I got to looking at my notes file for stuff to put in my blog from the last entry and I noticed that a) there’s a lot of stuff there, and b) it’s been almost 2 months since I’ve made a serious blog post. I suppose now is a good time as any to do.

School has started during the interim. Parking was only bad for the first week thankfully, and not near as it has been in previous semesters. I’m taking 5 classes this semester, and would probably be taking 6 if the last class wasn’t at 7-8:30pm. I got all of the ones I wanted for the most part. These include Math 110B (Algebra of some kind), Math 170 (Linear Programming), CSC 134 (Database/File Systems), CSC 196L (Artificial Intelligence), and History 17B (American: Civil War to present). I look forward to going to the AI class since it’s the most interesting of them and the projects are fun to do. The last one was implementing a program that used a minimax game tree to play a game called ‘Pawn Stop’ that the teacher invented. My program plays pretty strong and I hope to win the tournament he set up for it next week.

During summer I accomplished a goal I set to read the Xanth series over again. During the first week of school I was finishing up the last book of it (Up in a Heaval), that are in paperback at least. All 25 books of the series. That and reading I, Robot and On a Pale Horse, I had a lot of book reading that I did. I guess I made up for all the years I didn’t read at all unless I had to during junior high and high school. I’ve toned it down since school started and have only read Masters of Doom since then, which I’d recommend for anyone to read. I’ve also ordered a couple books to read in the future, which should be here this week hopefully.

My dad came in town for my birthday last week and we did a lot of things while he was here. First we went to Nationals in San Francisco. It was a lot of fun since I wasn’t a competetor at it and could just watch and relax. There were a lot of good fights during it and lots of carnage. My only complaint would be the inconsiderate people that were in the stands. Mostly people who let their kids do whatever they wanted which usually involved hanging on the bleachers and bumping into me and trying to push me out of the way. One parent had the audacity to tell their child not to get stepped on (implying that me, who hadn’t even moved a leg for at least 5 minutes when his kid crowded into a space next to me that didn’t exist). Another person literrally sat on top of the bag that was next to my dad that had his camera in it (there wasn’t that much space between him and the next person either!). Luckily the competitors are much better people than this, at least from what I’ve noticed.

My birthday came during the week and I couldn’t go to a traditional Black Angus dinner like usual, and instead just went to Baker’s Square for a lunch. I got a watch for my birthday, which I wanted to have since I don’t really like pulling my cell phone out of my pocket to see the time, and it’s akward to be without the time when I forget to charge my phone. I also got a 160gb hard drive that I haven’t gotten around to installing yet. I’d kind of like to build an SATA raid array, so I might use this for my pvr instead, although I’m almost out of space on my desktop hard drive.

On Friday we went to see Team America: World Police. It was pretty funny, especially the Team America theme song when they bust out of Mount Rushmore, and Kim Song-Il or whatever his name was talking in general. They sure get the Asian stereotype down :).

On Sunday we went to the Sacbots event at CSUS, “Smackdown in Sactown,” as it was dubbed. I arrived a little later than I would’ve liked, since I had wrote a program to handle the brackets and display everything on the projector screen so that it was easier for competetors and the audience to see what was going on instead of having things mysteriously happen with brackets posted on a wall somewhere. There were a few hangups with getting the program working since I couldn’t seem to get apache running on my laptop (it was working fine on my desktop). I ended up running it remotely over the internet. A second thing was that my digital camera was taking pictures significantly larger than the pictures I was using to test out the program, so my computer nearly locked up every time it tried to render everything. I ended up turning off images and running it without them until the break and then scaled them down using a program Joe recommended and uploaded them to the program. It worked great after that, and people even complimented me on it :).

