Robots, Cornhuskers, and Parking Meters - Part Two

Continued from http://www.groesser.com/2017/01/robots-cornhuskers-and-parking-meters.html

So Bennet and I made a trip to the University of Nebraska, Lincoln campus. We went through the student union. Not much happening on a Saturday Morning.
I happened to remember that there was a tower that I've always associated with the university and I tried an online search and I found that there was a tower called Mueller Tower. Hey, I know someone named Mueller. Got to visit that. We also found another sculpture.

On the other side, there was the stadium and the gym

Then we noticed off the right, there was a mastodon. I took the first picture and I wanted to know what he was doing. He mentioned that he wanted a pic to show he was holding it up. I came close.

Then, when walking back to the car, just past the bookstore, I saw the tower I was really looking for. Then the realization hit me that that was the state capitol. Of course it was. I felt kind of stupid for thinking it was part of the university. I must be slipping.

We had to make a quick run back to the motel and I noticed just to the side of the motel was a sculpture of a paper airplane. Notice the last photo that the paper folds are present. You may need to click on it to expand it.

OK. Off to the robotics competition.

Setup.

I don't have a video of the first competition but there are some good facebook videos that I will link to. Let me tell you about how the competition works. The first 30 seconds are devoted to autonomous action from the robot. It can do a few things in this stage, I think. It can shoot the two given balls into the basket. It can push off the large ball off the pedestal and park there. It can move to the wall and hit a beacon to change the color. After the autonomous time, the teams can drive the robots and points are established. Each color has two teams that are to work together. Also, the actions are similar but the robots can lift the large balls and put them in the basket.

Match 1 for Team 5037:
Facebook Video
My Video

Match 2 for Team 5037:
Facebook Video
My Video

Match 3 for Team 5037:

Facebook Video

My Video

Match 4 for Team 5037:
Facebook Video
My Video

Match 5 for Team 5037"
Facebook Video
My Video

Semifinal Round 1 (They were ranked #2 from 24 teams!!):
Facebook Video
My Video

Semifinal Round 2:
Facebook Video
My Video

OK. They didn't win. They did very well though.

Robots, Cornhuskers, and Parking Meters - Part One

So this past weekend I took a trip with Madsen and Bennet to the magical land of Nebraska for Madsen's robotics competition. I actually have an affinity to the Omaha/Lincoln area because the Union Pacific Railroad has such a strong presence there and it was the starting point of the Transcontinental Railroad. I like railroads. :)

So picking up the rental car was uneventful and it took me some time to understand how to get the bluetooth to understand my phone. I've had bluetooth in a few of my rental cars but this is the first one that could connect to the extremely popular Samsung phone that I own. Go fig. I have saved up my bandwidth and I planned on using my Google Play account to enjoy tunes all across the rolling hills of Iowa. We then packed up the car and loaded the pool toys that Ellie filled with air for Bennet. When we would actually have time to use the pool, I didn't know, but I checked on the website and the motel had a pool, so we took stuff for it.

Madsen rode in the van with his team all the way to Lincoln. Aside from an accident that backed up traffic for several tens of miles around Iowa City, the trip was uneventful. I'd taken it several times before so it was well remembered.

When we arrived, I couldn't remember the name of the motel and with a check of my email, I eventually found it on my map. It was just across the road from where I stopped to check. We met Madsen in the lobby as they had just arrived a few minutes before we did. The room was nice and clean. It had a fridge that I promptly plugged in and put in my diet Dr. Pepper for later. I planned out the next day on my computer to make sure I knew where things were. Madsen was leaving at 6:30am but the competition didn't really start until around 11:30am. I wanted to stop at the University of Nebraska to just check out the campus that I had seen so many times on televised football games. The bookstore opened at 10am so I had plenty of time to find a parking spot. The map mentioned that there were metered stalls all around the place so I shouldn't have a problem.

Morning went off without a hitch. Madsen went with his team. Bennet and I ate breakfast and I even made a marvelous waffle for Bennet. We packed up the car for the day and off we went. Finding the university wasn't hard at all. The stadium was huge and stood out on the skyline. It didn't hurt that it was only a few miles from where we were staying. We also found out that there wasn't an indoor pool. The other motel in Lincoln for this brand did, but not this one. Bennet was greatly disappointed.

Here is the problem. There was parking everywhere. All meters. The thing is, on the way there, I realized I didn't have any change. I figured that I would need at least a dollar for an hour, and all I had was some dimes and pennies. Still, I found a parking spot right behind the bookstore and went out to see what the meter had written on it so I could pay for parking. Hmmm. it seemed I had to load an app on my phone in order to park. I don't want to load an app on my phone. This is stupid. The meters stopped being needed at noon and it was close to that. Did I take a chance of getting a ticket? I'm in a rental car and I know they don't take too kindly to getting tickets on their cars. Grrr. Ok, maybe there's some parking. a little south of here. I just needed an hour.

So I drove around town, expressing my frustration to Bennet about how I couldn't find a place to park yet there were spaces everywhere. I eventually found myself on the other side of the stadium, having come full circle around the campus. I pulled in to a vacant lot and got out to re-read the meter to see if I could do this without giving my life history on an app just to park in a strange town for an hour. I noticed that I could go to a website and do this. Perhaps that was less intrusive. So I stood out in the wind going through a setup process. Ok. login...choose password....who am I....choose a pin...get a text....put in the code...THIS IS FREAKING RIDICULOUS!....I'll just park and get a ticket. This is maddening.

