After Defcon and Robogames last year, Joe and I were pretty tired of working on projects so we took some time off to do some non-project related things. It’s a lot easier to get projects done when you’re in college and only have to be at school 15-20 hours a week versus having full time job and obligated for 40+ hours a week. However, it’s also nice being able to afford things rather than being stuck with a shoestring budget. I guess it’s the old catch-22 of having enough time or enough money, never both.

To celebrate my minimum spare time, I decided to remake the Tournament Software I use to run the robot tournaments with WPF (instead of PHP). The initial reasoning behind doing it in PHP was that was what I was most familiar with and that I wanted people in the pits to be able to look at the brackets, etc over wi-fi without having to bug me. However, that aspect never got used and the software was hard to work with if there was any problem whatsoever (entered match wrong, or someone shows up late). I’ve wanted to learn WPF for a while, and this was a good excuse to have a project to do that with.

The new program is a lot easier to run, and the data is a lot more manageable. As a first WPF project it turned out pretty good, even though I’m not doing enough stuff the “WPF way” and didn’t accomplish all of the goals I had for it, namely the ability to integrate in with video mixing software so that the matches could be recorded and high-quality overlays for who’s fighting and who’s next. I must say though, WPF is nice, and LINQ is even better.

I used the software successfully at the CSUS event “Smackdown in Sactown” in April, and again at Robogames in June after making a few changes to support multiple brackets, among other things. Joe and I were kind of burned out of combat robots, so we didn’t enter any. Both Emsee Fry Pants and Big Bloom were out of commission, and we didn’t want to rebuild them.

Instead of working on another combat robot, we decided to focus our efforts on this years Defcon robot. We decided that it would be a good fit to have the shooting gallery event from Defcon at Robogames and suggested it to Judge Dave. He agreed and we decided to host the event by making the arenas for it and organizing the matches. Unfortunately, in doing so, we ran out of time to finish the gun before Robogames. Instead of doing a half-assed job with the arena and the gun, we decided that it would be better just to get the arena built properly and relax a little bit on the weeked, so we ended up just hosting the event and not competing in it.

Part of the problem with the gun is we got a late start on the design process. We are trying to address all of the problems from last years gun, and the biggest one was inaccurate pan/tilt. To address this, we bought some stepper motors to replace the servos. The second was the cardboard facade, which is being addressed by a frame made of a non-cardboard material. The manufacturing of the frame was delayed a while, and by the time the pan/tilt was fully assembled, there was only a few weeks left until the competition. And then there was still the matter of creating another custom hopper for firing and mounting all of the electronics. All of the delays added up to us not finishing it by Robogames. However, it gave us a big head start instead of doing the same thing before Defcon. And believe me when I say it, this years gun will be really impressive.

However, in the mean time, we decided to do a smaller projects with less pressure. One of which is a autonomous slot car. Basically it is a car that can decide for itself how fast to go around the track based on an accelerometer measuring the cornering g-force. Joe sent of a while ago to have a pcb made for it, and after diagnosing and fixing a problem on it (the transistor was in the wrong place) got it working. This last weekend we took it down to Fast Track Hobby and tested it out to see how well it worked. For the initial prototype, we decided it would only react to changes and see how well it worked. As it turns out, the car needs to be able to memorize the course and be able to react before the course changes (or add a camera and detect it early; the former sounds easier though). It was able to successfully navigate the track without flying off and slowing down on the corners and speeding up on the straightaways, however we needed to turn the max speed down in order to have it not fly off on the first sharp corner after a long straightaway. We took some pictures of the course and the autonomous slot car, as well as some video:

On another weekend, we decided to measure how fast Joe’s Corvette was by creating a G-Meter. Instead of creating something fancy, we decided to just use the sample development board for the development kit we got for free (plus shipping and handling) for a freescale microcontroller that happened to have an accelerometer on it. I created a quick application in WPF on his laptop that parsed the serial data that it was sending and displayed it in a few hours, and we took it out for a spin on the freeways to see what it could do.

