Machines Behaving Badly 2019

The 19th annual Machines Behaving Badly event is done.  And it was a good one.  A dozen or so helpers turn up.  The arena rolls in and is assembled.  Robots get last minute finishing touches.  And the audience shows up.  

There's probably an upper limit of how many you can park on bleacher seats around a six by six arena.  And this is about it.  At the other end of the room the high school team had the Big Robot up and running.

Nice to see a lot of girls trying their hand at the controls.  Also the occasional five year old.

And there were the competition robots.  Many and varied, it made for fascinating matches.  Spinners versus pushers.  Lifter bots versus machines armed only with duct tape and unrealistic expectations.  Some did way better than I expected.  Some surprised us in other ways.

There was a new arena hazard this year, a pneumatic powered axe.  Perhaps just a bit less lethal than the Chains of Doom, but it provided some nice moments.

For the kid brothers and sisters in the crowd there was the opportunity to operate the arena hazards or to drive a VolunteerBot. We had several of these on hand, but the voyage of this Barbie Themed bot is worth chronicling.  Thrown together in about fifteen minutes.

Proudly driven by kids.

And at the end, minus some parts and with a new punk hairdo, Barbie in Robot Cemetery.

A fun but tiring day, made possible only the efforts of my fun and tireless minions.  You see them here and there in the photos wearing the black new version Machines Behaving Badly shirts.  Many people asked about buying one.  But of course I had to shake my head and tell them:

"Some things in Life cannot be bought.  They can only be earned."

Some of the students now bumbling about with these crude machines will go on to far greater things.  They will join the high school FIRST team, they might even be motivated towards a career in technology.  They will accomplish a lot.  But not by buying it, by earning it.

Machines Behaving Badly - Eve of Destruction

This year's trophies.  The bases are blocks of metal from the tech school dumpster.  The upper parts are aluminum scraps from a long ago combat robot.  

Hopefully the event goes off well.  The ever increasing expertise of my helpers is counterbalanced by declining levels of student technical skills and by the general disintegration of supplies, especially batteries.   

There is a greater degree of "biodiversity" in this year's field of competitors.  Two wheel and four wheel pushers.  A two robot multibot and a three robot "unit".  A couple of spinning bars, a grinder disc, a fairly flimsy looking flipper.  One.....maybe two saw blade bots.  A rare full body spinner.  I figure more than half the field will be somewhat interesting.  

With the general tardy nature of the work there has of course been minimal time for drive practice.  I'm ok with that, learn on the job.  

In fact the entire improv nature of Machines Behaving Badly is part of the point.  Immutable Deadlines, obeying the laws of physics, attempting to find loopholes in all other rule sets....good training for future robotics.  And in fact roughly 2/3 of the high school FIRST team come to us via the MBB route.  Of course the first thing I have to do is "un-teach" them a lot of sloppy technique involving lava flows of hot glue.

Pink Reptiles of Wisconsin

It's the time of year when we look up at our front yard maple tree and wonder which will drop first, that gigantic mass of leaves or a foot of snow.  Leaves appear to be winning this year so there have been multiple runs to the municipal yard waste dump.

Over on one end of it are big piles of concrete and rubble.  Mostly from projects around town but evidently some private donations as well.  Here's a swell pink alligator that was set up tastefully.

And say, aren't those some nice red bricks back behind it?  Why yes, and one of them will feature in a future tale of local history.

In honor of those who still rest far from home.

Remembering the end of The Great War.  Nonsense can wait for another day.

Robotics Update - Time grows short

The middle school combat robots class is heading into the home stretch.  It's been a challenge this year.  In addition to the usual ups and downs of working with this age group it turns out we had fewer sessions to work with than expected.  Something about parent teacher conferences that had not been put on the schedule at the time I did my pre-season planning.  So, time to buckle down and work harder and smarter.

Some pictures taken while the clock ticks down.

Our first up and running machine.  Four wheel drive with nice traction tape on the wheels.  With a ramp and some armor it will be a competitive robot.

One week after that photo was taken things were looking up considerably.  An intimidating machine, although the rpms of the saw blade are pretty low.

I put no restrictions on "at home" work or family help.  This lad and his grandpa cooked up something impressive.  Future FIRST recruit I'm thinkin'.

The gulf between high ambitions and the ability to pull them off is usually huge.  It sure was with this kid.  But with a bit of extra help his project is coming together reasonably well.  Other times we just celebrate the high ambitions, which are worth something.

