead use the “addslashes” function, but until that time, I’m willing to compromise.

The nieces are over for another day it looks like, and I’m pretty tired – thats what I get for my inconsistent sleep schedule I guess.

Good music lifts my mood. I’m glad I decided to pull out the iPod and listen to some of my good music – I’ve been missing my music since Davis still has my firewire cable. Now its back, and I’m glad. As the title of this post sugests, I have many projects going on right now. I thought I would give an update on them.

Tim’s Senior Porject Combat Robot
Today was my first real day working on the combat robot. For the first part of the session, we mostly just played with fire, because the robot’s main weapon is going to be a flamethrower. In order for it to be effective, we want to make it more like a blow torch, so after trying some venturis that Larry suggested, I drew on my paintball experience to create a positive pressure air feed system. The muffin fan we tried the first time didn’t work so well, and the compressed air was way too powerful, but the FIRST robot’s compressor with a tube into which the fuel was fed about 3/4 of the tube length away from the end seemed to work very well for a strong blow torch effect. Feeling successful but hungry, we went to eat, and then returned to think about and work on the drive train. Now much work got done, but Tim and I figured out the main chasis (just a 2″x4″ thick wall aluminum tube down the center, to which the drivetrain will be bolted). The details will come.

New Desktop Computer
I purchased from Tim an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, and now all I need to to is buy the rest of the computer to put around it. I wanted to go to Fry’s today, but it looks like that’ll be a trip for tomorrow after work.

Work
Work is going well. I go in early all week, so I have to get to bed real soon here. Going in early, of course, means getting out early as well, so I have lots of daylight to have fun by, for example, shopping at Fry’s. All the non-disclosure agreements I signed means I can’t yet tell you much about what I’m doing, since its all propreitary information not yet released to the public. But I should be writing up some troubleshooting guide for the Flic Wireless barcode scanner that will eventually become public, so maybe I can post that info at some point. But don’t hold your breath.

SilverFir.net
Moving over to oasis-as-server running Gentoo is more or less stalled right now. Its amazing how much something working well enough is an incentive to not change things. Despite being on the backburner, however, this one is still on the list. Currently, Apache, MySQL, and PHP are all installed. I still need to get the Apache logs parsed out to the proper domain directories, and set up secure email, ftp, and web servers, get web mail working, and set up a secure VPN with a Samba server for long-distance file sharing for windows (for my mp3 collection remotely, primarily). If you would like to help with the project, let me know.

DARPA Grand Challenge 2006
This is a very long-term goal right now. The first step is the SRA’s (Seattle Robotics Association, formerly SRSoceity) Mini Grand Challenge, which will involve navigating to orange cones located around the Seattle Center sometime later this year. In order to prove my concept of machine vision’s ability to find orange objects to naysaying Bob, we took some pictures of an Orange shirt of mine in various lighting conditions from way overexposed to way dark. In all cases except one (where the shirt was mostly black it was so underexposed), my machine vision technique (really just a photoshop action script) worked. I think using a regular digital camera and algorithms like photoshop’s, it should be fairly easy to navigate towards orange objects in a variety of lighting conditions.
Also, I got the names of people from Subaru, VW, and GMC from Mr. Chaplin, so now I need to put together a two-year plan that describes how the $1,000,000 I will be asking them for will be used to win the Grand Challenge with one of their vehicles (modified for drive by wire and for travelling in desert terrain, of course).

Laptop questions
I like my old laptop better than my current laptop. The only reason I use my current laptop is that its techincally faster. But I think I will be trading back. This laptop needs a reinstall from scratch anyway, so I will trade it for the one my mom is now using, which is the one I liked better anyway. And Mobius (the old laptop) has a serial port for programming robots as well. And 2400+ Athlon’s are still really fast, just not quite a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4. But I like how Mobius is lighter weight and better balanced and goes to sleep properly and… Well, I just like it better!

Those are all I can think of right now, but I bet there are more even!