I’ve also been listening to podcasts in my car in my commute. Some of the podcasts I listen to are TWiT, .Net Rocks! and NPR’s Science Friday. In fact, one of my comments to .NET rocks was read on the show and I got a free mug from it. It’s a nice big mug too, that can hold a lot of tea. For those that are coming to this blog from the show, I’ve done more robots than just the sentry gun below. Also I’ve been listening to audio books from Audible (one of TWiT’s sponsors). Specifically the one I read (or listened to, rather) was The Time Traveler’s Wife. It was a really good listen, and I hear they are making a movie based on it which I’d be curious to see how it turns out. At least Will Smith isn’t in it, since he has a good habit of being in movies that bastardize the originals they are based on (iRobot, I am legend, Wild Wild West, and to some degree Hancock) and make them into more mainstream movies but missing out on the point of the originals. One of the problems with listening to audio books though is getting behind in the podcasts.  That book was 18 hours worth, and it caused me to get around 2 weeks behind. With taking a day of vacation and 2 sick days off between then and now, it’s made catching that much harder.

This is the end of my catchup post. I’ve created a Twitter account that I’ve updated somewhat more frequently than this blog. You can follow me on Twitter, and maybe some day I’ll get popular and catch up to Kevin Rose. I could also win the lottery and become a super-millionaire.

Also, I’m hosting some videos from Robogames 2008 on my website. Right now it’s mainly high-speed (aka slow motion, like they do on MythBusters), but the compilations on the bottom right are pretty good.

The robot was mostly finished a few weeks before the competition, which was good compared to the 30 pound combat robot where we stayed up until 2 am the week before the competition and barely finished a functional robot in time. This was also nice in that Joe was going to summer school every weekday, so the only time we could work on it together was on the weekends. The biggest part remaining at that point was just optimizing the software, which I could do during the week and then do minor changes to the gun itself during the weekend, like getting a single power supply with appropriate connectors rather than having 3 separate batteries with alligator clips to power the gun.

There were a few hurdles we had to overcome to make the gun function properly. Originally the intent was to have a single fixed camera, and calibrate the gun based on that. However, the servos aren’t very accurate when commanded to go to a particular position from another. Going to position 2000 from position 2300 was up to a couple inches off from position 2000 from position 1800. It was possible to change it so that we could manually make it go to the same spot from different approaches (instead of 2300 -> 2000 -> 1800 -> 2000, we did 2300 -> 1992 -> 1800 -> 2008), but after running the gun for a while, what was working a half hour ago to make the gun go to the same position, doesn’t work now (now required 2300 -> 1990 -> 1800 -> 2010). To solve this, Joe glued the camera on to the gun itself, and I modified the algorithm to use this. The down side to this approach though is it takes a lot longer to go to a particular position because it has to move, then see where the target is, then move closer, then see how close it is, then finally move again and then see that it’s in the right spot.

Another problem we were having was due to the way the gun was created, in that there is a servo that pushes a switch that triggers the air valve. Occasionally the solenoid in the valve triggering would cause a big EM pulse that messed up the USB <-> Serial converter we were using, requiring it to be unplugged and plugged in again. However, this happened when the servo was contacting the switch, so the valve was stuck open until the serial port could be reattached and the servo moved away from the switch. Luckily this didn’t happen at the competition though.

The weekend before the competition we created a façade for the gun to make it look like a sentry gun from team fortress (well, Zach and Joe did; I mostly watched). The original plan was to make it out of pieces of plastic, but when we actually started to mount all of the parts it was way too heavy for the servos, so they decided to make it out of cardboard instead. It turned out really nice for being made out of cardboard.

The trip to Vegas was pretty nice. All three of us bought a Nintendo DS and Mario Kart DS before going and we played that on the airplane. I still don’t like Southwest though, as the boarding procedure is what my family calls a “Cattle Call” to find seats. We found 4 seats near each other, and someone with a shirt that was something like “I’ve got the root password to your box” sat down next to Joe and Jamie. I commented that I bet he was going to Defcon too, and it turned out that he was.

We arrived Friday morning and Joe and Jamie went to get the air compressor and pick up the package from the hotel while Zach and I went to a talk on SQL Injection and out-of-band channeling. We got there late so we missed the introduction (luckily I knew what SQL injection was already, but Zach didn’t). It was a very neat attack as it allowed data to be leaked out of the SQL server than would be allowed in a normal SQL injection attack, and in places that injection wouldn’t even allow data to get out of the system. I’m trying to be vague here as not to confuse, but suffice it to say, I was pretty impressed with it.

After the talk, we met up and assembled the gun and took it to the practice area. It was both nice and awkward carrying the gun down the hotel lobby, as some people were like “woah what’s that, that’s cool” while we were walking down the halls, and then there was hotel security I was wondering what they were thinking. They didn’t say anything though, so we proceeded to the practice area. We did a bit of firing and tuning to get the system to work a little bit better. When we were satisfied that it would knock down the targets, we packed it up and took it back to their hotel room.

