Want to see an NZ robot?

VEX V5 General Discussion General Forum
#1

Dear Vex Community,
There’s been lots of talk on vexforums about the dangers of posting photos and videos of your robots. While most other NZ teams have camera gremlin issues, AURA (a new college team from the University of Auckland) has worked hard to remove them from our cameras, because we’re all about spurring innovation and we think that posting photos and videos provides inspiration and ideas for better designs, which fuels stronger competition, increasing the value of Vex for all involved. We don’t think that having your robot copied is even that much of a competitive disadvantage - a build design can only get your robot so far.

I’m glad to say that we’ve been successful at removing the gremlins from our cameras. On our website at www.aura.org.nz, you can see heaps of photos (and some videos) that we’ve posted of our robots as we construct them. We’re a pretty new team (having only started in January), so some of the stuff isn’t that great… or at least the stuff we’ve posted…

Over the last week we’ve been working very hard in preparation for our exhibition matches again Massey University at the New Zealand National competition. We’ve finished the first robot, and are 3/4 of the way through the second. Our team members have been helping out at NZ scrimmages all season, so we’ve seen some solid designs and strong competition. We do respect the wishes of other teams though, and thus we aren’t posting the photos and videos that we have of their robots. But since this is our robot, we think we have the right to post this photo of our robot/s if we want.

However, we’re not just going to give you the link to the photo. You didn’t think it was going to be that easy did you?

So just in time for the weekend in the US, here’s the rabbithole. Dig deep enough, and you might just find what you’ve been looking for. It’s probably not going to be very easy. If you really want to see what a round-up robot from down under looks like, follow the trail. www.aura.org.nz/start-here-step-1

Something else too - once seven unique IP addresses have accessed the final image, we’ll be taking it off the website. Just to provide an extra incentive to get to the end first.

We’re happy for everyone to discuss the questions here in this thread. We’ll try to answer any questions anyone has, short of providing you with the actual answers. If it looks like everyone is getting stuck, we’ll give some hints (only information posted from this account is official). It’s taken us the better part of a day for a couple of us to build this from scratch, and we’ve learnt a LOT of things about Wordpress that we really didn’t want to know. One of our test rabbits did the whole thing in an hour. Another gave up and went off to eat some carrots.

Give it a go. Might be fun. We’ve included lots of features that might be somewhat infuriating. Don’t try to cheat. We’ll know. Here’s the link again: www.aura.org.nz/start-here-step-1

Regards,
Auckland University Robotics Association (AURA)

(tldnr, go to this link: www.aura.org.nz/start-here-step-1)

#2

Quite a lot of people have give this a go already, which makes us happy! In fact, we’ve had over 749 attempts at answers so far. However, we’ve spotted a couple of things, so read this for a few hints:

SPELLING DOES MATTER. If you put in an extra space, the answer will be wrong. If you spell a word wrong, the answer will be wrong. Extra punctuation will make the answer wrong. Case doesn’t matter. We’ll automatically convert all answers into lowercase.

People try to skip levels, or just type in the URL. DENIED. There’s a pretty easy way to get around being sent back to the first step when you get things wrong though if you can find it…

For a lot of the questions, don’t bother just guessing lots. It’ll probably take you less time to actually figure the answer out.

Usually we’re pretty specific about what format we want an answer in. If the question has a similar item to the answer (e.g. a time for instance), we want it in the same format.

No one has made it to the end yet… but it’s only been a couple of hours. Feel free to discuss below! (Hint: When we say SI Units, if you don’t put the unit in, you don’t get any marks… just like high school physics!)

ENJOY!

#3

ahaha
i applaud you to think of making people “earn” the right to see the pics :stuck_out_tongue:
didnt go to the end yet, but is there any more info about you robot?
not really the specs, but more awards, competitions attended, and stats

#4

It hasn’t been to any competitions.

uses 12 motors, reaches all goals etc etc.

The robot itself hasn’t earned any awards, but the builders are
~10 NZ champions
~5 world Semi Finalists
~2 world champions

Good luck with the quiz :smiley:

#5

Hey Murdomeek,
Yeah, as C@meron said, it hasn’t been to any competitions since we’re recently only just made it. However, it scores and descores all the low goals an high (30") goals, and does it pretty quickly. To clarify, the builders reached those positions listed by C@meron in the high schools division during the Elevation and/or Clean Sweep seasons, before joining our college team this year.

Just an update: One person has so far reached the second to last question!

#6

Update: First person has broken through. Only 6 more to go!

Reminder: UNITS MATTER. Otherwise your answer could be in Litres or Decibels or Amps or anything. No unit = no marks.

#7

Due to difficulties with people understanding 987, and because of perceived ambiguities surrounding the wording of the question, we’ve decided to replace it with something a little easier. Apologies to those that already figured it out.

And two people have made it past the last question, only five spots left!

#8

You’re a legend. Should I bother asking how many questions there are?

#9

I did it. Not too bad. Although, the New Zealand spelling of a certain unit messed me up along the way… (it should be -er but they say -re :P). A lot of those questions got me thinking (and perhaps Googling). All in all pretty fun; however, I’m not sure the reward was worth it, but it was still a fun use of time.

#10

Not advisable

#11

Thanks Jumper =P

Both spellings of that word are actually accepted, so not sure what happened there. For a lot of the questions there are multiple accepted answer strings just in case people type differently or with different spaces.

Hey, we said at the very beginning: it’s just a photo. :slight_smile:

@Steph: There are 20 questions.

Three people have gotten to the end. Four more spaces to go.

#12

Five spots gone, only two left!

It’s a little bit disappointing how few people know their pokemon gyms… =(

Lots of people getting stuck on the questions that need math - check your units!

We’ll leave the whole quiz up afterwards, but our main robot won’t be there anymore. Also, we won’t be telling you how many spots are left!

#13

That was a fun quiz. Thanks for posting pics of your robot (and coming up with a clever way to do it)!

#14

Although I had fun solving the seemingly endless amount of puzzles, I wish you allowed more than 7 people to view the photo. :slight_smile:

#15

I gave up at the story problem ;_;:frowning:

#16

I gave up at this one. :frowning:
Screen Shot 2014-05-01 at 6.44.39 PM.jpg

#17

LOL I was not that persistent:D:D:D:D

#18