Yay, Magic Smoke!

Now it's really over. The final competition was today, with two rounds in the morning to weed out the weakest robots, and then the finals in the evening. Surprisingly enough, we won our first two matches! The first one was a total fluke - our claw wasn't attached to the servo (oops!) so the robot couldn't wall-follow and got stuck on the edge of the table. But we hit one ball hard enough in the process that it wandered into the 1-point goal. And since the other robot deployed the wrong way and had the point-blocker fall off the table, thereby scoring nothing, we won! Man, we were just really lucky there. The second round was much better - we reattached the claw and the robot worked just the way it was supposed to. We scored 14 points by transporting seven balls into the 2-point zone. The other team didn't score anything, so we won. That meant that we were guaranteed to play in the evening rounds and be on TV and everything. Exciting!! (Unfortunately, Amy, Sarah and Brett's team didn't make it on to the finals because their robot kept false starting. It's a crying shame though, because it seemed to work quite well.)

The evening rounds were even better. There was a big audience, and it was really cool to have all these people yelling "Magic Smoke!!!" I've never experienced that first-hand. ^_^; We did great in the the first two matches. The first round, we scored 18 points. I think it was the highest amount scored by any of the robots in the first round (certainly the highest out of the mid-ranked robots). The next round, we scored 21 points. A personal best for Magic Smoke. :P Thing is, 13 of the points from those two rounds were scored by the other teams. Haha, oh well. Whatever works. Unfortunately, in the next round, Jon made a calibration error and our robot failed to start, so it lost. It would have been an easy win too, since the other team only scored 7 points. Jon was really beating himself up over that one, but he shouldn't have - none of us had expected to do so well. The round after that, we scored 11 points (Magic Smoke was starting to drive erratically by then) and the other team beat us out. So that was it - it was a double-elimination tournament. We were out. But it was great to stay and watch the rest of the tournament. The two best robots finished with a best 2 out of 3 match, and Team 28 won - they had an interesting ball-scoring-preventor device. All in all, it was a great tournament, and I was really glad that we'd participated in it. All that hard work and frustration really paid off! Oh, and once we all get our websites finished, I'll post a link to the site so you can see what everyone spent the past month working on...

Now I'm all ready and excited to start the next semester. Finally, I'll be taking Computer Science classes again, woohoo! And I've definitely got two classes that don't have finals, and a strong possibility of a third that doesn't have one either. So that means that I'll probably only have one or two finals, depending on whether I drop a class or not. So far, I'm planning on taking 6.004 (Computation Structures - required CS class - it's reputed to be fun, but there's a new lecturer this term... This is the class where it's uncertain as to whether we have a final or not), 6.170 (Software design lab - another fun class, but a major time sink), Japanese II (Woohoo! I'm looking forward to this!), 5.12 (Organic Chemistry - needed for a bio minor), and 18.06 (Linear Algebra). I might end up dropping 5.12 or 18.06 because taking five classes is practically suicide, especially if one of them is 6.170. It's uncertain right now... I ought to see what my advisor thinks. Hah. Like he'd know anything about it.

- Flykyr Skysong

Current song: PERSONA 2 Eternal Punishment OST - BGM II (original name, huh?)
Current mood: ^_____^

Dekimashita yo!

It's over!! Well, not quite, but robot impounding was at 5 pm today, so we had to turn ours in. The competition's tomorrow - I hope we win at least one morning round so that we get into the evening rounds (that's when all the people come to watch). 6.270 was fun the first week (yay, soldering!), but it didn't become fun again until later yesterday afternoon (after I wrote yesterday's rant) because our robot finally started to function! So exciting! I started writing code finally, and I even managed to make it drive relatively straight, which is something that we hadn't really ever been able to do before. We scrapped the gyroscope and the distance sensor and decided just to use shaft encoders for everything. They work pretty well too. Basically, shaft encoders check to see how fast each wheel is spinning, and you can use that to adjust motor speeds to make the robot drive straight. It's pretty cool. Actually, it's really cool to realize how much I've learned this past month. It's been a ton of work, but overall, I'm rather pleased with it. I'm probably saying this just because we finally got a semi-working robot and I feel so relieved. I'll never forget how absolutely frustrated I was for the past few weeks, but I can also realize that it's been a great learning experience, and when things aren't breaking down left and right around you, it can actually be pretty darn exciting. We have absolutely no chance of winning with our robot, but it's going to be really interesting to see how all the robots do in the competition tomorrow. I'm really looking forward to it.

