Dead Robot Society Blog

Score: 219, Victory

We may or may not have owned the other team. You can tell from our score that both of our robots worked perfectly. Thank goodness create is fully functional again. It has given us quite a few scares. Our bots are very good, but this match we didn’t have the toughest competition. The other team only ran one robot, and it fell over. We can only hope that we continue to hold up as our opponents get more and more challenging. Speaking of next round, I hear we’re playing a team from TJ, one of our rivals and hardest competitors. I’ve been told they are consistently doing very well so we’re all a bit nervous for next round. We’ll see what happens.

Score: 127, Victory

Let me just tell you, Botguy was as close to the line as he could possibly be without actually touching the line. Curses. Oh well, a win is a win. We also somehow managed to not get all seven ducks on the line and not drop any sponges on oil slicks. We still scored over a hundred though. Win? I think so.

We were actually competing against the team we share a table with. Even though we were competitors, we wished the best for them and they were happy for us when we won. It could be because this is a double elimination tournament so we didn’t knock them out, but I like to think it’s because we’re good sports. Either way, it was a great start.

…and the pain of making them.

Yes I’ve been making a movie on behalf of the Dead Robot Society. I call it a movie but I suppose it’s really more like a music video of sorts. Basically what I’m doing is recording my teammates dancing, singing, and being generally entertaining to the song “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas. It’s quite an experience. Let me just tell you a little bit about what making the movie entails.

The first thing I wanted to see in the video was my teammates mouthing a couple of the lyrics in the song. Apparently it was harder than it looked because it took on average about four tries for anyone on the team, mentors included, to get the timing right. The outtakes are for more amusing than the actual clips I used for the video, which are pretty amusing. A lot of the video is us saying the words to the song. I’m sure my companions got sick of me sticking a camera in their face, but Mr. Gras insisted so there wasn’t much I could do about it.

The boys in the middle of filming.

Another thing we did was act out the words of the song. When I say we acted out the words, what I actually mean is we made Kelly act out some of the words. Her parts were my favorite parts of the movie. Pay close attention to the girl with the curly brown hair in the school uniform when you watch the video. Sometimes the acting we did wasn’t limited to the words of the song though. Like Miss Allison for example, merely acted bored for many chunks of the video. (We’ve yet to determine if she was actually acting.) There were some other parts we acted as well, but I can’t give everything away now can I?

Besides acting things out, there was also quite a bit of random dancing. A lot of that was again provided by Allison, although she had help from Mary and some of the other team members. Random dancing was a crucial part of our video. Without it, I might not have been able to have enough footage to complete the movie.

In addition to our own personal embarrasing moments, there are many failures from our robots incorperated into the film. Most of them are duck grabbing fails, but if memory serves I believe there are a few other fails as well. There are alos juggling fails, but that wasn’t a robot, that was Steven.

The movie was really fun and really challenging to make. Watching the clips of everyone regardless of whether they failed or succeeded was highly enjoyable. Making the movie was also a lot of work. First of all, I had a deadline for the first time. I was used to watching my teammates race against the clock, but I was always able to do my job at a leisurely pace. In contrast, with regards to the movie, Mr. Gras wanted it finished by regionals so I had to work quickly. Secondly, and more importantly, I had to listen to that song. I didn’t even like the song in the first place. Plus it’s not like I got to just listen to it on repeat. I had to keep rewinding and listening to three second clips over and over again. It was terrible. However, whenever I watch the finished product, someone thanks me for doing it, or someone comments on how much they enjoyed it, I realize it was all worth it.

(Pssst, here’s the link:) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko3CpFJ0unw

That I’m gonna hate this song very quickly.

Finally some footage has been taken four our video that I promised four blogs ago. Didn’t you know blogs were a unit of time measurement? Anyways, we’ve picked a song for the video and in case you didn’t catch it from the title of this post, we’ve picked “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas. I can’t give you too many details because I don’t want to spoil the song, however I can tell you that I’ll have heard it so much by the time we finish the video, I will never want to hear it again. But  I promise you guys will want to watch the video, it will be very amusing.

There are only three weeks left until competition and the team is responding accordingly. Everyone is trying to come two or three times a week. There’s a lot of movement in the BotCave these days as well. Software writes code, downloads it, takes it to the board, tests it, and repeats the process. I’ve noticed that software requires a lot of tweaking. When they run the program with the bot on the board, I’m always impressed. However they always return to their station and adjust the turns by a couple of degrees or the speed by a couple of seconds. I guess this whole process is why the Dead Robot Society has always been so successful.

Hardware is working on the basket of the create bot. The basket will bring the frogs and BotGuy to our wetlands after the arm of the create bot has knocked them off the platform. The hardware guys tell me that the basket will be finished today. I believe, don’t quote me on this, that the completion of the basket will mark the completion of the create bot. Well the building of the create bot at least. Like I said before software will probably continue to enhance the code for it.

We're actually almost done I swear.

In summation, I will tell you that as usual, the Dead Robot Society has had a tremendously prolific four hours together. I probably sound redundant, constantly telling you that we accomplished a lot. I really do mean it though. Every time we get together we work hard and see results. The demonstrations I saw today were pretty excellent, aside from the fact that I barely escaped a near fatal collision with the arm of create bot. Okay I might be exaggerating on the whole “near fatal” thing. So don’t fear, it’s always safe in the BotCave.