Because my last couple posts have been depressing, I present cats.
Category: Fun
-
Vacation Return Advice
Today’s advice is this:
When returning from a vacation where one dropped a vehicle off at the dealer to be serviced, do not forget to pick it up before the next work day.
Yes, Jenn is driving me there on the way to her work.
Obvious lesson learned. Carry on.
-
Pomplamoose Knocks it Clean
I love Pomplamoose’s videos. They make good stuff. They just released their tribute to Batman by covering the theme music.
I say just because they delayed it due to the Aurora shootings. They explain their reasoning, and why they ended up releasing it anyway, in the video.
-
Dragon*Con 2011 Images
I finally got around to tagging and uploading Dragon*Con images from last year. Flickr has the collection. Enjoy.
-
Back From St. Simons
Much to tell, but here’s a picture from Wednesday afternoon.
-
Best Ribbon Evar
I’m at a conference, and this is the conference chair’s badge. I love it.
-
I Heart Vi Hart
But! DO NOT WATCH this video until you’ve watched some of her other videos. If you have, great! Otherwise, watch Pi is Wrong or Snakes or any of her other videos on YouTube or at her website.
Vi Hart totally rocks.
-
The Piano Guys do Cello
You may have seen the link for Cello Wars making the rounds, and I highly recommend watching it, however after perusing the catalog of the guys who produced that, I came across this number which dropped my jaw on the floor. Firstly, the music is great. Secondly, the videography is out of this fucking world! It’s so good, it’s beyond good and wrapping around the klein bottle into the fourth dimension of awesome. Make sure you watch and listen to their other stuff as well.
-
Atlanta Robot Rally 2011
Sharon and I went to the Atlanta Hobby Robot Club Robot Rally yesterday, at the Pinckneyville Community Center in Norcross. It was a series of different contests that robots are entered into, from line following, where the robot has to navigate a course by following a line, to robo-sumo and many others. We saw the line following contests, both basic and advanced, and the beginning of the Cube Quest before leaving.
The line following contest is exactly like a course I took when I was back at RPI, studying mechanical engineering. The robot is a compilation of motors, sensors, and a microcontroller which is designed to follow a line on the ground. As things go, this is relatively simple to get working, but is not at all simple to get working efficiently and quickly. This contest is for time, and the faster your device goes, the less time it has to react if it gets off course. Too far off course and suddenly it can’t find the line at all and it’s disqualified.Amusingly, the Emcee of the event had given a talk the month before on the algorithm used by naval vessels to make turns smoothly and efficiently, and his adaptation of it to the line following robot. He was complaining that now everyone’s robots were beating his using his using his own algorithm!
Cube Quest was a contest between two robots to see who could get the most points in a set period of time. The object was to accumulate red cubes in your goal, worth 1 point each, and to not accumulate blue ones, worth -1 points. You could, of course, push blue cubes into your opponents goal, or steal their red cubes. It’s all up to your own strategy. The contests we saw were decided by scores of 1 to zero and similar.
Just before we left, we saw a quick demonstration for kids on how a line following robot was put together. The Emcee taped four kids together—2 sensors, 1 drive train, 1 controller— and had them follow a line, explanining how this was exactly how the line following robots did it.
It was a lot of fun to go see this. I wish we’d been able to stay for the robo-sumo, but lunch was calling.