Jon really wanted to name our robot "Dumbot". Give it a feather, and it can fly. Heh. But in the end, we chose "Magic Smoke" because there was a lot of that where our robot was concerned. For the non-electronics folks out there, magic smoke is basically this thing that's in any electronic component, and as long as it stays inside that component, things are cool. But if you let it out, that's a bad thing because then the object dies. Okay, it's a joke, yes. If you get magic smoke, it means that you fried whatever you were just working on. We did this more than once! Hence the name. Plus, it gives me an excuse to draw a dragon on our poster. Yeah, we have to make a poster and wave it around during the competition or something. Sounds quite silly to me. But I get to draw!! Not like I've gotten to do that all that much this month. Speaking of which, I ought to get it done so I can get to bed early. I'm so tired, and the final competition starts at 10am tomorrow. It's in Kresge, so if you're around here, you should go watch! Finals are at 6 pm - if we can win at least one of our rounds, we can be in it! Please place us against a sucky robot.... :P

Oh yeah, I need to get a picture of this year's t-shirts up. They're so scary. Someone needs to tell Ross that Lego-men just don't have teeth! Other than that, yay Ross for designing the shirts. Oh, and my sister sent me a short story that she wrote for me to proofread. Man, I wish I could write as well as she can. Her writing is so... lyrical. I can instantly recognize the style she uses though - she uses it a lot. It's really effective though, and I love reading her stuff. She should write more. :D Yay. Okay, I'm glad that I'm all happy now, and that I can relax a bit. It's about time!

- Flykyr Skysong

Current song: Uttara-Kuru - Our Life
Current mood: Dulled (i.e. waaay too tired)

Now Would be a Good Time to Panic

My 6.270 team has been beset by the worst luck for these past few weeks. First, we shorted out our HandyBoard (the brain of the robot) and Ross had to resolder it back together. Embarrassing, but relieving. Then we kept rearranging our robot because we were never satisfied with it. Went through at least five different castor wheel designs. Time-consuming, but not devastating. Then, a few days ago, our gear train broke down and refused to work. I thought that was the absolute low point - I had to take the whole robot apart to rebuild - it took me around 8 hours, I think. That means I spent 8 hours sitting there in one place, balancing the robot on one leg, trying not to hurl it across the room in frustration. Then I picked it up and went across the room to hang out with my friends on the other team (my other team members weren't around) and when I turned to come back, the servos controlling the front claws decided to take a nosedive onto the floor. The Lego casing holding them in shattered, and I burst into tears. It was the last straw. I don't think I've ever felt so frustrated in my life. Well, I eventually managed to recover, and the servos still worked, so that was sort of happy. Then we decided that the robot was too big to spin in place, and that we should move the castor wheel inside the robot instead. This was after we decided to servo-ize the castor wheel, and Jon had glued the servo to the outside of the robot. It came down to me again, since I'm the only one that I trust when it comes to rearranging the robot. Vikki doesn't seem too confident with working with Lego, and Jon likes to use a lot of hot glue. >~< So I spent all of yesterday doing just that, wondering why we felt the need to have the robot rotate within the 1-foot by 1-foot starting box. It's not like we can't back out of the side without the balls and gain some extra room to spin. So after all that time, I changed the robot, and now it's shorter, but no less tall. The end result - the balance is horrible because the center of mass is waaay too high for it now. I've started comparing our robot to an SUV - it seems like it's all too ready for a rollover. I left the lab sometime around 9:30 last night because I was starving, and I never made it back. I was worried because the gears were screeching horrible - darned shaft encoders are too narrow. Fortunately, Vikki managed to fix it up by breaking the shaft encoders in half to open up some more space. So now the gears sound great, at least when hand-spun. Why don't you test the motors out with the HandyBoard, you might be asking. Well, here's our latest problem... The HandyBoard is dead yet again, and this time it looks like it might not be coming back. When we turn it on, the LED screen is all blacked out. Jon and Vikki seem to think that our expansion board is okay and that it's just the HandyBoard itself that is messed up... Now that I mention it, I ought to go pull the expansion board off and see if the HandyBoard works without it. But if it's really dead, then we're sunk. A robot can't function if there's no working HandyBoard to store the code and to tell it what to do, right? I somehow suspect that 6.270 is not meant to be this painful.

