The TRC scouting application for 2005 has arrived. Its got almost no security, so please be nice. Comments are welcome, but don’t expect me to do anything about them. I can give out the source code though, so if you are feeling creative have at.
With some help from my wonderful mother, the latest TRC video is basically complete. And it’s a doozie. Four songs perfectly blended with action, suspense, drama, plot, and excitment all curled in to about seven minutes of video. The first screening will be at the International School in Bellevue, but after that it will likely find its way on to the TRC website. Stay tuned!
The website of the Titan Robotics Club uses the ColdFusion Meta Language (CFML) to generate and display its dynamic content. I posted earlier about how ColdFusion was an easy language to learn, and that it seemed semantically powerful, able to accomplish a lot in not too many lines of code. While that is still true, there seems to be a dark side to the ColdFusion story or at least that of our current host, readyhosting.com. It seems that of the server’s stability leaves something to be desired, especially on start-up. For example, if you are te first person to visit the site after some period of time and (at least this is what I speculate happens) the ColdFusion interpreter has shut down, you are greeted by a hideous page with SQL statements and unprocessed cfoutput statements, which is hopelessly ugly. Occasionally when just reloading the home page, you will witness the same phenomenon. Needless to say, we can only hope this doesn’t happen when a judge is around. So, to hopefully minimize the chance of this happening, I created a shell script that, every 30 seconds, reloads the home page, and logs whether it recieved a “big” (correct) or a “small” (incorrect) version of the page. This way, the command interpreter should remain active (hopefully) and I’ll get statistics on how often the page loads incorrectly, even after a “hot” start. Nothing like hard data with which to confront your host (or should it be Macromedia?) .
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After seeing the robot off into the hands of the FedEx guy to 1:30 today, Dan and I went into Seattle to eat, walk Alki beach, and eventually, watch Constantine at the Cinerama. I had read a review in the Seattle Times that, though not exactly lauding, piqued my interest, so I decided it was worth a shot, and most any movie is better in the Cinerama.
And the choice was a good one. Though Dan didn’t think too much of it except for the special effects, I quite liked just about everything about the movie. Maybe it has something to do with my own internal search for truth; I don’t know. But Keanu Reeves was the right man for this role, and the theology behind the movie was intriguing, to say the least. The movie could have been extraordinarily silly, but for me, somehow, it stayed on the right side of the line, and instead I found it fun, exciting, and very much worth the day away from work.
Dan says it better than I would have, so I will steal his work and post it here :-)
Mr. Postman, how many stamps do you put on a robot?
Spent most of the day over at Bellevue HS working on the robot. Bellevue’s robotics club, has been sharing some of their space with us and we have been sharing some of our equipment (particularly the parts of the playfield that we have constructed). It has been a mutually beneficial arrangement. We spent the bulk of the day working on autonomous modes. If we had another week, I am confident we could get our desired autonomous mode working. Namely, visually acquiring the location of field elements and using that information to run one of 16 driving programs in order to place a tetra on the center goal. All the pieces of code are there, we just don’t have enough time to plot out and test all the routes. Instead, we have fallen back on our “Plan B.” Plan B is to use dead reckoning to grab a tetra off one of the autonomous loading stations and place it on the near, inside goal and then return to near the loading station for the beginning of user-controlled mode. By the end of the day, we were doing this with pretty fair regularity. We will have to tweak our code a bit to accomodate for slight differences betweeen our practice field and the field at the Pacific Northwest Regional (like carpet type, slight differences in measured distances, etc.), but I am pretty confident we will be able to do this about 75% of the time. Based on what I have heard on the boards and what I saw from other teams at our the practice meet that we held yesterday, probably less than 10% of all teams will have a viable autonomous mode. I really wish that FIRST would give teams a little more time. 6 weeks is just too little time to be reinventing the wheel every year. Anyways, bitter recrimintion aside, it has been a WILD ride these last six weeks and I am pleased to say that Tyr is now safely ensconsed in a very large shipping crate awaiting pickup. Portland here we come!
This morning, I went to bed at about 6:00 am after staying up to finish up the Chairman’s Award submission before the deadline at 9:01 pm tonight. The good news is that I actually did finish it. On the other hand, I don’t know how much sense I make at 6:00 am, so I’ll probably have to go back and edit it today But at least that is considerably easier than writing the entire thing tonight, with the deadline quickly approaching.
No, I didn’t fall off the end of the earth… Instead, I have been below the radar due to the upcoming FIRST Robotics Competition deadlines. Along with Tim and Cheuk, I have done a lot of work on the TRC website, preparing to win (hopefully) its third sraight Best Website award. Since the site is written in ColdFusion, I have started to learn a little more about the Macromedia product. Its fairly easy to pick up on the basics, and already I have implemented foward-looking event queries (it’s a little bit of a hack, but it should work through the end of the year, and it will never be worse than it was before, when it only showed events on the current day), a more intelligent “What FIRST means to me” cutoff point (before it was hard limited to 500 characters; now it searches for the end of a sentence that occurs after 200 characters), and a new banner that most people, including me, are not entirely pleased with (suggestions are welome – but before February 22nd, please).
So go take a look and let me know what you think.