If you have no clue what i am talking about, too bad! We (as in my team) won a robotics cometetion!!

During the week of March 9th, our team (the Avon Uberbots (No i did not vote for that name)) won one of the oldest and most competetive regionals to date.

I bet right now you are asking "WHAT THE HELL DID YOU WIN?!" Well, we won $200,000 sponsoring for next year… and a bigass trophy.

<a href="http://www.usfirst.org">Click Here</a> if you want to know which robotics competition. I still can beleive we won this thing, and now we get to go onto the nationals which are taking place in Atlanta Georgia.

—-now onto the complaining—

Anyway, i was the programmer for the team, which meant i had to code C on a 20 mhz processor. First of all, this was not fun because of the limitations of this control module. What was really not fun (yet satisfying when complete) was writing the code TO HAVE TO FREAKING CONTROLLER COMMUNICATE WITH THE PWMS, SPIKES, LED's, AND MOTORS. It was a pain in the ass, and turned out to be over 20,000 lines of code, comments included.

And as if 20,000 lines wasnt enough, i am nowbeing asked to make the autonomous function of the robot smoother and better. oh fun fun fun.

20000 lines may seem like alot, but the rsults i got were very satisfieing. For one, an autonomous execution mode of the robot was to make it drive towards a luminescent-green goal, and fire at it. The bot is programmed with PIkD control, and is able to execute this fucntion, even if it is thrown off track during its execution. The code involved me taking output from a camera device, and using that to determine where the robot had to travel, and how much power it had to apply to its motors. Trut me, it wasnt easy.

—-WTF does your bot look like—-

for those of you who want to see what our robot looked like as of 2 days ago, <a href="http://uberbots.org/pictureLib/robot2006/"> Click Here</a>

Yay

—-For those of you that still dont understand—

I urge you to check out the FIRST website (usfirst.org) and learn a bit more about it… it is actually quite cool. It is not exactly battlebots (though we used to have a battle bots team), but it is still just as exillarating. It is more like a robotic sport then it is robotic destrutction.