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
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