Quote:
Originally Posted by TEntwistle
Excellent job on the reverse engineering. It appears to me that the shadow nobody can explain appears on your 50% transparency render. Is there any reason why this should be? Does it suggest that it is indeed coming from this piece and not from somewhere else? Would the fact that you had to render it with 50% transparency be part of the clue itself?
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The shadow still appears because its part of the original game hint image. The 50% transparency isn't referring to re-rendering the original image (we can't because we don't possess the original CAD file)Art took the original rendered game hint image made it 50% transparent and laid it over the top of his Solidworks reverse engineered render. You can see both images laid one over the other. Since nearly all the critical points line up, it confirms that at least proportionally his drawing is sound. The longer 1" schedule 40 aluminum pipes are a little too long in his model as can be seen by the fact that they don't line up at the rear (right side) of the drawing. I think Art's pretty close though, 1" schedule 40 aluminum is the exact size FIRST has used in the past for connector pins in standard field construction/assembly and he arrived at this dimension by extrapolating off the 0.25" lexan assumption. His methodology was thorough and I'm confident his model is pretty close. It took a while to get the reflections and shadows close (two light sources at to different positions) and we can only surmise that the rendering engines work slightly differently between Inventor and Solidworks.
That said, we have a close idea as to the size and composition of this field element, but are no closer to understanding how it will be used this year.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TEntwistle
Why have they given us a Classmate PC to use this year? My guess is so we can (or will have to) navigate the robot based on a camera image, and that we need the capability for real-time (within a few msec, or whatever the technology can give us) video to compete.
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They are giving us a Classmate PC to replace last year's driver station that was plagued by static discharge issues. I suspect that PCs were FIRST's original plan for last year, but it just couldn't get finished in time. This

shows clearly the Beta test DS layout and there is a space for the camera image. This layout can also be customized by teams. To what exact level I'm not sure yet, but the topic was mentioned during a webcast training session.
Anyway, that a very small image on the DS to navigate from, and the rate of image transmission isn't real-time, and it would eat up huge amounts of bandwidth, I don't think we're quite ready for live camera feed on all team levels yet.
Will the camera be important in this year's game? Maybe, probably, but the past games have always had other ways to achieve reasonable results with or without the camera. I wouldn't expect it to be much different this year. It all depends on how well your team can think outside the box, and overcome obstacles.
Instead of trying to read something into that reflection/refraction on the image, we need to concentrate on how this will be incorporated into the field, and why the GDC chose what appears to be smoked or tinted lexan for this component. Surely, the choice of materials is important.