Then Zach and I went to another talk about how to use FPGAs to speed up brute-force attacks. I was thinking it would be more of an introduction to them, and how they worked, but the speaker just skipped over that because “a lot” of the audience had seen his previous talk(s) (it was about one in four), so the talk was mostly “Here’s me running this code on my laptop.. look how slow it is. Here’s me running it on the FPGA.. look how fast it is,” and the different things that all used the same kind of encryption (Bluetooth, and a few others). After that we went to a talk on how to hack the ECU on a car. It was a really interesting talk as he talked about the different settings in them, and the history of the different ways to do it: purchase a completely custom one, fake out the sensors, or reflash the current one, with the reflashing being the current method. He also explained what the different kinds of things meant, like the fuel mixtures at different RPMs and loads, and had a few analogies to the Dukes of Hazard. I think Zach liked that one the most, as he could relate to it the most.

After that Zach and I did a bit of walking down the strip (Joe and Jamie were already down the strip somewhere when we went to the talk). On the Defcon web site it said that Las Vegas is hot, and they were right. Even at 9-10 pm it was still hot enough to sweat. It was nothing like Sacramento where it gets cool in the night. We were hungry so the first stop was to get some food. Originally I wanted to go to Dennys, but we decided to see what else was there. We ended up making it to a place called “Strip Burger” which was on the Strip (not because they had strippers; I was slightly disappointed that there weren’t). The burger was pretty good, and I got a raspberry something on the waiter’s suggestion (it had mint leaves in it, which was slightly disturbing). Then we went and saw one of the shows on the road with a siren ship and a pirate ship – apparently women can cause another ship to sink simply by dancing in the show’s alternate reality. It was incredibly cheesy and we didn’t have a good view. We continued on and went into Caesar’s Palace and saw a bunch of stores that sold things which we couldn’t afford, and one of the talking statue shows. The animatronics were pretty neat. After that, we decided we would each get one of the “Yard Long Margaritas” or something to that effect (I think it was 40+ oz), and proceeded to drink most of them before getting back to the hotel.

On Saturday we went to the contest area again and set up our gun for the contest itself. In our first round we went against the winners from last year. Our gun had only shot down one target before they got to their last target, but their gun jammed and we managed to shoot down 2 more before they got their gun un-jammed and finished off the last target. Our second round we went up against a two-gun team that didn’t seem able to hit targets by aiming at them, so it just sprayed bullets everywhere, and they managed to knock down more targets than us, so they won, even though we were 100% accurate. There was supposed to be black targets to discourage this, but there weren’t any so they took advantage of that and beat us because of that.

Zach and I went to a few more conferences on Saturday. One was about how the radio signal used to tell GPS devices of road conditions works, and how to broadcast it. It was a really nice talk because the presenter was a good speaker and pretty funny to listen to. One of the things he mentioned was how it’s possible to send fake alerts to a particular car that says there’s a road is closed because of an air raid, or maybe bull fight instead (along with a bunch of other reasons). The next talk we went to was about identification devices (like smart card readers, fingerprint scanners, etc) to get in to buildings, and how easy it was to hack them (essentially unscrewing the plastic cover and installing a “tap” on it by cutting a few wires). He gave a nice demonstration of the device he made and how it worked. This speaker was a very good presenter as well and very funny.

On Saturday night we went and saw Penn & Teller at the Rio. We took a taxi from the Riviera to the Rio (which was my first time taking a taxi actually) and made it there about an hour ahead of time. Originally we were going to take the bus, but we didn’t realize how long it would take. We had pretty good seats: close to the front row of the balcony, right in the middle. The show was as amazing as I could have hoped for; with the exception of one or two parts (I’m not really interested in juggling or fire-breathing).

On Sunday, we didn’t see any more talks and instead went to Denny’s for brunch, then took the air compressor back and then headed off to the airport. I originally wanted to have a later flight because I wanted to stay a little longer, but I didn’t really feel like staying there by myself, so I went with them to the airport and just played my DS while I waited for my flight. It would’ve cost like $200 to move my flight up, so I decided it wasn’t worth it and just waited a little longer.

Overall the event was a lot of fun, and we’re definitely going to do it next year if we can. For our next gun we’re going to try to build it with a more reliable control system (stepper motors most likely) and probably a gun that doesn’t need to be calibrated, but rather just works, so probably something powered solely with air to fire and load the next pellet. I have a few ideas on how that’s going to work. Also Joe is looking in to another camera, even though the one we have worked pretty well. I think the main upgrade would be a cleaner image and a controllable zoom so that we’re not wasting 75% of the camera area on the surroundings of the arena.

