Wrap up

18. April 2010 by admin.

Today was the autonomous car race at Sparkfun.  I had a really fantastic time.  There were a lot of out-of-towners (e.g. New York, Florida, the UK).  Everybody was great.

 I was pretty freaked last night, though.  I spent all of yesterday gathering GPS data and worrying that I blew a motor controller (turned out to be a power supply issue).  I was also debugging a really stupid problem that turned out to be a compiler issue.  I was up to 1:00am and then got up at 5:00am to keep trying to fix it.  I was happy that I finally found out what it was, but when I got to the course to do a practice run, I found an issue with the distance calculation.  I sent out a plea to Greg and Dave back in Victoria for help in a bit of a panic, but it turned out to be not that bad to fix.  Anyway, by 11:00am, I was pooped from coding as fast as I could for 6 hrs on not very much sleep.  But, everything was working the way I wanted to for the second and third heats.

 Unfortunately, things didn’t go that great competition wise.  I did not make it all the way around the building.  Not many ground vehicles do (about 1 in 10 attempts completed the course this year).  On one practice run I made it 95% around, but that didn’t count.  I placed in about the middle of the ground vehicles. I was just super happy that my car went at all after all the issues because it would have been a drag to get there and not have a working car.  It happens, unfortunately. 

I’m totally into doing it again next year.

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