Blacksheep

Well me and Moose have worked together on projects before and we tend to work well. Although both he and I have a bit of a sluggish style of working that even a procrastinator would frown upon, we get our work done. Now that our project is at the point where there is nothing to be done but test the code, which we need the robot for, we have been forced into waiting again. Now since our work ethic allows for setbacks like this but our teacher doesn’t, we have found ourselves in a bit of a jam. But I think that he and I are a good work group. Now all we have to do is get the robot and we will be home free.

Other than our lax work ethics though, Moose and I are entirely different people, which makes us a better team, I think. He was not my first choice, no offense, but he was in the top 6. You would get that one if you were in my class. Anyway, I think I would have probably picked him anyway since he goes to West Perry with me and we can do things at the home school as well as in class.

This week I made the final timeline (I think) and came up with a final purpose for our robot.  Moose did his share of work, but he has been getting a little out of his ethic, wait a minute...he had no ethic.  Sorry Moose if you read this.  But I carefully read the coding for what it does when it comes in contact with a wall or object, I really couldn't figure it out at first, so if anyone has any suggestions please post them below.  It seemed like it made sense at first but the real problem is that I can't test it on the robot.  So if I alter it may not work at all, heck it may not even work now, since I got it off some dude on the internet.  I thought the website for the robot would have more coding examples and I also thought that we would be getting the robot by now but the date just keeps on moving back.

It seems like everything will happen all at once and I’m not sure if everything will be able to be done that has to be done.  I mean we were supposed to have a contraption made to fit on the robot to help us with the whole thing but since we don't have a robot and can't find any specific sizing guides we are sitting in a canoe without a paddle right before a waterfall with the possibility of saving ourselves just out of reach, just to put it vaguely.  But I hope that it will work well, my grade is depending on it. 

So far we haven't been able to do too much because we're afraid of none of it working when we finally obtain the robot.  Most of that is behind us now.  What I did (and hope that moose did too) is copied all of the coding and manuals to a flash drive so we can view them easily at home.  I also copied JGrasp to my home computer but the program occasionally calls on other programs that my home computer does not currently have.  So i have to be very careful what parts of the coding that i change so that i do not screw up something that already works.

Other than the problems with JGrasp, the coding is simple since the creators were nice enough to explain most of their work.  Once i get back to Vo-Tech and can play around with the coding to JGrasp's full potntial i think we will have something to at least start with when we get the robot.  But that is only a hope not something set in stone so please wish us luck.

P.S. Sorry about the grammar or spelling errors in this blog, I have been forced to use my grandomother's computer (which doesn't have MS Word) since my ISP decided to require a system password, that i do not currently know, to jump on the web.

This week we were to join a few forums to possibly help us with our projects.  Doing this was easy enough, and Champ was nice enough to unblock most of the good ones so that we could access them from VoTech.  Other than that we really couldn't do anything more with our project.  The waiting is kind of unbearable but I think a few weeks of little to no work won't hurt me and Moose at all.  Yep we will just sit back and wait till mid-May until the IRobot comes.

But on a more serious note, we did do a few things to prepare for the times ahead.  We snooped around and made sure to take tabs on our classmates and see how far they are on their projects.  Needless to say we weren't really all that surprised.  Ryan and Evan are doing well but really they haven't gotten all that far since last week (they're still on the main screen of their game).  Moose and I are in waiting mode.  Josh is probably doing well but I really didn't look into that particular project.  And I still have yet to see the real point behind Andrew and Curtis' project, no offense Moomaw. : )