The next project that we’re working on is going to be the DefCon Bot. I’ve put a description of it up. It’s not quite finished yet, but I should finish it pretty soon (the description that is). We finished getting the hopper mechanism working yesterday, so as soon as we receive the pan/tilt servos, we can start testing it out. I have been working on getting the algorithm to determine what order to shoot the targets down in. This is what’s known as the Traveling Salesman Problem in computer Science, and is intractable for finding the most optimal solution (essentially unfeasable to do the calculations). However, I have created a heuristic for this and made a demo program that generates random points and gets a relatively optimal solution and “shoots” down the targets in order.

At work, I’ve got a project that involves a GPS antenna on my desk. However, there’s no real place to mount it, so I stuck the mounting pole in the corner of my cubicle. However, the side effect of this is that everybody that walks by asks me what it is. The most common thought is that it’s a sprinkler.

I finally graduated from Sacramento State in December and got my Bachelors degree in Mathematics and Computer Science. It was a lot of work, but in the end it was worth it. It wasn’t really all that difficult, just a lot of work. My aunt and cousin came out to Sacramento to watch me walk during the cerimony, which was actually relatively quick.

I’ve also just recently quit playing World of Warcraft. The expansion pack really killed the game for me, just a lot of work and not that much reward for doing it. I mean, it’s really just a giant treadmill to keep people entertained, but it wasn’t really entertaining anymore, so I’ve quit.

Last month I got a Nintendo Wii. After deciding I wanted to get one, it took a few weeks for me to finally find one. I ended up getting it at Wal-mart during their Sunday sale early in the morning. It’s a lot of fun to play, especially wii sports. I also got Zelda along with it, and later bought Paper Mario. Zelda wasn’t quite as fun as I was hoping for, and I haven’t beaten it yet. Paper mario was a lot of fun and I beat it in a few days, although there was way to much text for it in my opinion. It’s also a lot of fun to play wii sports on a giant projector, so if you ever get a chance to do that, you should.

It’s kind of nice being out of school, although that means that having a job is the next step. Initially I put my resume up on monster and contacted one company that did web applications in Davis, but I didn’t get chosen for the position. I also put my resume up on the Sacramento State Career site and got one interview from that; I didn’t really want to do what they offered, so I passed on that. I also went to the job fair at Sacramento State and got two interviews out of the process, although nothing panned out from that either (one was consulting and the other was mainly for an internship).

I was browsing the Career Newsletter at Sacramento State, and saw a position at Schilling Robotics in Davis. I had heard about Schilling from my friend Zach, who works there. I had been asking him when they were hiring computer science students and he said they weren’t. However, this posting was new so I talked to him about it, and he gave my resume to the right person, so I got a phone interview with their recruiter, then one with the person I would be working for, then finally an on-site interview with him and a few more people. Apparently I impressed them, as they offered me the position. I accepted, and I start May 7th. I’m really looking forward to it, because it is something new for me (as a job), to do more c++ work rather than web development. Also my experience with working on microcontrollers for doing robots will hopefully be useful in this job as well.

There are two big projects I’m working on this summer. The first is the one Joe is more excited about doing, the “Defconbot” as we call it. Basically the goal is to make an autonomous robot that will shoot down white targets against a black wall. Joe is somewhat involved with helping out on the software side (he really wants to make ‘cool’ drawing for the targetting), although he is primarily doing all of the design and fabrication of the robot itself. For the gun, we bought an air compressor and are essentially making a blow gun. The plastic BB’s will be loaded into a barrel, and compressed air will force it out of the barrel. The major mechanical point will be the feeder to get a single BB into the barrel at a time, and the valve to control when the air is on (as we don’t want to waste air). Currently we’re using an air sprayer as a valve to do the hand-testing, but ideally it will be some sort of electric valve, rather than something we make ourselves.

I’m mainly working on the software side of the project, since my mechanical & electrical engineering skills aren’t as great as his, and I’m a much better programmer than him, and a cooler guy in general too. I wrote some software in C# that grabs the video stream from a webcam, detects the objects, and also some software that controls servos using the serial port. This will be used to aim the gun at the targets. The two pieces currently aren’t hooked up together yet, as we don’t have two servos powerful enough to hold the gun yet. However, here is a screenshot for those that are interested:

The second project we’re working on is our 30 pound combat robot named “Big Bloom.” The concept is that it will spin in a circle using two wheels, and brake them at certain points in time so that it creates a translation across the arena when we want it to move. It is going to be controlled using bluetooth, and I have a few videos to show the progress on this. As usual, I’m doing the software side and he’s doing the mechanical/electrical. Anyways, the first video is the initial test of getting the wireless signal to the microcontroller (using bluetooth). The second is similar to the first, only I have it controlling motors as well. The last video is a small prototype I made a long time ago to see if the motion is possible, and how difficult it is to do. It basically just goes in a straight line, then stops, then goes in another straight line — this is all controlled by timers, so there’s no remote control.

