gwax's rumblings

6.270 has come and gone now. We didn’t win; in fact, we didn’t come any­where near win­ning. On the other hand, we did have a really good time. If it weren’t for the lack of prizes and campus-wide recog­ni­tion, I’d say it was bet­ter this way. That hav­ing been said, I’m more than plenty happy.

6.270 qual­i­fiers and seed­ing rounds are today and impound is Wednesday. Our robot is very much not ready to actu­ally com­pete but we only need to score a few points in order to qual­ify and be allowed in the actual com­pe­ti­tion. I’m con­fi­dent that we can score enough points to qual­ify, though we will likely seed poorly (not that it really mat­ters). After that’s out of the way, it should prob­a­bly take us a few an hour or so of ded­i­cated work to get the robot com­pe­ti­tion ready (by which I mean capa­ble of win­ning). We should be plenty ready in time for impound.

All in all, despite the fact that both Muth and I have pretty much taken IAP off, I am still con­fi­dent that we’ve got this thing fig­ured out. More 6.270 news when we’re com­pe­ti­tion ready.

Right now there’s this Mystery Hunt thing going on in my dorm and other MIT related places. Basically, it’s this huge puz­zle con­test of sorts. This year, once again, I have decided not to take a hugely active role in the mat­ter and have just taken a con­sult­ing sort of approach to the whole thing. As it stands, I have con­sulted on two prob­lems both of which have been solved whilst I was help­ing. The first one was some­thing involv­ing some organic mol­e­cules and what­not; other peo­ple did the grunt work and I helped with some of the end bits and get­ting the solu­tion. The sec­ond one was this really neat symmetry/crystallography one which I got involved with when some­one said, “Hey George, we have a prob­lem that we think is crys­tal­log­ra­phy, help us.” Now, on this puz­zle, I was there pretty much from start to fin­ish (minus sleep and some other things) and I played a pretty piv­otal role in solv­ing all parts of it. After all, I do know my crys­tal­log­ra­phy. Incidentally, we were the first team to solve the symmetry/crystallography puz­zle and the orga­niz­ers expect that we may be the only team that will solve it.

w00t!

Muth and I are work­ing on this 6.270 robot of ours and get­ting good results. Mind you we’re not work­ing on our com­pe­ti­tion robot yet, just one to com­plete the var­i­ous assign­ments for the class before we can start work­ing on our real robot. This being totally unim­por­tant quality-wise, we’ve been shoot­ing for just enough effort to get things checked off and move on. Assignment 3 was due yes­ter­day and Assignment 4 today; these are the only assign­ments that involve our pre-competition robot.

Assignment 3 invovled build­ing a robot that can go for­ward, back­ward, turn counter-clockwise and respond to a bump sen­sor. Yesterday we spent 2 hours build­ing a robot that sat­is­fied the require­ments for Assignment 3 and most of the time was spent debug­ging code only to find out that I had for­got­ten how to tell the dif­fer­ence between left and right. Having fin­ished, we walked into lab and were checked off in about 10 minutes.

Assignment 4 is where the story gets fun. Assignment 4 was to make your robot chase after an IR Beacon. We start out oday with some mod­i­fi­ca­tions to our robot from yes­ter­day, namely mount­ing the IR Beacon and fig­ur­ing out how to make it work (which is pretty hard because it’s sup­posed to be con­nected to the expan­sion board, which we aren’t using). So we ended up putting about 1.5 hours of work into the thing (of which a por­tion was taken up by my mak­ing and eat­ing some mac­a­roni and cheese). We didn’t test the robot before going into lab and my expec­ta­tion was that it would be suf­fi­cient, but barely so, to pass check­off. So we go in to lab and I’m think­ing that I should prob­a­bly test the IR recog­ni­tion capa­bil­i­ties of the robot before we ask to be checked off (don’t want to waste TA time after all), but then I fig­ure that I don’t really care and it should work so I don’t bother. We’re stand­ing there wait­ing to get our hands on another IR Beacon so that we can try our robot and in the mean­while we watch a num­ber of other teams make robots that sit there and twitch a bit, maybe twitch­ing gen­er­ally towards the IR Beacon and so on. We get tired of wait­ing so we ask if we can just get checked off then (with­out both­er­ing to test) and our robot races after the Beacon so fast that the guy can’t get away from it fast enough. The thing is flaw­less, and the TA made the remark that, “That’s the way it’s sup­posed to work.” So basi­cally, with a total of maybe 3.5 hours of work Muth and I have man­aged to make one of the best robots for Assignment 4.

Muth and I pwnz