Graduation is just around the corner. In a few hours I’ll get to ceremonially walk. Of course I won’t have a diploma until sometime in February, but we’ll disregard that little quirk for now. Congratulations to all those who are graduating today. Jen, congrats on your engagement and upcoming trip to Antarctica. That is really cool. Good job on whipping college in 3.5 years after whipping high school in just 3. For anyone out there that might want to watch the ceremonies throughout the day, click here.

Well, I would just like to give a big shout out to THE MAN, Justin McAllister. He is graduating after 4 and a half years of hard work and is now an official engineer. Now, it’s true that he has become nerdier than he was 4 1/2 years ago, but hey….sacrifices must be made. As his gf, I would like to throw out some thank yous to a couple of people. First of all, to Mr. John Daly, who over the past year has been kind enough to supply free tutoring and theoretical explanation to THE MAN. Big kudos to him. And to the ‘rents, Bev and Bob, big thanks for supporting him in every way they could to ensure his success. To all the friends and roomates who have been there to help him de-stress by playing countless hours of video games, you ain’t so bad. And finally, to Heather Nice who introduced me to THE MAN, I would like to say, “You rock.” To everyone else that I might have forgotten to mention, thank you. Justin, we are so proud of you. You earned it, and you deserve to party. Go drink a corona.

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. 

7:40 PM:  Batteries finished charging and we started Photius to see how well it followed the new transmitter that works like the mouse.  We notice that it was pulling left more than normal.  After inspection, it was discovered that the left motor was broken.  We were able to move the axle and it was operating at about 50% efficiency because of the extra drag caused by the wheel being able to wobble.  Justin immediately started trying to find a way to over come this. 

8:00 PM:  After adjusting the motor values to compensate for the drag, it was determined that it was best to stop before motor stop working all together.  We started brain storming other ideas.

8:10 PM: We decided the only option that we had was to try and find another motor to replace this one.  From previous emails that Justin had sent when we bought the first par of motors, We found the AOL screen name for the seller in California.  We sent him an email.  There was no response.

8:15 PM: Justin decided to call some of his friends in California.  None of them answered.  Then Justin called a friend that works for Delta to see if he would be willing to fly out to Cal to go be this guys house.  He also did not answer.

8:55 PM:  Justin’s friend from Delta calls back.  He has to work tomorrow and will not be able to go.  He said that he would try some of his friends that are just getting off and see if they could go.  We will call us back.

9:10 PM: Justin’s friend called back.  The last fight to Cal has just left.  We ask him about shipping faster than FedEx or UPS.  He said that Delta has a shipping service that sends packages with any flight.  We decided to look into this.

9:20 PM: The Delta shipping will be able to ship the motor on the first fight in the morning for us to pick up at the airport.  The only problem is that someone has to take the motor to the terminal.  None of Justin’s friends in Cal have called back.  Still have not heard from the seller in Cal either.

10:00 PM: The seller show as not being logged in to AOL, but we decide to send him an instant message.

10:20 PM: The seller logs into AOL.

10:30 PM: Seller send Justin an IM.  Justin asks if the guy would be willing to take a motor to the airport to ship for us.  He said that there is no way.  The trip is an hour and a half and he would not do that tomorrow morning for any amount of money.  He did say that he knew a guy in Hurst, TX. that might have some of the motors.  He told us that he would try to reach him and get back to us.

12:05—Guy in Hurst called and said he had the motors.  We’re meeting him at Whataburger in Hurst at 7:15am.  Justin and Eric are working in the machine shop on ‘the toy.’  More to come as things develop.

Well, the tests are finished – I killed the last one in just under two hours this afternoon. Art project needs to get done soon, if he’ll still take it; it was due monday, but without any dead days before finals that time was spent studying for my Tuesday final. Photius is coming right along, but we’ve had some software bugs slowing us down for the past couple of days. We’ll get it, and we’ll win.

