This semester is in the books

So I know I haven’t posted here in a while, but I have had a few things that I wanted to get down and they take more that a facebook post.


This semester is in the books officially. I actually woke up this morning about 4:30, and got my last grade. But before I start that lets go back to the start of this semester.

I have been at L3 for 2 year actually 3 years now, and been a co-op this whole time. Because I was a senor this year, I was eligible for a raise. When HR reviewed my grades and school schedule I was called in. Apparently there is a requirement of being a fulltime student and required cumulative GPA. I wasn’t meeting either requirement. Funny how I had been there for two years and this was the first I had heard of it. I was asked if I was planning on raising my GPA this semester, as I already was registered for full time. It was strongly hinted that if I didn’t meet these requirements I would no longer be working for L3. This was extremely annoying, because I was doing the job just fine. I had actually trained someone else on the part of job. So this was kind of ominous.

Plus I needed to take the FE again. This is the certification exam. It s 8 hours long and I didn’t pass it last year. The U requires mechanical engineers to pass the FE to graduate. So another big step in needed to accomplish this semester.

The semester when as well as it could. I apply for graduation as I was on track and I put the efforts in that I knew I needed to get better grades. This meant that I only work 20 hours or so at L3 but figured that was OK because my school performance was more important that my work performance according to HR. Anyway I did have some problems with my Ergonomic class, I was one of the lowest scores on the first test and the first lab, but I started to understand the teacher and well I aced the final and the project. The project I worked with my senior design team and we all did great.

My ethics class and my American Indian studies classes were going great. Of course I felt like if I got less than an A- in these classes I had done something wrong.

Senor deign was not going great. Our project was coming along but when we did our presentation, it didn’t go over well. So we kind of overcompensated without final report. It was 65 pages long. Now I have had reports at L3 that were in the 100 pages long, but none of my college reports had been this long, but we felt it was needed.

So anyway, grades started coming out last week. Ergo was first. I got a B-. I was feeling good about that, but I started to wonder what I needed to get my cumulative GPA up enough for L3. So being the nerd that I am I found how the GPA is calculated and built a spreadsheet. This gave me a good idea what I needed to get the right GPA. I was able to change the grade and see how they affected the cumulative. So I had an idea of what I needed. My Ethic grade came out next. An A-. I guess I should have done the extra report. But this tells me I did better on the final than I had thought. I just didn’t feel good about my arguments, but that’s another post.

Then yesterday when I got to work there was an email notifying me of my FE results. Of course their website was overloaded so it took a few hours to get to my results, but I had passed. What a relief, anther step towards graduation done.

So looking good, then Indian studies posted it grade. I got an A. I did do the extra report for this class. So I played with my spreadsheet and knew that if I got a C+ in design I was good. I would have raised my GPA up 9% (and yes I did figure that out). I know doesn’t sound like much but it would be enough.

Well I woke up this morning after a strange dream and logged on to the schools site. My last grade had posted. I got a B. I did it.

I’m not sure why I needed to write all of this down. It doesn’t even touch the headaches of this semester. I didn’t even talk about not being able to register for a month. But even that has worked out. I guess I just needed to get it out. Thanks for listening(or reading)

Laters

We're number 8

Well I guess I should let you know how the competition went.

The last milestone was basically the same as the competition, meaning we had to navigate to the correct Fay, capture her and locate and climb the correct side of the building.

We had some problems the first time we did this milestone, meaning it was horrible. I think we got 50 out of 120. We found broken connections and bad solder joints. These with a dead battery made for a bad time.

Well, we got a redo, and after fixing the problems, and some more testing, we redid the milestone.

This time it went much better. 110 out of 120. An improvement you could say.

So we looked like it was going to go pretty well on design day.

Yesterday was design day.

Before the competition started, our robot was running ok. Ben was doing last minute tweaks, and I was cautiously hopeful. We were in the fifth heat, so we had time to verify sensors and such.

The heats were going as expected. Meaning we had spent weeks watching some robot do really well and some not so well. I guess you could say there were few surprises.

