pic: The warranty, voided
 

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We had the same problem. When we were "testing" the base that was given to us by FIRST we accidentally ran our robot brain into a filing cabinet and nearly busted the radio connector off. We have people on our team with the know-how to fix it but our Leader made us send it in so we didn't void the warranty or something. So for the time being we took the brain off of last year's robot and used it.

Re: pic: The warranty, voided
 

A great shot of some high quality parts. Thanks, most people don't get a chance to see under the hood. Note all the surface mount electronics, that is how they pack all that stuff in the little box. Imagine if we were still running vacuum tubes.

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Our team looked at them "naked" a few years ago. I think it was the first season they used them. In our zeal to see it work, we neglected to use a fuse. The wires were connected directly from the battery. The ground and power briefly touched. And it seems that the magic smoke escaped.

Remember, the magic smoke it what keeps all electronics working. If you don't beleive me, let it out and see what happens...

Unfortunately I think IFI made us buy a new one. Something about 200amps across the power connector not being a warranty item. :ahh:

But it is a lesson we never forgot.

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Al...what's a vacuum tube ;)

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It's this glass envelope thingy, that glows in the dark and emits electrons...Oh never mind!

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So...it's like a giant record player?

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No, they are much smaller, and chronologically earlier than record players although they did coexist for many years. They were the electronic equivalent to tank treads on carpet, functional but not very efficient and probably produce about the same amount of heat.

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wen i first looked at the pic i thought it was a city from star wars. lol and i thought a vacuum tube was something that you clean your floors with. ;) :]

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That was meant to be a joke. I don't think you picked up on that. ;)

I might be young, but I know what records are. Heck, my family still has one somewhere...

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Next, WFA winner Al Skierkiewicz will share with us the technological miracle of computer punchcards... ;)

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These young whipper-snappers these days don't know how good they have it. Why back in my day you walked five miles from the card punch room to drop the card deck off, then waited 45 minutes for the job to get run, then checked your listing to see if you could find the card that was mispunched so you could do it all over again. UNLESS the operators dropped your deck (know as "floor sorting") then you were is real trouble.

Oh... My... Gosh..... I'm starting to sound like my Grandfather!!!!!!

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so is this still legal for competition?

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At the risk of dating myself, I remember when I wrote my first compiler for an IBM-360 as my junior-year project. I worked on it for a full semester, and carefully crafted it down to about 5000 lines of code - 2-1/2 cases of cards. I did the final edits, certified that it worked, and took the cases of cards back to the apartment to write the final paper on the project. Unfortunately, my apartment-mate was VERY ticked off at me (he kept yelling something about "you haven't paid your share of rent in 5 months!!!" or some such minor annoyance) and decided to get my attention. By shuffling all the cards in the cases.

What happened next was not pretty. Let's just say that it is a good thing that the statute of limitations has expired for most of the infractions...

-dave

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I was thinking of expounding on the nature of entering an eight bit binary bootstrap program manually using toggle switches on a DEC PDP-11 to get a paper tape reader going. Have any idea how hard it is to convert decimal to binary in your head and then load it using switches? BTW that was after a memory upgrade from 2K to 4K core (real core that is, wires and donuts) in a computer that was almost a full rack high with power supply and paper tape reader. Oh God, now I am going to have nightmares again! 00010011, 10111010, 1110101, no that was 11101101, oh darn where was I again....

Fortran IV?!?, yea they couldn't get it right in their first three attempts, what make you think it will be any better now?

Ok, the bootstrap is loaded, the paper tape is running, hopefully the program will finish loading before we get back from lunch.

Nice Amanda, now you have me started...Hit the "off" button someone, Quick!