Day 10 - 2 more days to Seeding
YONG CHENG:
Our team was in Pappalardo Lab the whole day today… Finally, our team has somewhat completed the construction of our robots! Haha, I won’t say that it is 100% completed, but then at least now we have something that is moving, can serve its main function and can be controlled via an external controller. We made some tweaks after our first testing of the displacement of the police car and the pulling of the cannon. They can work but we still have to make minor changes to increase the success rate.
We met Tom (our SUTD President) for dinner along with Corinna and Dan. We had a really good chat about our time here in MIT and of course our dinner in a restaurant called ‘The Blue Room’. The food was really good and I am getting used to the food here in Boston. Actually, I feel like getting another lobster again :X
Tom Magnanti listening to Edward...
Alright, so tomorrow will be a day of testing again. Hopefully, our team will be able to be fully ready by Thursday which is the seeding day! I’m really glad that my team consists of a diversity of people, covering all mechanical, electrical and programming aspects. Benoit is really a good programmer. Besides being really independent, he knows clearly what we want to do and executes them very efficiently. Chang Woo and Yuan Nan have some experience in mechanical and electrical engineering respectively. These make things easier to accomplish instead of a whole group consisting of only people with mechanical background.
2 days more. Let’s quicken the pace.
JIN KAI:
At the start of the competition, one of the professors mentioned that when estimating the time needed to complete a project, take the estimate and multiply it by two to get the actual time required. This is unfortunately turning out to be true; bottle necks crop up at the least expected moment. By the time the problem is fixed (or not), the night creeps up on you and before you realize it, the day has come to an end.
Less than two days to the preliminary seeding - fingers crossed!
KELLY:
It’s getting close to seeding day and all the teams are working extra hard to finish up their robots. My team is no exception – we’ve been spending our time polishing up our robots and getting them ready to be tested. We will try our best to get all the mechanical parts done by tomorrow and test the programme out at night. I’m glad my team is working very well together; we manage to get things done quite fast and quite well too.
We had a dinner appointment with SUTD president Professor Thomas Magnanti (“Tom”). He was a really nice and friendly guy who had absolutely no airs and it was fun talking to him about all sorts of random things, like how he doesn’t like Hainanese chicken rice (?!). Professor Dan Frey joined us for dinner too, and he shared with us some of his ideas for the future SUTD. It was a satisfying and enriching dinner to say the least.
KELVIN:
2 more days left for the competition. Tomorrow will most likely be the last day to complete the robot as Thursday will be the seeding round. Really very tired after fixing the robot the whole day. Nothing much to say here, today is all about work & work..... However, had a great dinner with Tom & Dan Frey at the restaurant. Tom footed the bill for all of us.
EDWARD:
How heartening it is to see all our hardwork coming together and shaping up (:
Shao taught me basic Arduino programming today, cool stuff. Surprisingly, its actually quite fun and amazing to see numbers, words transforming into specific tasks, somewhat like magic (: well; I am a visual person, so anything that can happen beyond of my visual observation always appears a little more magical.
I'm actually enjoying the process of polishing up the robot to make it neater and easier to manage. It may be a simple task, but by no means an insignificant one. The importance of having the robot well labelled and neatly managed is often overlooked. It helps tremendously during adjustments, troubleshooting and movement of components.
Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of our Jacks-in-a-Box AGAIN. Apologies.
It's time to rest now, it'll be an intensive period from now on.
PENGHUI:
We’re almost to the competition date! Tomorrow is Wednesday, so we effectively have about 2 more days to go before the actual competition itself! Our robot’s going along fine, we came to a bumpy start but I think we’re doing pretty well now. Everything should be finalized by tomorrow. :) Finally, testing can begin!
It’s kinda cool to realize how far we’ve gone (and how many mistakes we’ve made along the way). We built up and torn down about 2 prototypes before deciding on this final design. Within these short one and a half weeks, it seems like we’ve made a pretty tumultuous journey.
Anyway, we had dinner with Prof. Thomas Magnanti (no relation to Magneto), who’s a pretty cool dude (and President of SUTD to boot).
He looks like this:
He looks kinda scary in this pic, but yeah he’s a real cool dude in person.
And he’s still real fit at his age (like 70?).
Gotta sleep now. It’s going to be exciting tomorrow.
Oh, on a side note, in two minutes our pump really makes the balloon HUGE. I hope we get like 1000 points for that.
GUAN XUN:
As expected, today was yet another busy day for us. Much of what we had hoped to improve on one of the robots didn't move that quickly and we still need to think about that tomorrow. Tate is however doing very well on his balloon blowing robot, even adding an additional mechanism that will be able to increase the volume of the air delivered to the balloon.
The main problem that I now need to tackle is that of automating the cannon puller robot. Because of the rules of the competition, automation is extremely advantageous to whichever team that can do and use it well. I've already learned how to use a mechanical switch to obtain feedback and then make the robot do something, so tomorrow I will install the sensors and write the code! Very very hopefully, we can complete all our robots by tomorrow.
It really hasn't been going that well these two days. We aimed to complete our robots by Monday but now face the prospect of completing the robots only on Wednesday. The feeling of disappointment is present when things just don't work out as planned. It's just not nice. I guess the part that is not nice is you having to think that your original ideas don't really work. But that's how we all learn I guess!
Sad stuff aside, I am still having a ball of a time working with my group mates. They are such great people and I hope I am able to meet them again in the future, after this competition! I really feel sorry for people like Tat Leong who have not-so-friendly teammates. Life is just so much easier with nice people around you.
IAN:
Urgh! I have 2 grouches for today.
I had to keep on taking apart and reassembling my team's Caltech cannon pulling car due to design changes and bolt positions that do not fit into the designs. So frustrating! Just when I thought I was about to complete constructing it!
I was fed up with coming out with an original idea for that pesky hook holder! Truly great, original ideas for this competition are hard to come by. Chances are that a certain MIT student had already done it while doing Course 2.007 and that the best ones are up on MIT TechTV for showcase. Take the idea for an arm that pops out of the starting box and connects directly to the balloon's air valve -- a sizable number of groups are using that idea as part of their strategy. As a result, across the board, the general designs for each team's robots are roughly similar. On the bright side, if we didn't have the videos for inspiration, many teams would not be able to get their robots up and running in record time.
Luckily, before the end of the afternoon. my teammate, Takashi, used his superb skills with making almost perfect parts to construct a nice hook holder design he made up. The hook holder was of a simple and original design. I was impressed with the accuracy in which in made it too. As a Japanese, Takashi couldn't really communicate well in English, so he didn't really took part in the endless group discussions over the robots we wanted to make. And this was one of the special few times that I sensed that he was brilliant. With that, the robot was almost done. Also, Ravi and Lucas, who were making our team's put-police-car-on-the-dome robot, finally completed the monster-sized arm for the robot. It was a great joy to have finally almost caught up with the teams who were already testing their police car robot on the contest table.
We felt honoured to be invited to dinner with SUTD President, Professor Thomas Magnanti, or Tom, in the Blue Room at One Kendall Square. We all had a nice informal chat with him. I'm really impressed at his efforts in personally engaging his future students. Heading back from dinner, I thought, if I were a future SUTD student, I know that I would receive a great education by working with great people, and most importantly, be imbued with a passion for engineering. I knew that it will be a great university.
Carrying on...
The posters are up! The stage is set! 16 teams. 9 countries. 4 hacks. 1 winner. Nice.