Tough Tasks, No Problem

It's funny how the most difficult tasks turn into everyone's favorites. I guess it's because if something is easy, anyone can do it, and the kids that are involved in FIRST are not just any kids. They are smart, curious, innovative, and want to solve the hardest problems first, just to show everyone that they are not just any kid.

For example, we've been working on our software to control the camera. Remember, we need to detect a distinct configuration of green and pink, one over the other, in this years game. We were pretty excited when we started getting confirmation from the software that it was indeed seeing the color configuration we were asking for.

Over the past couple days we've mounted the camera in a device that will allow the camera to rotate side-to-side, and also tilt up and down through the use of 2 servos. Tonight we began testing the code that will search for the proper color configuration, rather than just look straight ahead for it. We had to work through some problems before we started getting any movement from the servos, but we did get it to work. We powered up the robot controller, and as it finished it's boot-up sequence the camera started panning back and forth looking for the pink and green flag. As soon as we put the colors in the camera's search path, it would lock onto them and never look away. We could move the flags almost anywhere and the camera would follow right along. I'm sure there were other students in the room that thought someone was controlling the camera manually, but it was all driven by software.

So here we are almost at the end of week 3, and we're knocking off the toughest challenges in this years game. It helps that we have some awesome students that have all the qualities that I mentioned above. It sure is making my job easy. :)