TL;DR
I’m sorry for the vast posting confusion that I caused.
I live a charmed life, I have a great robotics team that I mentor, I have amazing parts to build robots out of, my life is good.
I posted "I want sensors post because I want sensors. I’m three deep in Sparkfun, Adafurit, Robosyssey etc. sites with sensors that I’d love to use not so much from VEX
I have a robot lab. You’ve seen/heard about Dean’s on “Lifestyles of the Robotic” and the tours of his 1.2 million sq ft lab. My lab is 12*12 and it looks like a Radio Shack and three ham fests barfed up their contents into the room. Cool part is that every part made in the last 10 years is only an arm-reach away, bad news is that EVERY part made in the last 10 years is within arm reach.
So plan on seeing me on “Hoaders – the robots!” in the next year on TLC.
I was working on part of a robot. I never build full robots, there isn’t the time. But I do work on partial assemblies, for example I’ve built the “far west coast” planetary drive. (It’s pretty cool) So I have my hand in building stuff.
I have the mecanum wheels from January and I built the basic squarebot. And it didn’t work (off track displacement) So I added the built in encoders and that started the spiral into disrepair.
Stop
I love Kevin Watson, I’m a PIC programmer from waaaaaaay back. Kevin published PIC code that make hard tasks easy. Part of his code became the WPI library. So you have highlevel (move robot) code, Kevin code on the details of a PID and the ability to bit bang the PIC processor.
Life is good
Then the Cortex came out. EasyC has a really painful GUI (I want type code) and RobotC (which my teams use) because we can type code, but its nnot bare metal like I can get to with EasyC with some workarounds.
Workarounds are the bane of my robotics…
So to make a longer story shorter, I’m in Muppetbot labs working on a simple mecanum wheel/motor/sensor and I reach the frustration point of the season with the IFI change, the RobotC change and me not being able to get to the metal.
So I posted into the now famous thread. And yes I know better. Yes I have lectured others on this in the past. And Disciple posted and while we don’t see eye to eye, I responded. And I know better and yes I have lectured others on this in the past.
And I heard my Mom say “Walk away”. (We all have Moms. listen to her) And I did.
I was / am pleased with the collection of mentors that wrote to me. Most were along the lines of (Foster WTF?) And that helped. And I went into the lab and got the code and the robot to work.
Takeaways for you that read this far:
Dean and jpearlman rock. Their simple 6 line posts of what goes on does not cover the decades of work they stuck into your problem to figure out what happens.
I’m not a role model. Karthik, JVN, Paul C, Rick K are role models. I want to be Rich K when I grow up. (I wanted to be JVN, but he lost his hair) I have a passion for kids (roboteers) and competition robotics, I want my roboteers to have access to the life I have (living in a Radio Shack closet :rolleyes: )
We can’t do this depending on others. I posted a thread about sensors, I got a response from “Lyncas” and others backing me up. We do amazing things, we can do more with better tools.
RobotC and EasyC are pointed at the schools. NASCAR is us, your Dad in the Ford is the schools. We need to find a way to make us all be better. While 2:20 isn’t a big deal, on the floor at Disney it’s a lifetime. I offer 8 matches to a team, 18 minutes for 4 weeks of build time. That is not really fair. So we do 12 events and that seems about right. So I still want a way to make it fun.
So to summarize a summary; Listen to you Mom. We can do better than your Dads Ford. Pick someone else to be a role model, Foster is just crazy about robots and kids. And remember it’s nice that you are important, is is more important that you are nice.
Thanks for your support!
Foster