Woot!

I went to Marin Ant Wars V yesterday and got first place in the antweight division. I went undefeated, thoroughly defeating (and destroying) some the best bots in the competition. We even saw a rainbow on the way back. After I got home, I laid down and got a full night’s sleep, which I haven’t got in 2 weeks. Yesterday was a good day.

It was a lot of work making the robot.. er making Joe make the robot. He went to the event also with his robot Ground Clearance, getting fourth place (although would’ve done stronger if he hadn’t lost a judges decision in a match I thought he won. Oh well. Hopefully videos of the event will be up soon (on the MAW website) for those interested.

I haven’t really done much the rest of my winter break though. I’ve been pretty lazy. My dad came into town over the break, and I visited with him and did the whole Chrismas thing. I worked with Joe on our robots for the event. I worked on Fortress Forever some, and did some consulting for a web site (i.e. making stuff and them paying me money for it, not really giving advice). School is starting next week so I have to prepare myself for that (ugh). Unfortunately, it’s got some of the classes I put off till the end because I don’t want to do them. I’m taking History (ugh!), Spanish (double ugh!), Stats (ugh!), Senior Project (UGH!!), and a computer graphics class (yay!). Hopefully I don’t get too sick of school this semester, and I pass all my classes.

This won’t affect most of you, but I have disabled trackbacks on my blog. I’d like to give a big EFF YOU to all the spammers that spam my web page trying to get google pagerank (you won’t, since the trackback links don’t link to you), and spam my email with “new trackback received.” Off to delete 200 more now :(. It’s especially sick since almost all of them are transexual related, with about half of them refering to “tgirls.” Odd.

In other news, I’m still hard at work on Fortress Forever doing a bunch of pushing buttons on my keyboard in a funny language called c++. My WoW guild has been changed to Ataraxia and I have been doing a bit of web work for them as well. I also started going back in to work and hopefully making some $$$. No more robot news, except that I went to Marin Ant Wars with my dad and friend Joe. We had to drive in seperate cars because Joe picked up a trebuchet that he was given at the event by someone who didn’t have enough room for it any more. We took it back to his place and tested it out.. It’s pretty cool :). I did pretty well at the event too, coming 5th out of 16.

I created a new fighting robot thanks to my dad and my friend Joe. It’s called Emsee Fry Pants, which is an homage to the robot MC Pee Pants since they’re similar and was part of the reason that the robot ended up as it did. If you don’t know, MC Pee Pants is also a character on the cartoon Aqua Teen Hunger Force (ATHF). I took it to an event this Saturday in Gilroy and placed second out of sixteen. I lost my second fight against Rebel, then fought through the losers bracket to face the winner of the winners bracket. I beat him, but it turned out to be normal double elimination instead of modified double elimination (what’s usually done since the losers bracket has to fight more fights). So I rematched Lethal Wedgie for the championship and got stuck on his wedge and pushed out of the arena. I’m glad I’ve done so well with Fry Pants at this event though. It’s much more fun to drive than all of the other iterations of FryBot combined since it’s decently fast *and* has a weapon.

A few things I learned at the event which made the robot do better towards the end than the beginning was that I should tighten all of the screws before every round, and make sure that there’s some kind of agent to keep them tight during the fight (like superglue/loctite/etc). Through the event, the endcap screws were getting looser and looser, and by the second rebel fight, one started to come out (it had been making some noise when it spun up like it was off balance or something). Tightening those screws made it sound like normal and do a little better :). Also, during the first and second matches the bolts/screws that were used for teeth came loose and started hitting the ground when the drum was spun up. They were still attached because of the lock nuts they were screwed in to, but it was enough “damage” that caused me to lose my second fight (the first against rebel). Between rounds Joe put some quick-drying epoxy that he brought with him on the teeth and then screwed and tightened them in and the teeth coming out ceased to be a problem for the rest of the event. The final thing that I learned was that I could safely turn the drum up to full speed. During the second match with rebel, and the two matches with lethal wedgie at the end of the event, I ran Fry Pants with the weapon motor at full and the trim all the way up. Previous to this, I was only turning it up to around 3/4 speed and trim at the bottom. This helped a lot since it was able to throw Rebel upside down in the second fight, whereas only knock him in the air a little the first. Likewise, it tore up Lethal Wedgie’s lid pretty bad, and it made him cut a new lid out (at least that’s what it looked like from where I was standing).

I just uploaded coverage of the CSUS event on KOVR 13 that I just copied from my PVR today. It was recorded on the day of the event, but I was lazy. So sue me :).

Sadly, I’m not in any of it, but that’s ok, you can kind of see my tournament bracket thingy in its broken state before the break if you look carefully

Some pictures I took of nationals I forgot to post

Pictures of Sac State event

Also I got a thing in the mail from the DMV to get the new license plate I ordered a while back, so I’ll have a personalized plate now