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Unread 28-01-2003, 03:35
Micah Brodsky Micah Brodsky is offline
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#0824 (SWAT)
 
Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: Seattle
Posts: 5
Micah Brodsky is an unknown quantity at this point
grrr... not everyone is rejoicing

Well, I hate to burst your bubble, Ryan, but my team was extremely *disgusted* and *outraged* at your rules change.

For teams like ours that really _cared_ about building an advanced control system, we didn't wait until week 3 to get started! We've been working since before kickoff. And sure, we expected we might get some nasty surprises in the rules when they were finally released, but we understood that going in. Fortunately, or so it seemed, the controls & electronics rules were pretty much the same as they've been for years. So we worked day and night, designing building a system for bidirectional Robot Controller <--> microcontroller communication and control, fast and flexible enough to be able to run a fast-paced robot. This was *the* task for us at the beginning. Everything else depends on getting your basic infrastructure in place. On the morning of Tue, 1/21, I finally got the last piece of our puzzle in place: pulse-synchronized, 100% error free, 80 bytes per second communication from our microcontroller into the RC via the digital inputs. (see http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=16741 for some interesting challenges that aspect presents.)

(I won't explain to you the other side of the coin, unless our controls team leader gives me permission, because it was such a brilliant triumph we might still want to keep it secret until competition, even though we're not using it anymore. Suffice to say, we had designed and implemented 100% legal (no programming, tether, or modem port) circuitry to get data from the Stamp to our microcontroller at nearly 2000 bytes per second (that's even faster than the RC and OI can communicate), error free.)

And then, two and a half weeks into the competition, right after we complete our prototype system and send off an order to DigiKey for our parts, the rules change. The rules COMPLETELY change. Suddenly, the game's not about creating elaborate virtual-instrumentation interfaces. All our work is TOTALLY obselete. Now, any old team that didn't even care enough to get started yet on building an advanced control system can jump right in and be up and running in a day. A month of backbreaking work is thrown in the trash, along with our team morale and motivation.

Well, I hope you're happy. Maybe we're the only team that felt punched on the stomach by this rules change, but that would kind of surprise me. There are a lot of dedicated, inventive teams out there, I'd be pretty amazed if we were the only ones in this pickle.

Thankfully, after a week of disillusionment and grunt work rebuilding our infrastructure, we're finally back on our feet. We're still in the game, only now we've got our own bragging rights, having successfully implemented *both* ways of communicating. Now, we're running at 19.2kbps through the programming port. And we've again mustered the energy to push foreward, to build the very best control system we can imagine.

We'll see you at competition.

--Micah Brodsky
Controls team
Team SWAT 824
 


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