Since I entered a robot into the event, my dad handled getting the bot ready to fight, which was pretty nice because I was handling the bracket system and never had to worry about my bot since he took care of it. I did pretty well this event. Upon Steve’s (Fusible Link) advice, I ran copal 50:1 motors at 22.2V using two 3-cell LiPoly batteries connected in series. Coincidentally, my first fight was against him. However, he has since upgraded to the mythical maxon 17:1 motors which are impossible to get anymore and was much faster than I was. Much faster. He beat me pretty handedly. After that I fought Wild One and won in a record 7 seconds (he said one of his motors wasn’t working). Then I fought Shark Bait and won, and then beat Hurricane. I don’t remember the details of either fight, other than I won. Then I fought Havok and lost. His drum didn’t really do much damage to me, but it had enough oomph to lift me up in the air a little bit throwing off my traction. I kept trying to get him towards the pit but in the end he caught onto me and pushed me in instead. Oh well, 3-2 is a good record for me, since I would’ve been going against Grilled Fajitas next (Ross Hironaka’s Flamethrower), which is a really good robot and ended up getting fourth place, losing to his other robot, Mean Burrito (also a flame thrower). Here are thebrackets of the entire tournament, along with pictures.

Finally, I’d like to pimp out a few programs I use regularly. Firefox web browser, which is a much better program than Internet Explorer in that it has much better security, more features (tabbed browsing, find toolbar, popup blocking), and I like it better. Also is HydraIRC, which is a better IRC client than mIRC in my opinion. It is much better looking and seems to be faster and more responsive in general. It lacks some things like scripting, but other than that it has more features like the channel monitor and docking tabs. Also the channel list is much better because it’s a tree instead of just a list and that makes it much easier to be on multiple IRC networks/channels compared to mIRC.

I went to the Marin Ant Wars today held by Andy Sauro at his beautiful house and ended up going 0-2 and not qualifying for nationals. Oh well. I still won the rumble and got Andy’s second place prize money since he donated it to the rumble. You can see pictures I took of the event if you want. I stopped taking pictures after a few fights because my batteries died and there were two video recorders going and someone else taking pictures on her digital camera. Hopefully these should become available soon. I still need to post what I was going to post about before, but I haven’t got around to that yet.

Sorry to everyone that actually cares about me for not posting anything recently. Although, if you do care about me, you probably have my IM and talk with me on there. For those that don’t know, it’s FryGuy1013 on AIM (since most people have that). Don’t spam me though. Spammers annoy me :). This will be a long update, but hopefully not too long.

FryDrumBot didn’t get finished in time for the West Coast Robotics Event. Joe and I tried our hardest, but didn’t end up making it. It’s like 95% done at the moment and just needs a new gear or something. The gear that was laser cut was cut sort of inverted (our fault, cropped out the wrong set of edges) so instead of having spokes cut out, there were only spokes to support it. This made drilling into it pretty hard as you could imagine. Joe drilled the first two holes into the gear and they snapped the acrylic both times so screwing it into the drum didn’t seem like a good idea. We decided to use the AC glue given to me by Team Think Tank at the Gilroy Event. That would’ve worked great except I couldn’t get the inner assembly through the gear Friday so I gave up on it and decided to finish FryBot since I know he’s pretty easy to finish. At the event on Saturday I finally managed to get it in, but it didn’t do me a lot of good there.

The WCR event was pretty fun. Joe and his girlfriend Jamie drove out there with me on Saturday since he was bringing his own robot, Ground Bloom. He ended up driving past the freeway exit and after a quick glance at the map we turned around on the freeway and got of on the right exit. At the event he was a little overweight with his robot so he was removing parts to get it underweight. He finishes and it’s 16 ounces exactly according to their scale. Hopefully by next event they’ll have an official weight and compare it the old fashioned way (no pun intended).

I ended up fighting two robots on day one, the first of which was Toothy, of Team Tiki. He was at the Good Day Sacramento thing that Sacbots did so I’ll just say he’s from Sacramento (I think Davis though). I’ve seen his robot in action and I wasn’t really worried too much since it doesn’t really have any pushing power, and my robot is pretty impervious to damage. I had bad reception, but ended up walking over to where I had slightly better reception and just pushed him out of the arena.

Next, I fought Corrosive. We fought at the Gilroy event and he did a bit of damage to me and won by flipping me over. However, this time my bot is mostly indestructable and more importantly invertable. He did however sport a really cool green blade, while I still had my normal blackish wedge. He won in style I think :). It started out much as it did in Gilroy — him getting blade hits on me when I charge at him with my unrelenting aggressiveness. He flipped me over several times, tore off one of my skirts again, and I finally managed to get him onto my wedge and then push him out. It was a close fight, but fun.