So I walked out of my Comm Sys final and asked the guy that was standing outide, the first one to leave, “So, was I in the right classroom, or did I just take the wrong test?”  Yeah, it was that bad.  There were 20 pts that were gimme, then there were 4 fair questions that were like ones we had seen and studied; I kicked those in the butt, except for a forgotten equation on one.  Then there were these other 4 questions, like nothing we had seen, nothing we expected, and no one I talked to had a clue on them.  Myself included.  Comms Sys is fun; I like the material, I like modulation techniques and FSK, and I understand the concepts well enough to explain most of them to other people, but these questions made me hate it.  I gave up 2 hrs 25 minutes in, the 3rd person to do so (with the first only a few minutes prior) on a test that was supposed to be capped at 2 hours.  He kicked everyone else out at the 2:30 mark.  Nutso. 

Worked on the robot tonight, and tried to get it chasing the actual mouse.  Found out quickly that the mouse wasn’t hearing a 5ms pulse and had to up the pulse length to 15 ms.  Also found out that the turret, as good as it tracks a constant IR beacon, doesn’t track the mouse very well; especially when the mouse is only transmitting a few times per second reliably.  Worked on implementing a new control system so that the turret would track faster and compensate for platform rotation, but didn’t get this to converge on any fixed value.  Daly and I spent a half hour in front of the all-knowing dry erase board with a couple of Coronas and solved most of those problems.  We’ll try them out tomorrow night after the Systems and Controls final, which I should go study for now.  Well, maybe after just one relaxing game of BF1942.  Yeah, that sounds really nice.

All the classes are finished with; I still have my two exams and two projects to go.  Exams should be pretty fair, I think that as long as I do decent on both of them (meaning I pass) I should have no worries about gradumatating.  The art project was due today, but with all the other homework I had to get done today, it will have to wait.  That’s a class that I’m sure to pass, so it’s gotta be a lesser priority right now.  Off to study for Communications Systems, wish me luck.

By 7:00PM tonight, I’ll never have to take another [undergraduate] class.  By 7:00PM two days from now, I’ll never have to step in a classroom again [yeah right].  It’s almost over.  I have two exams and a final project to cap it all off.  Once tests are over, I’ll still have a bit of work to do on Photius, but that will actually be enjoyable.  I have him avoiding obstacles, transmitting IR, chasing IR, doing it all pretty well.  He’s still got some problems with IR reflections, but hopefully in the competition arena that won’t be too big of a deal.  Now to get on these tests so that I can actually graduate.  Wish me luck.

Things are getting close to the end as far as school goes and that excites me.  Did well on the Systems and Controls test yesterday, I might have missed one problem but only in part, so it’s possible that I came out with an A.  That would be really nice. 

Photius is doing well.  We got the servo that will be the turret mounted and talking to the handyboard through C.  Not interactive C, mind you, we tossed out that option a while ago; interactive C is just too slow for our taste.  Loading actual C to a board and having it interpret it at run time just isn’t the best use of a 2MHz processor.  Instead, we’re using an actual C compiler for the HC11, making Motorola S19 files (assembly) and running at a 1KHz program loop.  It’s good stuff.  Photius runs smoother than ever.  I’m about to head up to the school and do so more work; I’ve got the 38KHz oscillator working, transmitting IR, and the receiver working, I just need to work on the control circuitry and then put all of that fun on a perfboard and get it off of the breadboard.  What else?  I have to make the mounts for the IR sensors and the turret horn, and modify the mounting of the IR proximity sensors so that they are lower to the ground.  After that, all the work should be in software, which, so far, has only presented a problem once: getting the servo to talk to the card consistantly.  In that process we managed to run the servo past it’s left stop, but it seems to still be working fine for the moment.

I’m ready to be done with all of this and get a real job where I can learn more.  School, and the resulting feeling of being constantly busy without purpose, has gotten old.  I think that when it comes time for grad school I won’t mind taking it slow and a few classes per semester, but of course at that time I’ll have the choice of what I study, and I won’t be doing constant busy work for courses like art and government.

I’ve been really bored lately.  It’s not that I don’t have anything to do, quite the contrary really.  But with school and work drudging on through the same old motions everyday, it’s getting quite old.  Not getting to see my girlfriend but once a week doesn’t help either.  One more month, that is, if I pass Controls.  On an up note, I got an 82 on my Communications Systems Exam that I was fretting about last week.  Not too bad considering the average was a 55, and over 20 people (out of less than 60) scored below 40.