I made our way back to the bookstore, trying to avoid a bunch of high school students carrying pro-life protest signs. Hmmm. Well, I'm in the bible belt so I guess that fits. I once again faced my nemesis parking meter....OK fine!! I don't want to cheat the residents of Nebraska from their dollar. SHEESH! So I took my phone out and looked at the web page again. It wanted my credit card. I don't want to give you my credit card. I really don't. I know you are safe but....Let me just look at the other side of this meter....Oh. What's this? What appeared to me is what you see in the photo above. There was slot for coins. "Insert coins at anytime" OK. I didn't have any, but cool. What really captured my attention was that thing on the left....it was a credit card slot. In Chicago, there are stations on every block where you pay and you then put the stub in your window. I was hoping that is what I was to find in Lincoln. Instead, if I had just taken the time to walk around the stupid meter, I would have found this on every meter. I checked the other meters and sure enough, each one had one. So I fished out my visa card and slipped it in. $1.25 for an hour. Ok. Credit or Debit. Credit.  Done. Thank you. What a way to waste time. I felt so stupid. Of course the engineer in me immediately wanted to know how they were connected to the central office but I pushed those thoughts down as I took Bennet on campus.

I went to the bookstore and found the pens that Tracy wanted and I fought back the urge to buy an engineering pad. I had enough paper, but I did have to handle them a bit, to get my fix. I walked back to the T-shirts to find an affordable shirt, red, with "Nebraska" on it. I had to look a bit but I found one. I purchased it and walked out to check the rest of the place.

-To be continued.

It Seems I Need a Goal

The picture above is the cycle room at my gym. It will be my new home for the next few months. You see, a couple years ago I had the goal to ride the length of the Hennepin Canal. I did that. It consisted of 3 days riding about 30 miles per day. I could have done more per day but there were extenuating circumstances. Well since I did that and a few other rides, I haven't gone to a gym for no-reason no-how. I felt guilty, but I really didn't want to move much.

So I was playing with google maps or something, perhaps it was a railroad group on Facebook, and I read about a rail-to-trail in Southern Illinois that has some interesting railroad bridges. I check it out and I am interested. I had a goal last summer to head down there with a motorcycle and check it out. That didn't happen. So, I'm thinking that the kids are old enough now and maybe I can take Tracy down there and I can do the ride. She and I did one leg of the Hennepin Canal alone and it was a nice time. I really do enjoy time with her one to one. Perhaps we can take some time off to do that?

So, along with that ride, I want to ride up to the Wisconsin border on the Fox Trail. I can do that. For whatever reason, it helped me commit to getting to the gym to get the body ready for the trips.

Another downside of my self-imposed inactivity has been my sugar levels. I can feel it when I eat any significant amount. I need to exercise to feel better and burn it up. I need to lose weight as that is also key to bringing it down.

Kind of a boring post, but that is what my life is like at the moment. I want my summer to be better than it was last year.

Raspberry Pi

Do you mind if I geek out for a bit? Thank you.

During my mission, you know, that two years where I had all the time in the world to think about all the things that I had done wrong, listen to leaders that told me what I was doing wrong at the time, and then have random strangers reject and tell me how wrong my most personal beliefs were, (sorry. I digress) I looked forward to getting back to school and finish my engineering degree. I loved the idea of understanding the world, building and using tools, and all kinds of engineer stuff. I was getting tired of looking at something and guessing what made it work because I didn't have that information available. 

One of the joys of engineering classes, over, say, technology classes, is that you go into the why and how, not just the application. Over the process of my 5 years for my B.S., I learned how to build a computer from sand. We made the wafers, we made the circuits, we built the state machines, CPUs and memory and we learned how and why to program them. There was little that we didn't investigate. That isn't to say we completely understood. Each of these areas had sub areas and people had devoted their lives to particular aspects of everything we studied. That wasn't lost on me, so please don't think I'm arrogant in what education I have. I am acutely aware of my own ignorance.

So, one class I had was machine level programming. We had a board that was about a foot square. It had a small keyboard for Hex input 0-9 A-F, an LED display (Red LEDs, not LCDs), and bare chips. It was an 8086 processor on board with a whopping 16K of memory. With this, we had to build programs and become familiar with how data was stored and processed with the lowest level of programming. We had to be aware of each bit and where it was and where it flowed. It was a chore to work on. Plus, Intel chips did everything backward so we had to take that into account. Bytes were hard to read. It made me really dislike Intel's chips.

In keeping with my program's "make them suffer and then show them an easier way" paradigm, we were moved to a lab with Apple computers. Apple used Motorola's chips, the 64K series. There were emulators that allowed us to create low-level programs on the machine and we could see where the data was in memory, in the registers and all the other places data moved around. It was so much easier to understand than Intel's chipset that I fell in love with the stupid thing. It eventually landed me a job with Motorola, where I work to this day. My interview there consisted of "Can you read assembly on the 64k?" and my response was probably along the lines of <pupils dialated> " I LOVE the 64k! What a terrific instruction set!" My main accomplishment during that period was solving a memory leak in low-level code that plagued a product for over a decade. The product used a Real-Time Operating System that passed messages back and forth to the processes via a queue and occasionally, it forgot a message and the memory never cleared. That was the "memory leak."

So here we are 22 years later and I order the computer above. Yes, it is a full blown computer. $50 on Amazon. The drive is 16G, not out of line with the servers you can get from Amazon or Azure for VMs. The OS is a version of Linux. You simply connect a keyboard, mouse and monitor and boom. you have a computer. When the first version came out, I had read about it and thought that it would change the world. It is that accessible. Now we can buy cell phones with the same specs, but they aren't completely accessible in that it isn't fully interactive. Still, this thing is amazing. It is essentially that foot square board I worked on but it has a quad-core ARM chip with 1G onboard and whatever SD card I can put in. I can access the internet and program the board to run peripherals. For me, it is an amazing tool. 

I hope I never get tired of being amazed by what mankind can do with what we have learned over the millennia. It keeps me from being depressed by the stupidity that mankind is still capable of.