In our heat we started ok. Our robot was running well and it was avoiding other robots. We made it to the doll, captured her and then made it to our side of the building. At this time our robot was supposed to turn around and back up to the building. Well it did a 360 and backed away from the building. Well since there was time, we started over. This was allowed when a robot got stuck, so we started over, capture Fay Wray again, and off to the building. It turned around properly this time and backed up to the building. Now our climbing device was a threaded rod and a window anchor. We've had problem with it lining up, but this time it did back up and the anchor hit a window. Not the center window but a window, then it started to climb, for about 5 secs. Then the nut bound up and it stopped. The TA tried to help it, but then time ran out.

There was a chance for a redo, but looking when they posted the score, we got 100 of 120. The top score of our heat.

That it turns out was our ticket to the second round.

We moved on even though there were several teams that did better when they redid the first round.

The second round we had a bit more of a problem. Our robot was running rock solid. It could tell which direction it was going so it knew it if was not lined up to capture Fay( our capture claw is on the right side). When it approach Fay for the wrong direction, it turned around and tried to capture her. It would avoid other robots. And I bet if it got to the building it would have climbed. The problem was that we were on the course with other robots. Our robot got caught more times with other robots, It seamed because the other robots that made it to the second round didn’t have avoidance built in. One robot was a pain in our behind because it just stopped and waited for the other robot to get out of the way. Our avoidance was for our robot to do a 180 and run away. This doesn’t work well when there is a robot on both sides of you. And those robots just stop and sit there and wait for you to get out of the way. We got two chances in the second round to do well but each time we ended up getting caught between two robots and couldn’t get away. This was a pain, We did capture Fay, but could never get past the other robots to get to the building. After the final round, we did get a third chance to get a better score, with our best on the second round was 70 out of 120. I was frustrating.

So Ben did an incredible job with our code. One of the TA’s was saying that our code was doing everything it should do. He really liked it. We just ran into problems that we couldn’t foresee, like robots that just sit there and do nothing.

So we made it to the second round. This meant that we were in the top ten least.

Dr Minor listed the final standings today, and we were 8^th. 8^th out of 30 odd teams.

Not a bad job.

There will be a youtube video of the competitions at some time. I will let people know when it is up.

On a side note. Desert News has a picture of the course, and you can see Aidan sitting just off the side. Look in the education section and find article on the U’s design day.

You can’t miss him, well I couldn’t.

Sorry this was so long. And believe it or not I left a lot out.

Laters

Team Picture

So we had to have a team picture for our poster. this is one that didn't make the cut. Think that was a good move?
Really I didn't just fart.
Laters

I give you Robo Cam

Man, that robot is tall

I got Ari to model with our robot today.

Do you think I should include this picture in our report?

Laters

Robot update

So part of the project is to capture a doll that will be named Fay. There's four of them. go figure.
So here is the robot with the grabbing claw we built for it.
We used a servo to extend and retract the claw. I'm happy, I only ruined two servos trying to get this right.

Here, just a good picture.

One of these times I will remember to take the camera and get a video of it going around the course. It's cool.

Laters

So Stacie says I need to talk about my robot. My Mechatronics group is building a robot this year. It will navigate a course, grab a doll and then climb a building.

Here is how it's looking right now. I like this look, it is cleaner, but I don't think it will last. There are some space limitations that may not allow us to use this configuration.

This is without the upper platform. You can see more of the wires and such. But to mount the grabber and the climber we will probably have to use it this way. I will still try for the other configuration, but we'll see.

This shows the underside. The line of sensors in the middle is the line-following array. With this we can follow the black line on the course. The other two are used to make the turns. Simple motors are mounted. The handy board is on the top. It the thing with the screen. All the sensors are connected to that. At this point it will follow that line and does quite well.

I have built most of the robot, I think because I have been selfish about that. We've built all the circuits and what's funny is that is more than the student electrical engineers I work with are doing. So we're coming along. I will post more pictures as the grabbing mechanism is built and mounted and when the climbing mechanism is designed and built.

Anyway, there you go.

Laters