It turns out that we won the competition.  Cool.  Photius did his job, but not quite as well as we could have hoped.  Here are the events that transpired.

12:00am – 4:00am:  Blake, with an hour drive still ahead of him, heads north to Sherman.  The plan is that he will show up at 9am, ready to fix Photius’ limp and work on some last minute coding issues.  Justin and Eric work on what has come to be known as “The Toy.”  Using spare parts left over from their robots and a spare PIC that Eric had on a breadboard, they decide to build another competition robot.  A few hours in the machine shop and a couple at the work bench and they have a working bot, fully equipped to transmit 38kHz IR and receive for wall and mouse detection.  They set the bot aside for programming in the morning.

4:15am: Heading home for a nap.  Bedtime comes about 4:45am.

6:00am: Alarm sounds, Eric is heading over to Justin’s for the drive to Hurst. 

6:20am – 7:10am: Traffic.

7:20am: Eating breakfast with ’StartFragment ->Grandad Eldon Da Motorman’ who sells high end European motors, mostly for model trains.  We have a good chat over breakfast, and he tells us all the reasons we should have used other kinds of motors for our project, but he is kind and knowledgeable (and very correct).

8:30am: Eric heads up to the school with motor in tow, Justin heads to bed for another nap.  Whataburger coffe sucks and tears up your stomach.

10:00am: Blake and Eric are working hard on Photius, chip’epan, and The Toy when Justin arrives.  Everything is going as planned, except that eric is having a problem or two with chasing the cat.  Photius chases well in prelminary runs, but never catches.

12:00pm: The Toy is working, walking, but having some motor stalling problems.  Eric and Justin try to resolve through code and hardware changes, but to no avail.  Another hour on this one and they’d have had it, but decide instead to focus on the competition and leave The Toy for another day.  It was a lot of fun while it lasted, almost building a competitive robot in less than 8 hours.

12:30pm: DPRG folks show up for the show, bearing all kinds of fun toys. 

1:00pm:  Contest begins, Eric starts it off with good wall avoidance but in the second round doesn’t really chase the cat.  Something is strange, and he heads upstairs to fix the problems.  Photius runs and hits the extrusion wall that defines the starting alley.  Knew this could happen, but it is the only ding.  Chases the mouse a good bit, looks like he has it at one point, only to back up and run as the mouse charges.  The obstacle avoidance is taking over the mouse detection.

3:00pm: Photius goes for round two with code change.  Acts very much the same as in the first round, giving the mouse one hell of a chase, and finally catches by cornering the mouse and causing the mouse to run into him.  Justin is not satisfied and heads upstairs.  Soon he realizes that he had changed the code wrong and that the code really hadn’t changed for the second round. 

4:00pm: Cats are beginning to give very little chase, as the 20 teams who didn’t catch the mouse in the first two tries frantically change code and hardware.  The labs are full, but the course is empty so Professor Cilia threatens to head home.

4:30pm: Looking through the IR detection scheme of the Sony Handycam, we determine that the mouse has been banged up and is no longer transmitting from the rear, apart from his turret beam.  Photius’ third run with the [real] new code pretty much proves this, as he ignores the mouse when the mouse is facing away. The test is pretty much finished.

5:00pm:  We are announced as the winner based on catching the cat in the second try with only one penalty.