School here at the UA is going okay as well. I’m only taking 14 units this semester, and it’s a breeze compared to last year. All of my classes are finished before 11 every day, so I seem to have plenty of time for being lazy.

I was sitting in front of my computer screen today (as I am prone to do every day to no end) and was reminiscing about the engineering science fair I was in last year. We built an inertial navigation system using the Lego NXT platform and a 3rd party accelerometer. It didn’t really work at all, so I was thinking of ways to make a reliable system that FIRST teams like the NERDS could use. Using a gyro or compass (I’m not sure which is more accurate, I’ve heard gyros tend to drift) and a quadrature encoder, you could relatively accurately keep track of the position of the robot on the field, and subsequently make functions to move to various locations. Some pseudo-code for those interested:

getPosition()
{
double angle = getGyroHeading()
double distance = getEncoderDistance()

double curX = cos(angle)*distance
double curY = sin(angle)*distance

posX += curX
posY += curY

resetEncoder()
}

Essentially, you take the distance you’ve traveled since the last iteration of the loop and add the components of that displacement to the total displacement with respect to the field. The only way this would be considered unreliable is if the wheels slip. The target for this would be autonomous though, so you can assume for all intents and purposes that it will not. I really want to test this and create something useful, but at the moment I have neither an encoder, a gyro, or a robot – all very useful for testing purposes. So I suppose I’ll have to wait… Maybe once summer starts and the NERDS do their summer vex camps I work with them on it.

That’s about all I’ve got..
Yup.

By the way, we made a FIRST promo vid for FRC, it’s up at YouTube but you can get an exclusive look riiiiight here:

We went ahead and build an FTC robot or two, had fun at the regional in Phoenix, and all was well. This was, of course, after we finished build season, during which the cooliest group I’ve ever met helped build the awesomest robot I’ve ever seen. The new system and LABView were amazing, which made my final year on the team that much better. Luckily, we’ve got an incredible group of students ready for next year, so I’m quite satisfied that our mission as seniors was accomplished.

Right, so, the competitions. Basically, FIRST came out with the game Lunacy, to which we build an awesometastic spiral-hoppered turreted shooter of sorts that could track targets autonomously on the go and adjust for distance accordingly as well. It held a max of 15 orbit balls and had a fire rate of abouuut 4 per second, maybe a little less. We seeded 4th in LA and made it to the semifinals with one of the coolest teams ever, 330. We then proceeded to the Arizona regional with a hood that made the balls fire straight down (thus vetoing all work done for tracking and long distance shooting… *sigh*) However, we seeded 1st, had an overall record of 15-1-0, and won the event. Holy Jeebers, Batman! I got to drive the robot and win a regional : D So that fulfills my senior year, just winning a robotics regional.

However, we just recently also went to the Championship in Atlanta. We seeded 17th of 88 teams in the Newton Division and made it to the quarterfinals, breaking our record from the last time we went to Atlanta. We also visited the World of Coca-Cola and the Aquarium, which were quite fantastical adventures in themselves.

Anyway, we just got back from that on Sunday. I need to whip out my unicycle some time now that it’s getting hot (and Mr. Forbes needs to fix the swamp cooler!!). Piano is pretty awesome right now, there’s a recital coming up that should be lots of phun. And I’m going a week on just water! And I have a giant infested wart on my foot! Yay!

Til then… lata foo’s!

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!

I did manage to hand off Mr. PosUni to James, hopefully he can get it down pretty soon and get a nice one, so another person in the club can learn! (Club circus, anyone?)

And the last thing I did today was finally get the rest of my floor clean and ready for carpet. All I need to do now is remove these 3 pieces of furniture and WaLa! We’ll be good to go.

And apparently we get to use Eclipse for programming next school year. That should be way, way fun!

Yep.

Afterward, Gary and I mozied on over to Dan Pressler’s house (he was watching Scorpion King… what a weirdo!)  and stole back my original unicycle! Yay! Here’s a picture (because pictures are amazing):

So, now I can give this to other members of the club and we can create a giant circus roboticist community! What fun. I can’t think of any other news right now, either. Except that I finally compiled a simple Hello World program and ran it in a GameCube emulator and WaLa! it worked. So once I clean my room and get my Wii set up again, I can start writing some programs for it and getting used to the libraries available.

Right.

So, as far as news is concerned… I’ve begun the arduous journey of cleaning my room. Not because I want to, but so we can get some carpet upstairs and hopefully scourge this house of the last remaining poor-quality flooring (ie. plywood!). So far I’ve managed to remove 3 large pieces of furniture from my room; however, I’ve left all the stuff in them on the floor, so not much progress there. I’ve discovered just how many books I have on programming and computers as well! They’re basically all the same as well, “Learn C in 24 Hours!”, “C++ Demystified”, “The Art of C”. Yes, programming is my other hobby.

Since I have to clean my room, I’ve decided to destroy my piggy bank (in a stylish way, of course) to get at the money:

I had $57.93 in assorted change in there. The one thing we forgot when filming this is that it’s the middle of June in Arizona. And it’s concrete. And metal change. So when we did finally break it, Mr. Forbes ran off to the house and left me stranded trying to pick up very, very hot change off some very, very hot concrete. Darn you, Mr. Forbes! Needless to say, I managed to rescue most of the money. When you put that with the other $17.50 I found on my desk when I moved all the crap off it, you get about $74.39 in change. Now, add in the other $50 I got for my birthday and the other bills laying around, I almost have enough to get one of these:

http://www.unicycle.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=763

Which would be, of course, incredibly awesome-o.

Several more things. Tomorrow the robotics club (did I mention I’m an officer in the local robotics club?) hosts the second session of it’s 3rd Annual Summer Robotics Camps! w00t (that’s a word now!)! Thirteen kids are signed up and it should be plenty of fun. Also, … goddangit, I can never remember what I was gonna talk about… oh, yea, random numbers! What fun. I just started randomly thinking about (pseudo)random number generation algorithms. Wikipedia (oh, great God among us) mentioned a simple well known algorithm:

where m is the maximum numbers the function can create. Ahh, gotta love recursion! I also though about the distributions of random number generators (that’s a long phrase, I’m gonna use RNG now). Here’s a good Delphi article on it:

http://logicalgenetics.com/showarticle.php?topic_id=893

Wouldn’t it be neat to have a RNG that randomly generates a distribution first, then attempts to follow that distribution? Pretty stupid idea, huh?

That’s it. Bye.

EDIT: more stuff:

Looks like Steven and Thomas hacked and installed the Homebrew Channel on Thomas’s Wii! yay! Also, I forgot to mention the NERDS were mentioned (myself included :^P ) in the SV Herald, seen here:

http://www.svherald.com/articles/2008/06/20/news/doc485b64a8cc769314620007.txt

Now that’s it. Bye. Again.

Apart from this weird stuff, I whipped out my unicycle (see header image) and tried (unsuccessfully, of course) to do some unispins. I’ll have to get better…

And in other news… wait, there is no other news.

…Success! Now I can pester the world with… me!