Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Meeting Minutes, Sunday, 10/26/2008

I hope you have time to read this long post. The team has had a great week!

A big thanks to Mrs. McCurdy for being our Teamwork coach. Their primary focus is to concentrate on how they can work together better as a team, also working on other team goals needed for the tournament. Having 3 separate activities during the meeting: Project, Teamwork and Robots, allows the whole team to stay engaged without so much distraction - and it really worked great!

Teamwork:
  • Xander revised the miscellaneous schedule (nothing scheduled for 10/30)
  • Michael revised the project schedule (writing/editing is listed for 10/30)
  • Danny revised the mission schedule. In the new schedule, all missions will be completed and jockeys selected by the end of the 11/2 meeting. Working backwards from the tournament date, he scheduled one practice tournament (12/4), two robot jockey practices meetings (11/23 and 11/30). and five meetings (11/6, 11/13, 11/16, and 11/20) to combine missions, and have the jockeys train with coach assistance. It's rational, but not reasonable, and I think Danny understands that. He said that what he personally had learned about time management through FLL was that schedules can be revised. Beats panic!
Project:
  • The boys have been working on a web site to share their findings from the project. Once published, we'll add a link to this blog.
  • Paul and Nate agreed to have Puppet prototypes by next Sunday's meeting.
  • Scenery and Props need to wait until we have the Puppets settled, but we will need:
    3 scene changes and 1 window change (Pierre's and Alfred's apartments will be the same except for the scene out the window)Radio (to be built out of Legos by Joey)Ghost Laptop (to be built out of Legos by Trevor)Special effect noises: music for the radio station, sound effects for ghostly movement and the heat wave Fog Machine (for our cloud formation at the end)
  • We will also need a puppet stage

Robot - Activity Saturday and Sunday:

Saturday was open table:

  • Joey and Danny completed their mission! Great work. They tried a second robot and it had some trouble, but read on.
  • Alex and his dad came over. Alex is the 3rd mission group in the "Mega" program, thus the robot location is not very predictable. He worked on locating his robot on the mat using sensors. He has a strategy and started programming it.
  • Paul worked on prototyping a tank track to replace the ramp, but decided to abandon after some testing. It was a nice design.
  • Michael, Andrew and Nate finished the day and made a lot of progress.
  • ==> Andrew has made a huge discovery for the team. He had finished his mission but when he tried a 2nd robot, it did not behave the same. The first robot always drove left on a straight run, but the second one was even worse. He tried swapping wheels on one of the robots and found that it drove right! He deduced that the tires were different sizes and since then has found 2 matched sets for our robots that now enable them to drive straight. This is a very big deal, allowing us to have 2 robots that behave similarly enough to make them interchangeable among teams. They are much more predictable.
  • ==> Michael and Nate made improvements to their mission and reliably deliver their cargo to the ice and have a good direction towards the ice drill. The bear is sometimes sleeping, but they've deferred that until after they accomplish the rest of their mission. They've got some good teamwork going.

Sunday:

  • Alex, Michael, Andrew & Nate arrived 1/2 hour early, so Paul and Danny joined them. It was a very productive little pre-meeting with a lot of progress for a short time.
  • ==> Andrew finished going through the wheels for matched sets. He was very systematic.
  • ==> Paul modified his line follower, adding parameters for sensor, line side and power. He tested it and it works nicely. It's called ELF_1 for Extended Line Follower, Version 1.
  • Patrick and Trevor made progress on the house mission, adding ELF_1, and got to the point of sensing the wall with the arm by sensing rotations, as suggested by Paul. They started, and Trevor finished Wednesday, a motor assist that now allows them to sense the wall without adding a touch sensor! Fantastic teamwork.
  • Alex added ELF_1 to his program before time ran out.

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