Swarmathon Code is in!

Two weeks ago we had some decent code. Last week it turned into promising code. This week we have something worthy of the competition. 

Testing was challenging again this year. The team worked within the bounds of the time we were allowed to be on campus. Obstacle avoidance takes on a new meaning when you have high winds, snow, and a severe lack of power cords in your testing arena.

Man's not hot (never hot) but he was pretty chilly on the last day of testing. Nothing like some late March snow/sleet to get the blood pumping for Swarmathon!

The team was caught unaware by a sudden cold snap and had to wear all of the coats I had been hoarding in my office.

Our final code was submitted at 11:58 pm. 

Now all we have left is the video, technical report, and outreach report!

Yee! Yee! 

Skkkkrrrrrrt. Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! 

Resting Our Eyes

Generally speaking, testing days are some of the least fun and most necessary parts of the work. It's never as quick as one hopes, often fraught with nested, independent hurdles, and any progress we do make seems vastly disproportionate, in the bad way, relative to the effort required.

Ol' Foamy (sans eyes). Also n.b. the egregious amounts of caffeine and junk food that fuel serial Saturday workdays.

Ol' Foamy's job is to hold everything in place while we test two of our servos. We installed a wooden arm on each, to which weights can be attached so we can get a baseline idea of how they perform in vacuum while under load. Note the successive layers of tape; this is rapid prototyping at its finest. Handsome Dan did a great job whipping together the original test stand in an hour, and we've been improving on it every test day.

Documentation! is! important!

Keeping in mind that this is essential to the project's success is sometimes difficult. We occasionally take breaks, though, to shore up morale. Today we rested our eyes a bit; we've been selecting googley eyes that are right for "Ol' Foamy", our test stand, so that its constant shaking and gyrations will be more amusing. (I forgot to take pictures of the end result, but will post them later.)

Here are a couple photos from today's break. I decided not to try it as a selfie for reasons that may be apparent: