Machines Behaving Badly - 2016 Edition

And so another Machines Behaving Badly tournament is in the books.  It was a good one.  It may have been our best one ever.  It started on time, flowed smoothly, ended on time and saw a wide array of 3 pound student built robots get clobbered in interesting and entertaining ways. The key to it going well was lots of help, not only on tournament day but in the build session classes that led up to it.  Many, many thanks to the FIRST robotics high schoolers, in addition to the regular "Minion" tournament crew...plus a few recent draftees...

A few robots before combat started:

An ambitious drum spinner fashioned out of an old paint can.

Two saw spinning robots.  These are usually more menacing in appearance than effective but "Saw Shark" actually did win quite a few matches.

"Dead End" was a simple but well protected wedge robot.  The decorative touch of a roadway paint job and Dead End sign was very nice.

This creepy little thing has been around for years.  We use it as a bracket filler so that nobody ever has to take a bye when we have uneven numbers of competitors.  Everyone wants to destroy this dead eyed horror.  They never manage to do so.

Robots in action

In one corner of the arena is a multiple fire "drop hazard".  Things fall from above.  A Teletubby figurine went first.  The pitchfork came down next missing the target and skewering little Tinky Winky.  If you look closely the robot in mid picture has a plush duck on it.  The duck is full of five pounds of lead.  Note the shredded styrofoam everywhere.  That saw actually worked.

Here we have a whole bunch of robots. As the competitors get eliminated we have kids keep them active.  Its fun to toss in 8 or so all at once for a chaotic melee.

Aftermath.  The "Chains of Doom" really put the dents and scuffs into this all metal robot. But the armor held.

Many thanks to the competitors, families and especially to my helpers.  Some are young, some are old, none are really "grown up".

My Dad's New Neighbors

It had been a while since I had gone to see my dad.  His funeral was in January.  This was my first visit since then.

It was an odd experience.  I have often stood in places and felt the weight of history, perhaps even the faint shadows of famous people who have stood in the same place.  But standing at my father's grave I did not get much of a sense of presence at all.

I had always imagined that he would be buried near the farm where he grew up.  Increasingly in his final years he spoke of it often.  But it did not turn out that way.  Arrangements were made hastily and his final resting place is far from anywhere he would call home.  So far he does not even have a grave marker.

On a day where it was not easy to find much to smile about I did rather enjoy a couple of my dad's new neighbors.

On the next little hill over we find this Tree Shaped Tombstone.  At first glance it appears to be a standard version.  

But I always take a closer look, and I am glad that I did because I found something that I had been trying to find for years...

Its a squirrel.  He's got an acorn.  Now with due respect to serious students of tombstones I think this is not an allegorical message of any sort.  It is pure whimsy and I sure appreciate it.

Now, if you want something really whimsical you could follow the squirrel's line of sight for a couple of hundred yards and you would encounter this:

It sure looks like a giant walnut to me.  Other than the name on the other side - and its a very commonplace one - no clues as to why this person chose to be remembered for all time in this eccentric fashion.

I know it does not matter that my father is "far from home" and surrounded by strangers.  In life dad was a quiet, retiring fellow who did not make friends quickly.  I don't actually think the shades of the departed loiter around the tombstones after midnight.  But hey, I could be wrong. And if so it seems as if a couple of dad's new neighbors are gifted with a sense of humor.

Tree Shaped Tombstones - New Lisbon, Wisconsin

A nice example from New Lisbon Wisconsin.  Liking that owl on top.

With a common name such as this - H. King - it is hard to say a lot with certainty.

But lets assume that he liked to hunt and fish.  I think the curved structure below the rifle and oar might be a deer antler.

I like birds on these monuments, owls in particular.  But this one looks more like a bull dog to me.

Sorry 'bout the blurry smudge on this and several other photos from this jaunt.  I apparently have somehow put a scratch on the lens and to my displeasure will be needing a new camera. Puts a look on my face somewhat similar to the pooch-owl.

Fish Wrapper Blues

I am showing my age here but I still have a smidgen of nostalgia for authentic, dead tree, delivered to your front door newspapers.  

There are many reasons why newspapers are in decline.  The electronic world provides faster news.  We don't as a general rule live in compact communities where delivery of the paper is practical.  To some extent we have gotten out of the habit of reading at all.

Oh, there are some places where they remain viable.  Its a treat to go to London and see several papers being sold and read widely on the streets.  It must have once been so in all major and most minor cities.  

We formerly got two papers.  One from a larger city an hours drive away, another from just down the street.  Each was enjoyable in its own way.  The Big Paper had a fun Bulletin Board feature that we read and sometimes wrote for.  I could follow my favorite baseball team in detail.  There were columnists whose writing style and even personality you got to know and appreciate.  The Small Town paper of course was mostly to see who had died, gotten arrested or on a happier note, hit a home run in last night's Little League game.

We let the Local go first.  Our children were grown up and no longer playing Little League (although I suspect they still could in the Dominican Republic!).  In a small community you generally hear quickly about the deaths.  We did not know many of the arrestees.

We stuck it out with the Big Paper for a long time.  They would up the price a little here, shave a few pages off the product there, but the ritual was the same.  Wake up.  Coffee. Get the paper off the front porch.  You generally would glean at least a little information from it. And in recent years we started doing the crosswords with the diligence of near oldsters with a mystical belief in mental excercise as a delaying tactic for senility.

Eventually they couldn't find a local delivery person and the paper stopped.  They ambled back into the picture a while later but with an offer that was ridiculously expensive based on past experience, but probably realistic given the economics of the business.  We declined.

Not long ago we heard from both The Local and The Big City Paper.  Similar offers so I guess this is some kind of Newspaper Industry trend.  "How would you like to get our paper, for approximately nothing?".  One offered a month's worth for a dollar.  Another a year's worth of the Sunday only for a price that worked out to fifty cents per week.  

