Robotics Much?
That’s what I’ve been up to. Last post was in June, I believe. Since then, my carpet has been installed successfully, school started, first quarter went by, and now second quarter has come to a close.
That. Was. Fast.
Robotics hasn’t been doing much lately except work on FIRST Tech Challenge robots and other random events. The numbers started out startlingly high: around 35-40. Good news there: they’ve dropped to about 25, which is usually a pretty healthy, manageable number. Luckily we received both FTC kits before the close of the semester and have begun work on both robots (did I mention we have two FTC teams? We have two FTC teams…). We also got the new FIRST Robotics Competition Control System [kind of] early this year, about 2 weeks late but 2 weeks earlier than we would have gotten it. So far so good, the controller is the CompactRIO from National Instruments, which is programmable in C/C++ or LabVIEW. For better or worse, we’ve decided to take the challenge and climb the learning curve of LabVIEW; there’s just too many features (wireless, real-time debugging included) that can’t be turned down.
Other than robotics, I’ve been busy with piano; I’d like to learn jazz improv with a 12-bar progression, but not having a teacher that knows that already is making this kind of difficult. I’ll just need to scavenge the vast cosmos of the intrawebs for the answers I seek. Unicycling and juggling have slowed down considerably since calculus, programming, and cold weather set in, but they should be back in no time…
Kick off for FRC is January 3rd, should be intensely fun as the chaos of build season begins.
That’s that. Adios!
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