Control Prototype v1:

Control Prototype v2:

Motion Prototype:

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.

I’ve spent a lot of time coding lately. It’s probably because I want to procrastinate on my sociology assignment (read a book by final exam) and my philosophy assignment (write a 5-7 page paper on an “outside topic” in philosophy, and use a book as the source). Both of those are due in 2 weeks, so you might understand my want to procrastinate.

On Monday, I slept through my stats class (ya I know.. shame on me..) and decided to work on Fortress Forever. One thing lead to another, and I ended up working on it for about 10 hours writing code in c++ and using the tools and helping another team member get models into the game. One positive thing is I got a lot of stuff done. I guess I should hope so if I spent so much time on it :). The capture the flag rule set is completed and I got the sentry gun code to rotate 360 degrees, which is always a plus.

On Tuesday, I went to all of my classes and got home and chose to work on an addon for WoW for my guild to help distribute the items from bosses that we defeat in a more timely manner. This was my first decent-sized addon I made, so I decided to use the Ace framework to make it a bit simpler. The addon code is written in lua, so it’s nice to learn all the intracicies of another programming language. Lua is pretty nice because it treats functions as a base level object so it makes some stuff a little clearer than when doing the same type of things in other languages.

On Wednesday, my alarm woke me up so I made it to my stats class on time and went to my job and mainly worked on a PHP script that imports the phone numbers from a daily report we get emailed to us. I wrote it a long time ago, and apparently it stopped working. In the past, this usually meant that the server that ran it every day forgot to do it, or something like that. In which case, I can just restart the service or turn the scheduled program back on which is simple to do. However, the mail server got upgraded or something (that’s my best guess at least) and the format of the emails had changed. My strategy to get the data from the emails in the past had been to just blindly read the entire mail and grab the information I needed. However, the upgrade caused attachments to be encoded, so I actually needed to strip out the attachments from the email and read them properly. It was a pain to do, but I eventually figured out how to do that propery and I ended up making something pretty robust, so I was pretty proud of myself. Later that night when I got home, I did a bit of work on a side job in PHP which I had done some parsing stuff for as well. Tonight I worked on the user interface stuff for it and got a bit done.

Thursday, I actually decided to play some WoW with guild. We had some attendence problems early on, but we filled up a little bit towards the end. We had some good attempts at defeating the boss we were stuck on this week, but eventually we ran out of an item needed to beat him so we called it a night. Afterwards I remembered I had an assignment due for my computer science 139 class (operating systems), so I started that up. I had a lot of it already thought out in my head, so it was a simple matter of writing it out and getting it done… and remembering exactly how to compile shared objects in linux. I won’t bore you with the details, but it took me longer to realize I was trying to fix something that wasn’t broken, than to do the entire rest of the assignment. With that done, I submitted it via email and read some web pages and went to sleep.

Today was the exception though. I opened the fortress forever code up when I got home and poked around at it a little but didn’t really do anything. I also opened up Eclipse and looked at the java code for the game programming class I’m in, but didn’t get anything done there either. Afterwards, I signed onto wow and played a while. We were really having membership problems and after a few hours finally defeated a boss that we usually beat on the first or second try. We did it with 30 people, and we usually try to get 40. We were a bit demoralized (and the second boss is really difficult), so we decided to call it a night. I spent the rest of the night looking at web pages and such. I opened up the side job PHP stuff again and did a little bit of work, but not very much. I guess I was burnt out from doing so much coding during the rest of the week. If I had’ve worked on my game programming assignment, I could say I did significant work on projects in 5 different languages on 5 different days. Alas, I didn’t, so I can’t. I still did a lot of productive stuff, so I’m happy for that.

In other news, I found out that the next antweight robot event is in January at Andy’s place in Marin. I’m looking forward to finishing the new version of my robot and eating the incredibly good food they have at the event. Hopefully I’ll even do good in the tournament and not get my robot tore up like at the last event.