Both offers came by circuitous routes.  Phone calls from obvious third party telemarketer types. But when we called up the newspapers we were told the offers were legit.  And it was something we actually appreciated especially at the bargain price.  We said yes to both.

The Local Paper turned up on our doorstep for about eight days and then stopped coming.  The Big City paper continues to arrive every Sunday.  But we have started to get notices that we are behind on a surprisingly hefty bill to them.  Having already paid up for a year of Bargain Papers I politely tell them that they are mistaken, but no doubt they will stop our paper soon. It seems to be a pattern.

So at some point the mighty Newspaper Industry has not only declined into a wan shadow of its former glories, but it has also been infiltrated by petty grifters.  Maybe these unaccountable but loosely affiliated telemarketer types are equivalent to soot smeared Newsboys of a long past era. I am pretty sure they would jack up the price of The Daily for a prosperous looking customer, and I would not at all put it past them to occasionally short the clientele of the Sports Section.

Perfection in an Imperfect World

I rarely venture into political discussions here.  I have my opinions, others have theirs and the Internet hardly seems a place where thoughtful discourse happens.  Like many I am far from pleased with the options we have before us next week.

Obviously it is not a perfect world.  Far from it.  

But that does not mean it does not contain elements of perfection.  My grandson is walking and talking.  This year at Thanksgiving the Kids Table is where the fun will reside.  I leave photos of The Next Generation in the hands of his parents, but I can show you a couple of other examples of perfection.

A part I was supposed to machine to 3.50 inches.  Two extra "in your face" decimal points thank you very much.

And the maple tree that stands in front of Trowelsworthy Hall.  Perfect not only in its magnificence but in the fact that it always hangs onto its leaves longer than any other tree on the block.  It was a beautiful day, a perfect day.  But I looked up and said, "nah, not going to do any raking today.  Go and enjoy".

May you  find your own personal small Perfections in this Imperfect world.

Solid Work on the Beach

I have had fun learning Solidworks, the high powered 3D modeling program that enables you to virtually create almost anything.  I have dabbled a bit in using it for 3D printed parts and hope to graduate to having our FIRST team do more pre-build prototyping with it.

Its fun to play with.  Sure, there are suggested ways to do most things.  But there are quite a few "alternate routes" to follow as well.  Even when my assignments are done I enjoy tinkering with it.  

Quite a while ago I discovered that you could make the parts you were working on have different colors and textures.  You could make them out of pure gold.  Or mahogany.  You could polish them, make them checkerboard patterned.  When I had a difficult part done I would find someplace on it to add embossed letters.  I go back and forth between GIZMONICS INSTITUTE and ACME INCORPORATED.  I have even found a way to put a smiling badger on the corner of the 2D blueprints that are generated from the 3D part drawing.

But recently I found a marvelous, obscure little function that lets me get rid of the bland, light grey back ground and put my work....on a beach.  Or on a factory bench.  I think one of the rocky desert background scenes is a location often used in filming for the original Star Trek. Soon I expect to I figure out a way to import new and varied background scenes.  

What scenes, real or imagined should I then choose as backgrounds?

80/20 Plus a Bumper Crop of Good Ideas

In the "pre-season" before FIRST Robotics really gets going we do get the team together once in a while.  On a recent Saturday we had several things going on.  One was a chance to play with a batch of 80/20 parts. For those not in the technical mindset this stuff is preformed aluminum in an assortment of clever sizes and shapes.  You can make many things with them, and it is easy to bolt things together, take them apart, modify them.  This has very obvious appeal for FIRST where you have a crazy short time period to build something quite elaborate. And many teams actually build two identical machines.  One for competition the other to practice with.

Its fun stuff to play with and I think will make our build season run smoother.  I will insist on having a bit of steel and plywood in the build anyway.  Traditions must be upheld.

We got other things done too.  We are going to actually keep detailed notes this year. And we have more in the way of manuals and such.  So a ridiculously over engineered book shelf got made.  

Of course we drove last year's robot around a bit.  We do need to start training up the next generation of drivers.  But several of the day's most interesting revelations centered around...bumpers.

Bumpers.  All FIRST teams despise them.  But the competition rules require robots to have protective bumpers with very specific construction. Plywood, foam pool noodles and heavy vinyl fabric must be put together just so, and then attached to the frame of the robot in a fashion that allows very rapid change out between two different sets of bumpers.  It is a real pain.

Last year our bumpers were difficult to swap out.  You had to get a socket wrench into some very tight quarters and when you did there was always the risk of bumping delicate wire connections.  So eventually we found some little plastic do-dads that fit over the hex head of bolts.  This allows a team member with nimble fingers to reach in and tighten the bolt by hand.

But these little plastic parts cost 50 cents each and are hard to find.  Hey, lets just make some...

Fire up the solidworks software and ten minutes later we have a design.  Here the kids are setting up to print a small army of them but I said we only needed a few.

The new version and the old.  They work equally well.  Our first 3D printed widget.  The first I suspect, of many.

The bumper question came up because we have been doing a variety of outreach visits these days, sometimes with the robot, sometimes without.  It really is best to have at least the front bumpers on.  This one is looking saggy and beat up, we never did get the letters perfect and had to keep slapping more layers of packing tape on to keep them in place.

We are in the process of bringing on some new members.  One of our freshman new recruits listened to our tales of woe regarding making bumpers and said; "What's the big deal?".  Turns out she knows how to do upholstering sewing.  Someone who can make really nice looking bumpers....a cheap and cheerful method of attaching them.  I felt as if the Heavens opened up and a ray of sunshine came down from above.  A few faint notes of song from Angelic Choirs on High whispered to me for a brief rapturous moment....