So the qualifying rounds were yesterday. Our robot can only score from one of the four possible orientations, so the first round was a total failure for us. We were lucky the second time though, because we were facing the correct direction. So we scored 3 points, which means that as long as we build a webpage by Saturday, we pass the class! Hey, it's something... I'm so mad though, that our robot is completely non-functional, and other teams are busy fine-tuning. Why do things keep breaking on us? Why are we so inefficient?! We've been working around the clock all this week - there's always at least one of us in the lab, but nothing gets done because parts keep breaking on us. In the end, I'm more than slightly tempted to just go home and to sleep for the rest of the week. Impounding's on Wednesday at 5pm, but I don't think anything's going to happen before then. Not anything good, anyway. Which is really lame because it means that this past month has been a huge waste of time. Well, not completely, I guess - I did learn a lot. But still! I came into this class expecting to work hard but to have a good time. I assumed that we would be working with functional equipment. Obviously, I was dead wrong. Oops, gotta run - we are going to modify the robot some more while we wait for help on our HandyBoard. No worries though - I'll always be around later to complain some more. It's what I'm best at. X_x

- Flykyr Skysong

Current song: Crush 40 - Escape from the City
Current mood: Completely and utterly frustrated

...And Here's to Late Nights!

Okay, so I'm officially crazy now. I was going to go to sleep early (i.e. midnight), but I pulled out the sketchbook and put on my brand new Enigma CD, and well, you know what tends to happen after something like that... So I drew a nice picture which will make a great birthday card for Kristen. And I can think of a few other uses for it - I'd love to color it on the computer, though without the Dot, I don't know how that'd go. Anyway, so now it's nearly 2 am and I'm all, I need to make a copy of this so I can ink it in and still keep the original! Don't have a lightboard, don't have a scanner, it's a sad sad world. But then I thought about how nice and bright my computer screen is... End result: I pulled up a new Word document, spun the laptop around, flattened it out, and proceeded to use my brand new lightboard. It works pretty well too! Now I just have to find an inventive way to create a scanner, and I'm all set. Anyway, I obviously haven't been getting enough sleep and it's getting to me. Our robot is a sad, sad affair. For every step we take forward, we seem to take two steps back. My teammates seem much more into it than me - they're all 'let's stay up and not go home, yay!' and I'm all 'let me sleep'. I feel so very lame. Yaargh! I just wish all the equipment wasn't so flaky. Nothing works perfectly. *grumble grumble*

I cooked for the first time in a good long while today. I tried to make a Hamburger Helper casserole by using the Italian mix and adding some mushrooms and cheese, and baking it all. It was okay, except I put it in my big casserole dish and there wasn't enough cheese, and then things were a bit too watery because of the mushrooms. I really should have added some more noodles, but I didn't have any with me. Sigh. I had to supplement it with some bread instead. I rediscovered the peanut-butter cookie dough ice cream in the freezer that I haven't touched in a month. It's still good. ^_^ But other than that, life has been really tiring. I never thought 6.270 would be so time-consuming. I'm actually looking forward to spring semester because that means that 6.270 will be over! Of course, spring semester is going to kill me too. I don't think I really can take five classes with one of them being 6.170. But I don't know what to drop! Linear Algebra or Organic Chemistry? Hmm.... Nope, not gonna think about it right now. I am going to go to sleep, and it will still be more than two hours earlier than when I went to be last night! . . . I could cry.

Eheh, and now that I've re-enabled my cookies for Blogger, I can login just fine. Silly me.

- Flykyr Skysong

Current song: Enigma - TNT for the Brain (W00t! The remix rocks!!) BTW, the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack is amazing. I love having new music to listen to. ^___^
Current mood: Stupid and sleepy

Here's to Long Weekends!

Hm, interesting. I can't login to my Blogger account on my laptop, but I can from work. I wonder why. Anyway, I haven't written in forever for a variety of reasons - my laptop doesn't like Blogger, I'm too lazy to write, and I'm just too darn busy. 6.270 is sucking away my life. Time for IAP to be over. I just want a robot that works. Still, building robots is a pretty cool thing. 6.270 is MIT's Autonomous Robot Competition. I'll leave it at that - I don't feel like explaining more. Mostly, we just spend our lives in the lab, and it is a sad thing.

Haha, my friends and I went to New York City over this weekend (well, Sunday and Monday, at least). It was fun, albeit a tad bit stressful for me. It's because I worry about everything and I did all the reservations and stuff. We stayed at the good old Days Hotel where my family always stays when we're in NYC. The location's great - it's only a block away from Times Square. We left really early on Sunday - we took the 7 am Chinatown bus. The Chinatown bus is a great deal! Only $10 either way. The only problem is that it's terribly boring. Going down was okay, but coming back wasn't so great because my CD player's batteries died and I had nothing to listen to for several hours. But that's getting ahead of myself.

