Portal 2

Recently I have been playing the game Portal 2. Portal 2 is a puzzle game where you have a portal gun that shoots blue and orange portals. Anything that goes through the blue portal including your character ends up in the orange portal and vise versa. One interesting thing about the portals is that you keep your direction. Another thing is that you can only put them on white surfaces limiting the way you do the puzzle and making it more difficult. The goal of each puzzle is to get to and open a door leading to the next puzzle with some story weaved in. There are lots of other objects and substances that add to the puzzle such as push buttons, buttons that need to always be pressed, a bouncing gel, a fast gel, a gel that lets you put portals on it, energy bridges, energy floaters, cubes, turrets and more. I am a big fan of portal 2 even though it is an old game (2011) because I love puzzles especially when they make you think like these. I also like the story weaved in because it is interesting and doesn't overpower the game play.

Civilization V

This week not much happened with robots so I'm going to do something random. Recently I got a PC game called Civilization V. I really enjoy the game so I'm going to talk about it. It is a very complex turn based strategy (similar to how a strategy board game is) where you control an empire from the ancient era all the way till the modern era. It is not historically accurate at all except the fact that the people and units were real things and their abilities are based off what they did with their empire. To start off a game you first pick a ruler. There's one ruler per empire or country in the game and they are all the most stressful or famous rulers of that particular country. All rulers have very different abilities involving war, region, influence, food, science, culture, great people, trade, building things, money, and things evolving being on land or water. All of the aforementioned things are complicated aspects of the game and there are a few more. The other really important setting when starting a game is the map. The maps can be completely random, random with restrictions or the same map every time. The map is like the board in a board game like risk. Once you start the game all you have is a settler which starts cities and a warrior to protect your city and explore. Your cities do a variety of things too and you can conquer destroy and puppet them. The goal of the game is to be the first of the many other empires or civilizations your playing with to complete one of the victory conditions. The victory conditions include things like conquering everybody else, having tourism and culture, science, and being elected as world leader. The game is mostly signal player but does have a multiplayer mode. I would suggest it to anyone into complex strategy games and board games.

More Prototyping

This week nothing new happened but I did continue prototyping. I have to experiment with a lot of  new ideas because the next stage of the completion will be a million times harder. The other teams at that event will also have qualified and it isn't till April so they will be a lot better. This week I tried an intake idea to quickly get the balls but that didn't work. I also tried to do a one wheel fly wheel (normally two wheels spinning in opposite directions that shoot a ball) but that didn't seem to work that well either. I started working on another idea where the balls are picked up in a similar way to my other robot except that that is also the storage. From there it could be lifted up by a sort of arm and as it tilts the back will become a ramp and the would fall into the goal. There's a lot of prototyping ahead so will see what the robot transforms into.

Prototyping

This week I started making new robot prototypes. I started doing this because while I did qualify rather easily the next competition is in March so teams will have plenty of time to improve and all the teams at this next event will have qualified too. Not only that but there will be more teams competing for a few spots to get to the next level, worlds. I really want to get to worlds because you get to compete against teams from all over the world like China or England and because I would get to travel to Kentucky. My current robot can only score one point per ball because it doesn't shoot. To even have a chance of qualifying my new robot has to shoot. There's a lot of other things I want my robot to be like be small, fast, powerful, get balls fast, and shoot balls fast. Not every condition will be met so I have to decide which traits will help my team score more points. Right now I am prototyping specific parts of the robot such as the intake or the base but once I find out what works and what doesn't I will put it all together in one robot. That's all for now bye.

Second Qualifier

So this week in robotics wasn't as work intensive as last week because I already qualified. However it was still more than usual because I was signed up for another qualifying tournament. At the event I was a lot more laid back than the last and we didn't even get any awards but its okay we already qualified. The good thing is unlike the last qualifier there were plenty of good robots there that I learned from because I'm gonna start building a completely new robot for the state competition in March. One thing that did annoy me at the competition however were these to teams with the exact same robot. One thing that particularly annoyed me was that one of them got an impossible score in driver control. At least I didn't lose control. Another thing that sucked was that one of the teams that go to the same place as me that didn't qualify at the last tournament also didn't qualify at this one. On the happier side Friday was my birthday so I am now 13. So that was the highlights of my week hope you enjoyed.

