Back to blogging

Hey guys! Sorry about the long wait for the FLL updates. Was feeling very tired yesterday and it is pretty much the same today although I will just make an effort to post since it is too early to be sleeping. Essentially, I did another rebuild, which is just so characteristic of me. Here are some photos since I did bring my camera to the lab.

Wow I have finally finished uploading the photos after such a long time. This thing has taken much time to build and much effort thinking of how to charge and change the battery so the programming progress is slow. However, the bone bridge is complete as well as the syringe. The bone is now aligned but the cast is not applied yet because I am doing the pacemaker and patch first. Unfortunately, that is still under works so once the first part is complete, I'll upload the videos. Thanks guys and I would really appreciate if you would share your ideas with me.

Also, somewhere along the time when I was missing in action online, this blog has reached a 100 visitors. Excellent stuff there and thanks so much for supporting me.

End of holiday rush

Hey people, I really cannot stand Lego. Not that their software isn't good enough, I find the hardware exceptional when compared to the China made versions. It is the software that I'm frustrated about. In the beginning, I wasn't too critical because I thought the lag the occurs every time NXT-G starts was due to the old and thus slower dual core processor. After re-installing NXT-G on my new laptop a few weeks ago, I figured it had to be that the software itself was lagging. After all, I was using an Asus X42JR with an Intel i7-740QM, a 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon graphics card and 4GBs of RAM. The loading time was my biggest gripe. For a laptop that has the ability to handle Command and Conquer, HAWX, and Counter Strike smoothly, I do not see how a relatively less taxing program like NXT-G could tax the processor. Even after it has supposedly "loaded", it will show a blank windows for quite a long time before the GUI loads. When programming, the interface continues lagging, with connector wires often overlapping, making programming confusing. I can certainly tell you that even with a Chinese program like Robo Express with a slightly inferior hardware build does not lag even on a dual core processor. Moving on, my FIRST Lego League preparations have completely stagnated and the competition is approaching quick. 1 month to prepare (ruling out the week with Outward Bound School) is barely enough to finish the programming, which also means that we will not have the time to do any testing. Either ways, I will be working more on it next week (hopefully) so I hope we can produce a robot which is capable of scoring the full 400 points before school reopens. Things will be very different after school reopens with competitions like Robocup Singapore open to prepare for. Which reminds me that we will have to budget for it, again in a week. Looks like the final week of the holidays is not going to be used for unwinding yet again, or continuing to produce more Photoshop works. Alright, post again soon, bye!

Whoa Blogger is excellent too. After pressing save as draft more than 10 times, it wouldn't save. Deciding to be smart, I opened a new tab, copied the content and pasted. Guess what? It posted on the first try. Makes me wonder what the problem was.

FLL 2010-2011

Hi people! Good to know that my blog is getting at least some hits. Today's post will be about my team's FIRST Lego League preparation so its going to be rather dry. So the initial robot was pretty much a first draft, 2 motors facing down at 90 degrees mounted onto an NXT facing towards the playing field and a third motor mounted onto the NXT straight. The reason behind the NXT facing downwards (which looks really weird) is so that I wouldn't have any problems with the 3rd motor mounted low which would aid the lowering of the bone cast. Then I started the programming which got extremely irritating to start the program. Secondly, the low center of gravity, which was supposed to be a good thing, made the robot weigh down too much, scratching the field and caused the rotations to be inaccurate. So me being me, I chose to rebuild and went back to my signature NXT mounted sideways robot which I had finished on Monday. The cast fitting could be quite a problem even though I mounted the motor downwards as seen in my last test. I will be working on it soon, probably tomorrow once I get permission from my parents to go back to the lab. So now for the hard part which is the attachment building and the programming which I suspect would turn out to be a fully hard-coded program. I will try to upload some photos too and possibly videos if I get anywhere near points on tomorrow. Meanwhile, nothing interesting really happened over the weekends. One thing that I'm really angry with right now is LG's incompetence. I sent my phone (GT540) in for servicing about 2 weeks ago and the got it "fixed". Or at least their definition of fixed. Whenever its turned on, the camera would be activated and the buttons are really loose. Conclusion? back to the service center. Anyway, I am really happy that for once, I'm not doing my holiday homework on the last day and I have actually started so kudos to me. I will have to leave now but I'll update this soon. Goodbye!