Rockhopper wins expert division and 2nd place in hide and seek!

I am happy to say that Rockhopper v1.5 has repeated Rockhopper v1.0's win at Trinity! On my first run I got the perfect run of putting out both candles, found the baby, and went up and down the ramp to the second floor. This was something I was unable to do last year and I believe the first time this has been accomplished by any robot at this competition.

Things however went downhill from there. On my second run I hit the button to start and...... nothing. So this run was a bust. I took the robot back to my table and began to debug. It took some digging but I found it was just a bad connector. I was able to replace the bad wire and I _thought_ all was well.

I didn't have much time between when I thought I had fixed it and my next run. So, on my third run when I hit the button it _did_ move however very erratically as soon as I saw this I knew what the problem was. In the process of trying to figure out what was wrong I had disconnected my A/D connector so essentially the robot was completely blind. Worse actually because with the cable disconnected I just got random signals in place of my range sensors. So this run was a bust as well.

However my robot being the only one to accomplish any tasks was still by far the winner in the Expert divsison.

On to hide and seek.

Last year the expert divison was not eligible for the "Hide and Seek" competition. I just noticed in the rules about a week ago that this year it was open to all robots in the competition. The challenge in "Hide and Seek" is to find a baby in the maze. The baby is the same as in the expert division where they have a 15 watt light bulb painted black to simulate the body heat of the baby. The robot simply must find the baby and signify it has done so by either turning on an indicator light or (for a bonus) have an audible voice that it uses to say it has found the baby. I could not do the voice but the rest is the same thing as the robot already knows how to do from the expert division.

The robot gets 3 runs for this competition also. On my first run it found the baby but it signified that it found it outside of the 30cm limit so it didn't count. On my 2nd and 3rd run it found the baby both times but on the 3rd run it took quit a while so I didn't get a great score. Still, I figure 3rd place in an event I had not planned to do and never had any time to write special code for is pretty good.

So now, over the next week or so I plan on getting my thoughts down on paper with new ideas and such. I am also going to investigate what went wrong to try to avoid it next year.