We were dropped off in NYC's Chinatown, so we went and had lunch in a little restaurant in Little Italy. It was good! And the place was warm, which was a relief because it was cold and rainy. We took a cab to get to our hotel (should've taken the subway - would've been cheaper), got all checked in without any problems (and they only charged for three people even though there were four of us - I messed up on the reservation, heh), and then went to wander around Times Square a bit. We wanted to get tickets to some sort of show, but we had to wait until after 3 to get in line so that all the matinee crowds would go away. We spent much time in the Virgin Megastore - it's huge! And Neo was flying around on like, a million TV screens, so that was interesting. We got in line for tickets and it was cold and snowing. So we waited, and waited. But I'll bet it would have been worse if the weather were nicer. In the end, we got tickets for Beauty and the Beast. We decided on that because it started earlier than most of the other shows, and we didn't have time to eat beforehand. So then we had a couple of hours to spare, so we went to go look at the ice rink at Rockefeller Center, and then we went to Kinokuniya (that's the main reason that I wanted this trip to go through ^_^;)!! It was great. The first time I ever went was this past summer, and I could read like, five hiragana characters, and things were sad. But this time, I went upstairs to the floor with all the Japanese manga, and wandered through, reading the titles. It was so cool. I saw the first book of the Chrno Crusade manga, and I realized that it's so expensive because it's so large. Since I've already read it, I decided to look for something different. Shounen Jump stuff is great, but the series never end, so I just admired the pretty book covers. There's something about Japanese manga that makes it so much more appealing than the English-translated stuff. It's definitely got to do with the way it's bound, and how the Japanese books come with dust jackets. Maybe they can get more vibrant colors on that material or something. Shrug. So I was totally tempted to get some Fullmetal Alchemist manga, and I probably would have, but they didn't have the first book in stock. Too bad, because it was cheap too. A lot of Japanese manga can be bought for about $5 a book. That's half the price of the English stuff! I was also thinking of getting some more Di Gi Charat manga, but I already have a book of it, plus it's kind of expensive. So then I was looking through the shoujo section and at the end, where there were more interesting titles (like Fullmetal Alchemist), I found Legend of Zelda manga! Ah! It was the most exciting thing in the world. There was an Ocarina of Time manga that consisted of two books. It was exactly the sort of thing I'd be interested in, heh heh, I'm so sad. But I bought it. And I planned ahead and brought my lovely Japanese-English dictionary with me so I could read on the bus ride home. Yaaaay! It's the happiest thing I've ever seen, especially since I've played through most of the game. It's really quite easy to read - I can understand a good deal of it, even without the dictionary. And the pictures are so cute. I love the anime-style Link to death. And there's this one part when he's an adult and he gets burned up by Volvagia the dragon, and he wakes up in Goron City and he's not wearing his hat and he has a ponytail! Waah, it's just too cute. *fangirlish scream* Uh, okay, I'll stop before I embarrass myself any further. Anyway, it's great. I love it. I can't wait to sit down and actually read it all. Haha. In my free time. Hahaha.

So we saw Beauty and the Beast, and it was good, although I was disturbed by the great amount of innuendo present. After that, we ate at the East Restaurant - this good Japanese place that I've been to several times. People seemed to enjoy it, so that's good. Then we went back to the hotel and went to bed, since we wanted to get a kind of early start. In the morning, we went to Munson's Diner. Another place I've been to with my family, heh. I actually found the address by Googling for it and finding the location mentioned in the credits of an Utada Hikaru music video. Who'dve thought?! It was good too, and after that, we walked down to the end of the block to see the water and New Jersey... A whole different country! :P Sarah took pictures so she could tell Jim that she's looked upon his homeland. ^^ Then we went back to the hotel and checked out, and rode the subway to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We spent several hours there - it was good times, especially since we checked all our luggage at the coat check. We got to see the Egyptian temple, and the Hall of Armor and Japanese swords (yay!) and lots and lots of European paintings. The funniest one was probably this one with the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child and there's some other people around including this other little kid, and everyone's fully clothed! Unusual to say the least. If you read the plaque by the picture, it explains that the nuns who commissioned the painting insisted that the children be clothed. Figures. ^_^ Well, we eventually ran out of time and had to go - we rode the subway back to Chinatown, muddled around in confusion because the bus line switched on us. It was much like Return of the King - we thought we were near the head of the line, but the line was really further down the street. So weird. The bus ride took much longer this time because of the traffic - more than five hours. And like I said, my CD player gave out near the end of the second CD. So Vikki and I went through my first Ocarina of Time manga, and it was good because she's played that game too. We were highly entertained, even if I didn't go and actually read all the words. I've fully translated the first section though - there's a lot of talk about Hyrule's history, which was annoying. But I read it all anyway. Go me. And now, I should get back to work and stop writing this overly long entry.

- Flykyr Skysong

Current song: None - but NPR is playing in the background
Current mood: Tired