Fry me a River

I Also decided to throw together an all-new robot, which I decided to name Pretty Fry for a White Guy (which didn’t actually end up competing). It was a series of bad things that happened Saturday night, and I kept Joe up really late to build it (sorry). Primarily, the problem was my machining abilities, or rather, lack thereof. On top of that, I was having receiver issues, brushless motor controller problems, and brushed motor controller issues. I borrowed a new brushless controller at the event, and decided to run it with only one wheel working. However, as soon as it got in the arena the receiver freaked out and the weapon motor got stuck on and it was out of control in the arena. It ended up losing one of the brushless motor screws, and overheating the motor a little bit (I think it’s fine though), so I didn’t end up getting to compete with it. The robot wasn’t very competitive, anyway.

Frypants & Trophie

Joe decided that, since he rebuilt it, he got to drive it. Normally I would disagree, but I figured why not, so he ended up driving it. In an unlucky first round matchup, Frypants ended up facing what I thought was the robot to beat at the event, Rector. After a minute or so, Rector was mostly disabled: the parts of the robot that were supposed to be inside weren’t inside anymore. However, he was still able to move a little bit, and Frypants knocked himself into the edge of the pit on the final hit, and was unable to recover. Joe drove valiantly through the remainder of the losers bracket and ended up winning the event. Driving Frypants isn’t the most difficult thing to do, I mean, point the dangerous bits at the other robot, and drive towards them; however, there are definitely hazards of driving in the Sacramento State arena with a weaponed robot (namely don’t knock yourself into the pit), and he did a good job of driving, so I commend him for that.

You can read Joe’s report of the event at his web site.

* Brightened up lower lobby
* Remove battlements entrance

You can download it on the maps page if you’re interested. Also, I’m going to hold a playtest on it to see if it’s more balanced. Hopefully it is.

I finished the first beta of fry_laser2k3,
which you can download here. I don’t want
to repeat myself, so I’ll just quote the maps page:

When I made fry_laser, many people (well, a few at least) said I should make a 9on9 version
of the map. This is that attempt. It has all the features that fry_laser does, including
the fall-through laser and the secondary activated capture point. It also has spawn tubes
like in the map prodigal. The layout is fairly simple so it should be easy to learn.

I had a playtest on the map last week, and it had almost entirely positive reviews from
people playing it, and I’ll take that as a sign this map is pretty good, even though the
playtest audience tends to be receptive of new maps. The only real problem with it in the
current state is the ease of getting into the flag room going through the air lift.

I’ve recently switched browsers to Mozilla Firebird away from IE. I still pop open IE
for small quirks like opening up movies without saving them, and the fact that certain
plugins don’t work properly. Apart from a few web pages, everything looks normal, which
Netscape 6/7 failed to do when I used them before. I used to use Netscape “back in the
day” when I still used windows 3.1, and really would prefer to use something else besides
Microsoft products because eventually I want to be able to make the switch to Linux from
Windows. I also think it has more features than IE does like the / search, and the download
history. It still has a bunch of little quirks, but I’m sure I can get used to it.

Finals are done, and that means school is done too. When I started writing this, I had
just finished school, but now it’s a few weeks later and I’ve already got my grades back.
It was a fun semester and fairly easy because 3 of the classes (MATH 108, CS 028, and PHIL 060)
were very similar to each other, with each going over most of the same stuff at the
beginning as general knowledge and branching off to their respective areas for more detail
with MATH 108 going into more detail on proof, and then set notation and then more
detail on functions. And then CS 028 going into a tiny bit of set notation followed by
computer science related concepts like logic circuits, and recursive functions, and
langauges (i.e. regular expressions, finite automata, and grammars). However, PHIL 060
didn’t seem to go any furthur. It seemed the entire class was learned the first 3 weeks
in MATH 108, but with different symbols. MATH 102 was fairly easy because I had already
read a book about Number Theory before, and it was much similar although I didn’t understand
the book and taking the class made me understand it much better. CS 130 was also an easy
class because I had read The
Algorithm Design Manual by Steven S. Skiena, which is very in depth and the CS 130
class was a subset of the book. I was actually surprised that the class didn’t go farther
into detail on problems like NP-complete, and things like that. If you care about the
teachers I had, I thought Taylor (MATH 108) was a really good and entertaining teacher,
although I’m sure the dynamics of the other students in the class helped with that. Also
she gave good lectures, but I’ve heard that she’s hard (I didn’t really think so though).
Krovetz (CS 028) was very organized and a good teacher overall.

One thing I thought was interesting about CSUS was I thought I might see some people I
haven’t seen since high school, since I went to American River while most of the other
people in my class went either to Sierra or directly to CSUS. The whole semester I
didn’t see a single person from my High School at the college. I only saw one person from
American River that I had in a couple math classes there. Other than that, I did see someone
working at a place I regularly go to for food that went to High School with me (and I like
to think we were friends). Perhaps next semester will be better.

I finally got my PVR set up, and I ended up moving it into my room without a network cable.
My dad brought some long rolls of cable from Utah that don’t have ends on them, so I’ll
need to get some connectors the device that crimps them and feeds the wires in. I also
had to get a Svideo -> RCA connector at Radio Shack for $20 (wow!) since HSC didn’t have
any, and I didn’t want to make one myself. It actually works pretty good now that we
get more channels through Comcast since they converted service in our area (again), so
I’m really only missing out on Tech TV, a few others, and the movie channels without making
the IR blaster.

I’ve also been working on a new map, which I’ve tentatively called fry_laser2k3. Basically
the intentions of it were to make a 9on9 version of fry_laser, but I don’t know if I’ll be
able to do have all the gameplay additions without making the map too unbalancing for
offense or defense. It’s shaping up pretty well, with having almost all of the base
constructed except for the spawn, and potentially another small “buffer” room. So really
just the midfield and cloning the bases after that, so it shouldn’t be too hard.