Finished with the robot late on Friday, I attempted to get a bunch of hours of sleep in before driving out on Saturday to attempt to be there by 10ish. I was helping run the insect weight divisions of the tournament (the 150 gram, 1 pound, and 3 pound) in the smaller arena, so I needed to be there early to sign everyone up that wanted to go. Things went pretty smoothly aside from me accidentally clicking on the delete button instead of the edit button to change someone’s name since I made a typo. I fixed that up and things ran pretty smoothly. The arena was much better than at the last event in San Francisco which was nice.

The actual competition part for my robot wasn’t until later in the day, so I watched a bunch of the bigger robots compete, and it was a lot of fun. Lots of robots got destroyed, and that’s pretty much what I came to see, so I was happy. It came time for me to fight, and I got a bit nervous like I always do in my first fight. I went against a VDD clone (vertical disk.. like a sawblade) and one good weapon to weapon hit knocked him into the air and disabled him. The fight ended pretty fast, and I wanted to get a bit more action for the crowd, but alas, a win is a win.

My second fight in the night was against Steve (from sac state too) and his robot Fusible Link. Steve’s robot is similar to my old one in that it is pretty much indestructable, but with the difference that his is pretty fast too. My drum isn’t quite as powerful as I’d like it to be, so he outdrove me and I wasn’t able to do any real damage to him so he won. This kind of bummed me out, but oh well.

The drive home was fairly amusing because I was a bit tired and over-hyper like I am when I get that tired, so things that weren’t really funny became incredibly funny. For example, there was a sign that said “Cummings Blvd - 4 miles” or something similar, and all I could do was point at it and laugh. Joe laughed too, which made it all the funnier. However, the traffic was horrible for the first little bit. I guess there was some accident, and it caused the trip to take an hour longer than I wanted it to. We stopped at In-n-out on the way, had some food, and got some gas while the traffic got a bit better, and I finally got home around midnight after dropping Joe off.

The next day, the antweight fights were supposed to start at 10. It takes around 2 hours to get to the event in San Francisco, so I left around 8. This left me with getting much less sleep than I wanted to, especially for a weekend. Anyways, I found my other friend Zach’s place with a little bit of help and we went. Joe couldn’t come because he was having his birthday dinner or something with his parents, so Zach came with me instead. I got there a bit before the matches started and set up my computer for the brackets so people could look at them, then went into the pit area and put my stuff away (thanks Andy for letting me use part of your table). When I came back, I ran the fights for a while and then got to go myself. I went against another fast wedge named Kato, and lost as I usually do against him, with any of my robots. I had followed advice from Steve and trimmed down the supports on the front, but this caused the drum to hit the ground and it made it impossible to drive, and Kato to get an easy win.

With two losses, I was out of the tournament, so I proceded to run the brackets and enjoy the rest of the event since I didn’t have any stress of having to compete. There were a bunch of good fights in the bigger weight class, namely where a 220 pound robot got thrown over the I-beam, bounced off of it, then hit the robot that threw it and broke the major piece off of it. It’s kind of scary in a way since the robot that hit the wall is capable of ripping pieces of other robots and throwing the pieces into the wall with enough force to put a hole in the arena walls.. and it actually directly hit. Luckily it didn’t do too much damage to the wall and fights continued. I didn’t take any pictures of the event unfortunately, so I can’t post any.

On Monday I went to school and work and got back later in the day and the guy on my team for the game programming class I’m in at Sac State told me the assignment was due Tuesday. This kind of sucked since I thought it was due on Thursday. I sent a message to the other guy on the team and told him to finish his part up, and I finished up my part that night and went to sleep. The next day it wasn’t completely finished, so I stayed at the lab at school and worked on the project with the other guys. We finally figured out the retarded problem the code had and submitted it just before the time it was due. I’ll let it be known I hate Java. Java is the devil :(.

I got some really good sleep Tuesday night since everything is pretty much done so I can relax. Wednesday was a normal Wednesday.. went to school and work, then school again and went to Chipotle with Zach and Joe. Mmmmm.. Chipotles is sooo good. When I got home, I watched this weeks episode of Lost. Wow. That show is so good as well. Chipotles and Lost, a really good combination

Today, my dad got back in town, and he got me an embroidered shit with my website on it, which was really cool. He also brought back this CD which is a swing/jazz CD with covers of a bunch of songs and I’m listening to it as I type this up. It’s pretty awesome so far, so I’ll have to finish listening to it in the car tomorrow on the way to my statistics test. Maybe it’ll make me smarter and make me get an A on it.. well, I can hope at least

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.