CCC Camp Taylor Lake

I've visited the sites of several CCC camps "up north" in the general vicinity of our cabin.  They are always fascinating.  So when I heard about one that was said to be in such good condition that the baseball backstop was still intact I was quite optimistic.

In one sense this site, Camp Taylor Lake, was a disappointment.  But in examining the reasons why the CCC remains were so minimal I did, as a sort of historical consolation prize, come across another nice little story.  More of a tribute really.

The sense of something being not quite right began with that baseball backstop.

It is in way too good a state of preservation to be from the 1930s.  It still has chicken wire on it.  And there was a basketball back board in even better shape.  The things that looked "too new" were everywhere.

Even the floor surfaces I came across were well preserved.  Usually CCC camps were tossed together with whatever was on hand and by recruits who had at best a vague idea of how to build things.  Crumbling concrete and foundations made of round boulders are the norm.

To understand this let's just meander through the history of this camp.  As it indicates on the sign, this was a camp that was established early in the CCC era....and with operations continuing to 1942 it would have been one of the last ones to exist in Wisconsin.  It appears to have been a fairly major camp, one that was a sort of hub for others.

With the usual fragmentary histories available I have been able to puzzle out that it was established by a "junior" CCC Company.  A group made up of World War One veterans - note the V designation on the sign - arrived in 1936.  The work was of course appropriate to the area.  Forestry and fire fighting.  A picture of Company V1676:

You can't tell much about the camp from this.  Just that there was at least one whoppin' big barracks type building there.

With the onset of WWII the CCC was disbanded, most of the young and not so young men exchanging one uniform for another and joining the armed forces.

The camp on Taylor Lake was presumably vacant during the war years but in 1951 it was leased by Northwestern University who operated a surveying school there for the next five years.  The University of Wisconsin took it over at about that time and for the same purpose.  It was said that there were..."about 20 permanent metal buildings, many of which remain from the days when it was a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp in the 1930's.  Previously the University of Wisconsin's Engineering department had run their surveying camp near Devil's Lake, but pesky tourists had become too much of a problem there.

The new camp on Taylor Lake was very much the project of one man.  He is remembered at the site:

On his passing one of his students, later a colleague penned a very nice memorial to Professor Eldon Wagner.  It mentions prominently his love of the Camp Taylor site, the quality of the engineering knowledge passed along there, and the role his wife Roselyn took in the practical running of the camp.  The softball field apparently was the site of annual student vs. faculty ball games.  I found some photos of the program and the site HERE.   

The engineering camp specialized in surveying technology and ran until 1972.  By that point the old CCC buildings must have been getting a bit run down and apparently everything was razed.

There's a lesson here for me.  Not all history of importance is a thousand or even a hundred years old.  I went to Taylor Lake just looking for another collection of picturesque CCC ruins, remnants of the Greatest Generation's younger days.  In that I was disappointed. Taylor Lake CCC camp was built to a higher initial level of quality and then well maintained.  But what I found instead was a neat little story.  Of Professor Eldon Wagner and his colleague and biographer Dr. Paul Wolf.  Here they are posing - I think - on the ball field, backstop behind them.  They are both gone now but I'm delighted to help keep a bit of their story alive.

Parking Lot - Left and Right

I am as usual enjoying my time at the local tech school.  I'd say that in general both the students and instructors are a notch up from the average public school environment.  The students, at least at the manufacturing campus, are often older and have done other things in life.  Many are ex military.  The instructors likewise are often of a broad experience.  Someone coming from industry to teach has a different perspective than a person who has never ventured out of the Ivory Tower.  It's good people all around.  The teacher-student gap is much reduced and we can converse as equals.  At least I feel I can, being myself older and of varied experience.

That's not to say that there is no difference between teachers and students.  These are divisive times politically, which is why I seldom use my tag "Just Politics".  But I also want to attempt to understand the times we live in, and to share my observations.  Wisconsin may be the ultimate toss up state, and it behooves those who would have our votes to attempt to understand the sometimes peculiar nature of Badger state politics.

In the tech school parking lot there is one section - on the left - that is closer to Administration and to where most teachers have their offices.  And over on the right side, closer to the main entrance, is mostly student parking.  There is no designated parking for instructors or students so other than perhaps a bit more rust on the student's vehicles you can't really tell.  But a walk through the lot on the way to class is interesting. 

Bumper stickers.  I won't tell you which side of the lot they are from.