8/28/2008 Meeting Minutes

Last week, Mrs. McCurdy pointed out that the team's experience allows them to get a jump on the season by working on organization in advance of the the challenge announcement. We were able to set our agenda for this week based on that focus. In addition, Mrs. Naughton led a discussion on what was learned from the weather station tour and distributed a paper on climate. The team chose to read at home and answer the questions as opposed to doing it during the meeting.

Danny and Trevor came up with a robot schedule and reviewed with Mrs. Emge. Danny entered the data this week and it's posted on the blog to the right as "2008 Robot Schedule". Nice work!

Nate and Michael generated a project schedule and reviewed with Mrs. Naughton. The data will be posted once entered this week.

Patrick and Joey started attaching the mission items to the board while the coaches were busy working with the other boys.

Andrew, Paul and Alex had volunteered to work on organizing software. Andrew experimented with my-blocks to understand how they are stored and how we can be sure which version we're using. More work is ncessary to figure this out, but Andrew was diligent in his effort. The NXT software is quite confusing in this regard.

Paul and Alex helped Patrick and Joey on light sensor characterization. Last season we found that one sensor had a different response. The goal of this exercise is to determine the repeatability of the sensors with each robot for black, white and the colors available on the mat. As a reminder, the post-mortem identified repeatability of the robots as an important trait. Nate built a spreadsheet for documenting their results, which can be found in the links to the right under "Light Sensor Data". Nice job, Nate! Paul build a jig for mounting sensors that has a quick-change mount and keeps them at a fixed height from the mat.

Welcome Back, Supernova, 8/21/2008 Meeting

Today's meeting was primarily a postmortem of the 2007 season. We discussed what worked and what we can improve on from last year. Below are the results and action items for which they volunteered.

Vote results:

• They voted to keep the Supernova name, 5 to 3
• Regional preferences:

1. Batavia
2. Palatine
3. Lake Zurich

Action items and assignments. The organizational stuff we can do at the next meeting since we don't yet know the project or missions, but we have enough experience to know the fundamentals of what generally needs to be done.


We need a "lawyer" at each tournament run to respectfully discuss with the judge any scoring issues. Also responsible for the mission tracker and working with the rest of the team to make tradeoffs. Needed 2 team members so there is a backup.

• Joey and Patrick

Robot Run Organization: We should have a binder for the missions: robot alignment, implements, etc. Need a solution for quickly accessing programs.

• Michael and Andrew

Software organization - process for keeping computers synchronized, understanding my-blocks and how they are stored. Robot download before meetings and tournaments. Integration of Andrew's program access. Includes SW part of the technical presentation and board.

• Paul, Alex and Andrew (related to program access)

Project Schedule - work out the steps for completion and when they need to be complete, with enough time left at the end for practice before regional tournament. Assume 2 meetings per week starting 9/4.

• Nate and Michael

Robot Schedule - work out the steps for completion and when they need to be complete, with enough time lef at the end for optimization and practice before regional tournament. Assume 2 meetings per week starting 9/4.

• Danny and Trevor

Tournament tri-fold information boards. Everyone contributes but we need an owner for each.

• Joey: Bios
• ?: Technical
• ?: Project

Robot Re-design and testing. Think about improvements, build and test solutions and present to the group. Finish this in the next couple weeks so that we know the robot platform, making it easier to design implements and approach a final design sooner.

• Nate, Michael, Andrew, Paul and Danny

Other topics discussed:

• The team liked solving all missions last year and then optimizing for points. They think they can move quicker to multi-missions from the beginning now by doing more up-front thinking about the implements and what missions can be combined.
• Helper charts might be useful, like wheel rotations vs. degrees robot rotation (single wheel turns).
• Test all missions on at least 2 robots. If they do not behave the same, find out why so that we may learn and also to make the missions more robust.
  

12/28 Power Lines and Wave Turbine Videos

Patrick made the corn mission more reliable and Joey finished the power lines this morning. The power lines mission plants 2 trees and connects 3 properties to the power plant. With the wind turbines and dam, it's worth 50 points alone.

We also shot a new video of Nate's house solar panel mission that now throws the wave turbine into the water. Paul designed and built the new wave turbine to work this way.

12/27 Minutes

We had a very productive meeting. Alex worked on the Alien Chicken. Andrew, Danny and Sam also worked on project. The whole team spent quite some time hashing through the mission order and discussing ways of reducing our time. The order was mostly agreed upon until finally Joey and Paul volunteered to decide on the final order so the rest of the team could continue on other tasks. The order now combines more missions and requires fewer implement changes. The group decided to decline to do the coal mining. We discussed methods of organizing the programs so that it doesn't take so long to sequence through them. Andrew volunteered to bring an example "super program" that is faster. A new mission tracker has been published at the link on the right.

Mrs. Naughton brought in some tri-fold display boards for the project, technical and general presentation. Each boy is to bring a bio sheet to the next meeting to put on the general board - 3 to 5 sentences and a head shot (school photo?) if they have it.

Joey, Michael, Danny, Patrick and Alex all volunteered to introduce the group for the project, including writing up the introduction. We had a secret ballot and Michael was voted in.

Mr. Emge discussed some of the problems with move blocks with turns. This was an issue with corn harvesting. By changing to single wheel turns, Patrick was able to modify his program and get a pretty repeatable mission in a short time. He came in before the meeting to accomplish this and the video is below. He is returning tomorrow to make it less sensitive to alignment in base. He also found a way to send out an oil barrel at the same time, since we must get an oil barrel to the farm to make the harvest count. This means we still get points for the corn even if we didn't get the truck sent to the farm, which was the original order.

Nate also came in before the meeting and refined the solar panel program, using a light sensor. It's pretty reliable using different robots. Paul built a wave turbine that rides on the solar panel so that it gets thrown over the house when the solar panel is installed, combining these missions.

Joey and Paul worked on power lines Wednesday morning, including planting 2 more trees. They figured out how to use the light sensor and touch sensor to put it repeatably in a really good spot. There is a little work to do on it yet and when they finish, a video will go up. It uses the same "scoop" implement as many other missions, and gets 50 points, so this is a really good accomplishment.

Below is a video of Patrick's corn harvesting mission.

12/23, Meeting minutes

We're still at 10 minutes for all missions, but Nate spent some time before the meeting finishing the solar panel installation mission. It's a dead-reckoning program but works very well. Video below.

In addition, the team continued work on the project and Paul and Alex got the dam working.

Nice job, Nate!

12/22 - Uranium Mission Video

Paul fine tuned the Uranium mission today using light and touch sensors.

12/20 Meeting Update

It's been a while since the last post and Supernova has made tremendous progress. The project is going very well. The boys are finished with their research and are bulding the presentation book. They stayed after school today to get pictures taken for it.

T-shirts are in and will have the new logo on them - same as on the top of this page. Thanks to Nate and Patrick for the designs. The team had a secret vote to pick between them.

All robots are now built identically and the team has finished almost all the missions. Robot time during normal meetings is now spent practicing and getting the time down. Last week was the first attempt at all missions. Currently it takes about 10 minutes but they are learning the importance of proper alignement in base and quick attachment changes.

The team is going to build a notebook with the proper alignment for each mission. The implements are also going to be modified slightly to make them easier to attach - things like common peg location and making the pegs "captive" in the robot. The few missions that need program modifications are now being worked on when those team members can come over and work outside the normal meeting time.

Soon, we will be working on the design review presentation. That will be a good time for the boys to reflect on just how much they've learned and let that come through to the judges.

We will be posting a schedule for the Christmas break. There will be extra meeting times where they can come in and work in small groups to fine tune their missions and presentations.