equals zero

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080229/pl_nm/usa_politics_muslims_dc

Jack Shaheen, you are full of shit. Don’t you DARE try to bail Islam out of being the root cause of much of the world’s conflict today, and ESPECIALLY not be throwing around the term “terrorism” like a hot potato to other ethnic groups who don’t deserve it, and on top of that, especially not Asians.

You are being no less discriminatory than what you allege the world is being when you throw almost half of the population of the world in under the same 5-letter label, all while members of (presumably) your religion are strapping bombs to themselves in the name of Islam. There is no balance because no balance can exist when a few groups of people are being the source of issues, Shaheen. To try to accuse people of being “discriminatory” is attempting to play off and excuse the actions of militant Muslims.

You are full of shit. Hot, boiling shit. It is a misfortune that anyone in the world believes what you’re saying. Misfortunate indeed, because you play to the “politically correct” and “anti-discrimination” groups well by being blatantly discrminatory and politically incorrect. People like you are the most selfish, stuck-up types around.

*ahem* Anyways, back to robots. That just pushed me over the edge. I have a deep disdain for people like him who think the world is discrminating and only against them. As he does not identify any political affiliation, I’ll spare the short-sighted emotion-driven liberal remarks.

I just realized that some of the work we have been doing in 6.01 with state machines is getting pretty close to forming parts of a PID controller. I have been curious about those things, and have a grasp of how they work, but have yet to actually implement one to solidify said grasp. I suspect it might be coming up soon, since it is a very common control scheme.

This would be pretty neat for experimentation, as the only autonomous bots I’ve built to date have used proportional control only with an enormous deadband to avoid oscillation, or some sort of 3/8ths-ass fuzzy logic (not even half-ass).

Bets on when I’ll send one of the lab robots through the wall?

Equals Zero has been hit with a barrage of spam over the past week or so. It suddenly went from nothing to about 20 per day, fortunately all caught in the spamtrap.

Yeah, I know, still no Motorama event report… Consider it a vector sum of no motivation, busy classwork, and other projects. It’ll be up soon, I promise.

Let’s see how many spam messages this one gets.

That was an insane weekend. Currently, though, I need to attend to a week’s worth of classwork that I need to make up, so won’t be writing a full event report yet.

Watch this space.

So, I wrote the last build report Thursday night in a hotel room in Harrisburg. Friday was 150g and antweights day, as well as early safety/checkin for anyone who wishes. There were plenty of larger bots being built in the pits.

Of all the things I forgot to bring, it was my camera’s (sucky proprietary) cable, so no pictures for now. I wasn’t able to secure an arm controller, but did get the following done…

1. Make a arm restraint/guard to follow the rules
2. Make an LED power light. It mights up the back end of the robot as in every version of TB since 4.0
3. Make the charging plug, which worked fine.
4. Install all the hardware. I only put on a bit of hardwareduring the build so each test didn’t involve putting in 30 screws. The bot’s fully loaded.
5. Dropped a 3200uF capacitor on the 5v line. Spektrum receivers apparently have a bad issue with voltage transients and draw an unusually high current. Spikes or dips on the 5v line from regulators not responding quickly enough to robot conditions can cause them to reset, which causes the bot to stop for a few seconds. I noticed this behavior in TB alot, so decided to try it. I approve. It was better that it did this in testing and on the Media Lab floor than in a match against something big and pointy.

At weigh-in, TB came in at 12.0 pounds even. However, the scale measures in half-pound increments, and I haven’t actually put it on a ounce or gram scale yet. So it could be anywhere from 12.00 to 12.24 pounds, which is over. Why the hell is my UHMW box so heavy?

The bot handled great during a quick test drive. I was able to do a fair share of drifting around the test box, and it’s zippy even on 11.1 volts.  Due to the Spektrum capacitor hack, it did not drop out at all.

Anyways, the tournament starts tomorrow. Reports later!