Alas, day one was over. I got to watch a bunch of the bigger robot fights and they were cool. VD3 of team think tank is really powerful in the 30lb division, and insanely cool to watch. He literally threw a robot 6ft in the air with his vertically spinning weapon. Joe decided that since his robot was broken that he was going to wuss out retire undefeteated and not go back day two. Or something like that at least :). I thought about not returning for the second day, but decided because I was 2-0 and had a good chance of qualifying for Nationals I’d go back. If I was 1-1 I might not’ve come back, and if I was out I definately wouldn’t. Anyways I drove all the way back there on Sunday, semi-tired. Caffeine was good though. I ended up overcompensating for getting lost on Saturday, so I turned off too early and had to ask for directions at a Gas station that didn’t know the town layout (who knew). He refered me to the mexican restaraunt in the parking lot with it and I got directions there. I thought about saying Gracias to him because he obviously spoke Spanish (he was talking to another customer in Spanish while I was there) and I know a little bit of Spanish, but I didn’t know if it would be rude. I just said Thank You politely after he gave me directions and a small map. I ended up making it, so Thank you if you read this, whoever you are :).

On day two, I ended up fighting Hazardous Waste driven by Jenna of Sacbots. She got her lifting arm under me early and flipping me over. I drove backward towards the pit, which wasn’t exactly what I had intended since the controls were backwards. We immediately get into a pushing match and she gets me in the pit since I didn’t have enough time to get away. Oh well, I’m only in the losers bracket, being 2-1.

Next I fight Lethal Wedgie, in the losers bracket losing one fight and winning none. Stupid Byes. He proceeds to get under me a couple times and I drive off him. Then he gets under me again and I drive off him into the wall and my skirt gets stuck in the wall. All throughout the competetion the Commentator for the bigger robots had been going on about how sportsmanlike all the competetors were about unsticking the other robots since they would rather have a good fight than win by the wall. Apparently he didn’t hear all that and left me in the wall and started doing victory dances. Andy Sauro was “watching” the fight and said I was pushed into the wall and they counted me out. He lost immediately the next fight though so I guess Karma wasn’t on his side. I shouldn’t be bitter but I guess I am, since I had won two fight against weaponed robots and he hadn’t even won a fight yet.

Oh well, I watched the rest of the fights during the day and it was pretty fun again. I stayed after they closed and was going to help Adam from Sacbots tear down the antweight arena since he lives in Sacramento too. He seemed to have enough help though, and I saw the guy tearing down the “big” arena (bigger than the antweight, but not the heavyweight box) and he was doing it by himself so I volunteered my help. That arena is heavy. I helped him carry out several panels that weighed a bit and unscrew the top parts and carry those out and then other people came and helped out too. We ended up disassembling and loading the entire arena out in an hour or so it seemed. My arms didn’t thank me the next day though and were sore for a few more days. Oh well. The drive home was uneventful. I got some Chicken Nuggets, fries (I *am* the FryGuy), and caffeine at McDonalds on the way though. On the leaving the McDonalds I got onto the road and there were two lanes: “FWAY ONLY” and the left lane. I decided since I was going on the freeway I’d get in the right lane. However, I suppose that they needed to specify that it was southbound freeway only, so I had to wait for traffic to go in the left lane and I got over into it and then left. Good thing it was night and nobody wanted to go southbound on the freeway.

This will be Part one of this post. It’s been a half-hour or so and I’ve got several more points to post, but I’ll save those in notepad and get to them later. So stay tuned for Part Deux

I’ve posted some more pictures of FryDrumBot. I got the polycarbonate frame for it so I figured it was appropriate to post some early pictures :).

Update: Some more pictures added to the archive linked above. Joe came over today and helped me put it together, so it’s all assembled except for attaching the gear/endcaps to the drum, and the wheel to the motor. Currently it’s at 15.25oz on Joe’s scale without drum bars or screws.

My friend Joe who is super leet from the CSUS Combat Robotics team (and we went to high school together) came over and modeled an inside frame for frydrumbot since the original way I designed was going to work. Overall the total weight of the inside frame in polycarbonate was less than 2oz which is good because I only had 2.5oz to work with. Hopefully it will still be stable though. Here are some renderings for your amusement.

Inside frame
Complete frame/drum (no wheels or stabilizer)

I’m going to have it laser cut by a company called Pololu and it should be here by next week so I’ll have a week to work on it at least.