And as far as that goes, I’m thinking old pogo sticks might come in handy. If you took a giant ball with spikes like that, and tensioned a large weight in the center correctly, you could make a self-cleaning ball that would crawl over objects! (by self-cleaning, I mean the spikes would retract when they near the top of the ball, and thus scrape off any debris they may have picked up)
Hmmm … I wonder if the OCR on the cRIO can be tweaked to recognise notes and chords :eek:
Traffic cone trumpeting anyone?
I was along the same lines. Another option is to make random notes of music in the same way that the Boston subway stations around MIT do – large wind chimes.
ears perk up - are there any photos or links that tell about this? It sounds cool.
A little more research and I’ve found that they’re only at Kendall Square. Skip to about 0:58 into this video and you can see what I’m talking about:
Some random dude’s 3 minutes of youtube fame
Also, apparently (blog link) there are levers to control the chimes, a gong, and sheet metal.
Or build robots who can make the field play a pre-engineered tune, like the road in California that was grooved to play the William Tell Overture. Here is the link to the news story, videos are on YouTube, but I can’t get to them from here! http://cbs2.com/local/William.Tell.Road.2.822008.html
Weird! I guess I was wrong in thinking no-one would actually use that idea. Well, as long as they’re not using it for word advertisements, I’m fine. (it looks like if they made the road actually have that sort of clarity and resistance to wear, then it would be much more slippery when wet and would have no flex in earthquakes)
On a different note, using chimes as targets (or actuated by targets) is brilliant! You could even have a marimba-type thing (with a resonating chamber).
How about a giant funnel, like those things that marbles spiral down? (line the rim with chimes and keep the lazy suzan in the center) The gamepieces would be those little blue racquetballs that team 128 was handing out at nationals. Near the base of the chimes there’d be a shield to hold the balls in and keep them from bouncing all over the place; instead letting them roll down the funnel (maybe in a spiral). The goal would be to throw the balls up and hit the chimes (more points for certain interval sequences). Getting hit by your opponents balls (when they’re on the ground) would give them points. Firing balls at an opponent would be penalized. As your balls are rolling down the funnel, you should try to pick them up. The “spout” of the funnel is just a recession that makes it more of a pain to collect balls (encouraging teamwork). Since this might require a ceiling, there could be a giant gong (suspended horizontally) in the middle of the ceiling, where you get special points if you hit it. You are also awarded those points if you fire some balls on top of the gong, and someone else knocks them off by firing at the gong.
Now what could Autonomous be? (thus the problem)
We’ve had robot basketball and nascar…
'07 was kind of like “Tic-tac-toe.”
Now comes…Soccer?
Maybe Scrabble?
Yes, robots moving huge tiles under time! It would use shape-recognition, at least for autonomous :rolleyes: .
I’m pretty sure a Brazilian team would win if it was soccer… 
Tic-tac-toe was 2005; 2007 was Connect 4. Hmm…board game, sports game, board game, sports game… Uh-oh.
Woot! New patterns are emerging!
Monopoly!
Checkers!
Chess!
We have a stretch of Interstate 295 around Richmond that is so cratered and patched that when you drive over it, it seems to play a tune. It’s hard to make out, but I think it’s “Don’t know whose rear-end is gonna fall off first - mine or the truck’s”. It’s an old blues tune.
Risk! With real bombs - small, but real.
We could have water bombs!
Water Game+Board Game…
Now all we need is a fire game!
I know!
on an allience we would have one fire fighter bot, one bomb droper, and one platform bot that would have to have bombs droped on it butalso do the platform thing that we did in 07, and then for your team to get points your bot has to not be on fire at the end but it and you would also get points for being on the platform but if the other allience drops bombs on the fire fighter bot they get major penaltys and vice versa
this will never happen but atleast it would make robotics less nerdy…
we mght get some outsider fans too…h
Why not go the safer route? Use the robots to play Magic the Gathering. (with giant cards, of course). Autonomous would be building cards into the deck.
Battleship. Sort of a water game. Sort of a board game. Actually that would probably suck as a spectator competition unless it was the Deluxe Talking Battleship.
At this rate we could just play marbles.
But no, I still like that stuff involving tones and intervals. I suppose we could have something where the robots move around the area, find the data ports in the walls (each which has a few kilobytes of memory to store a waveform), and try to assemble a wave sequence to unlock some sort of code. Or they could be given sheet music which they must read and play (and then post in the .abc format](http://abc.sourceforge.net/). bonus points for making up lyrics to go along with it)
This is only the 80th post, and it’s already way past feasible. What was I saying about making FIRST actually consider the ideas in this thread? This stuff might be usable in ten years or so.
How about really fun and funky stuff, like ferrofluid, non-newtonian fluid, or jello?
(and now for my 4th edit)
What about different sized balls, so each makes a “boing” of a different pitch? Some could even be filled with different liquids or gasses (helium in one, nitrogen in another, argon or xenon in a third)