The Qualifier

This Saturday was my robotics qualifier and it was stressful but fun. I had barely slept the night before because I had stayed up working on the robot the night before and in the morning I woke up at five and couldn't get back to sleep. On the way there we stopped at Starbucks and I had hot chocolate with a little bit of coffee which was my mistake. We got to the school it was being held at by 8:30 when the practice tables had opened. We signed in and started practicing. The actual competition matches were supposed to start at 10 but they didn't start until at least 10:45. Pretty much since the time we got there till until the matches started I was supper anxious and jumpy because of the coffee. Once the matches did start my team first got paired with a team that didn't even score points so it was only the points we scored that counted. The way the matches work is that teams are paired with each other and for that round they get the collective score. As the matches continued we got to be paired with very good teams from the same place I do robotics and we were doing very well. The only way that we could win was to at the end of the qualifying matches be the team ranked one or two. Near the end of the qualifying matches we got paired with some bad teams but some how we kept second place. In the final match we got paired from a team from the same robotics place and we beat everybody by a land slide. Both of us were moving on to the state competition YEEEAAAHHH. So now I have to start preparing for the state competition which is in March so bye.

Ahhh the competition is in a week

At the beginning of the week not only did I get a new video game but I got a new book that had just came out, Magus Chase and The Sword of Summer. With both of those things taking up a lot of my time I didn't even work on my robot till Thursday. I went to robotics again on Friday and finished up the book which I recommend. On Saturday I was also at robotics but didn't get much done because I was trying to learn something and all the instructors were busy. That really sucked because my competition was in a week and I had to get autonomous (Where you program the robot to run its self and not control it) done by then. On Sunday I was pretty sick of robotics so for most of the day was was doing other things but at the end of the day I went again. Sadly I will probably be programming the robot every day in this upcoming week and will stay probably until 10 on Friday because its the day before the competition.

My crazy week

This week I get to talk about my crazy life. On Thursday I went to robotics practice and about a quarter way through I over heard another team talking about the practice scrimmage (an unofficial practice event held by a few teams to see where their at) on Saturday. I asked them about it and they said it was at five. I had remembered I had it but thought it was in at least a week because October came so fast. So I practiced a little when one of my mentors (mechanical engineers that work at the place I do robotics) noticed that two of the six wheels on the robot where rubbing against plates and was causing a lot of friction so a loss of power and speed. To fix this I had to completely take apart the robot. I got few more practice runs in and it was already eight and the robotics place was closing. Not only that though I had procrastinated on an English essay due at 11:59 at night on Friday that I had planned doing some of on Thursday but I was brain dead and just went to sleep. Friday morning not only did I have to make my lunch get dressed and go to school, I had to do some of the essay too. So I got done about 2/3 of the essay which was harder than usual because I tried to right in a way I wasn't used to. School was normal accept the fact that my English teacher reminded us that the essay due date was extended and that all my worrying and rushing was for nothing. Then when school was over I at least didn't have to finish the essay but I had to go straight to my programming class at the same place as I do robotics that didn't end until 5:30 and I practiced a lot  this time actually with my teammate (which doesn't happen often). until eight again. My brain was dead and I went straight to bed. Saturday I was very negative about the practice scrimmage and I practiced all day until the actual event that started at 5:30. It was only with four other teams one of which were the mentors because we needed at least one more team. At first my team (just me and one teammate) were doing pretty bad and it was like that for all 12 "qualifying" matches. Next came the finals where the top two teams and the bottom two teams were paired up. By some miracle we were 2nd by one point and got to be paired with the best team (which is a good thing because your working together) who was of course the mentors. We easily beat the 3rd and 4th place teams and WON. 

YEEEEAAAAH the end and the real qualifier is in two weeks .

The garbage truck

Above is the robot I built at its current state although I am constantly tweaking and improving. In the front of the robot there is a contraption that I call the rake that picks up the orange balls that you can see scattered around the field. The rake is attached to a sort of conveyor belt that I can  move up and down with a remote control. Once the rake is all the way down I can drive the robot into the balls to get them in the rake. After they are in the rake I put the rake all the way up to dump them in the bucket in the back. When the bucket is full I can then score points by backing up into the pipe fence and dump the balls like a dump tuck onto the other side and score one point per ball. In upcoming posts I will show videos of me practicing driving the robot.

The VEX Competition

I'm in a robotics competition called VEX IQ and this years challenge is called challenge bank shot.
The photo below is the field where the competitors drive their robots. The main part of the competition is two person diver control in which two different teams participate for shared points. They way it works is that after the points are scored each team gets that amount of points even if one team did nothing. This is evened out because there are multiple rounds. One way to score points is to get the orange balls on the opposite side of the pipe fence in the back for one point each. Another way is to shoot balls in the blue bucket in the back for three points each.The last two ways are emptying the cutouts on the blue ramp in the front for one point each and  having one robot completely on the ramp for ten points and two robots for 25. Each round is one minuet and the goal is to score as many points as possible. It is a fun challenge and I will be showing and explaining my robot in future posts.