Subject:
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2nd bot entry: Brawnbot, and a tale about why you should always read the manual
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.space
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Date:
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Mon, 2 Aug 2004 14:34:41 GMT
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For your education and amusement. Here it goes:
I was visiting my parent’s place this weekend, where my Lego is, and used a good
bit of it building my first ever humanoid bot for the contest. I finished it by
Saturday, and was pretty satisfied with it; without the use of ball joints, I’d
managed to make a pretty agile bot that can crouch down and pick up containers
from the ground and walk around with them.
Then I had a big problem; with a contest that ends at an unknown period, it was
too risky to photograph the bot with my fathers analogue camera, since I
wouldn’t get them until next weekend and be able to post them before some time
next week. And we only had a few hours for photographing Sunday, because I was
invited to a birthday by 1400.
So we borrowed my sister’s digital camera that were “simple and easy to use” but
runs out of battery very quickly. Back at my parents place we arranged the Lego
scene in the sun on their south facing terrace, and from 11-1300 I crawled
around on knees and elbows on the rough concrete terrace, shooting some 60-70
pictures of both my brawnbot and one my father had made. Not very pleasant in
the melting midday sun, especially since the brawnbot’s friction-pin-joints
seemed to loose some of their rigidity because of the heat (maybe I just lost a
lot of patience because of direct sunlight): It demands a lot of fine
adjustments. So far so good, after a quick bath, I went over to my sister’s
again to get the pictures out of the camera again, and proceed to the birthday
with them: There were a lot of my niece’s flower pictures, but only two pictures
of mine on the camera. I wasn’t able to smile for the next couple of hours…
After a lot of cake eating, the rest of the party decided to go to the beach
because of the heat, while I went home to have another go at the shooting. The
camera were recharged, and after emptying it, we put up the scene, and from
1700-1800 shot the entire Brawnbot sequence, and went over to get the pictures
out. And now the story begins to seem a little absurd: No pictures on card. So
we called my sister at the birthday to ask for help, but she didn’t understand
what was wrong (maybe it was my niece that’d messed up the camera, so she
suggested that we looked in the manual: It wasn’t where she’d told us, but my
father found it nearby after some searching: Apparently the first click of the
release button was the camera focusing: To actually take a picture the button
needed to be pressed down further: Apparently I’d spent around three hours
focusing a lot of nice pictures, and if we’d bothered to look at the display
we’d found out.
Back at my parents place we had a big problem: the sun had disappeared from the
terrace by the time we got back: the only level place without grass around the
house, so now artificially lighting were necessary, so my father went out to
find a new halogen lamp he’d bought, and after some troubles of inserting the
light tube, we put op the scene for the third time. Starting once more with the
Brawnbot sequence and a very low battery, I suddenly realized that for the first
5 pictures or so, I’d made the exact same error, and we had to start all over
again.
By now they called from the birthday to tell that dinner were ready soon, and
after some delay, we could continue the session: The heat from the lamp were a
lot more bearable than the sun, but I’m not sure my father felt the same way
since he was holding it! Anyway the battery ran out a couple of pictures before
we had finished the sequence, so for now the ending must remain shrouded in fog
and mystery.
Back at my sister’s place, it turned out that the bucket we’d used as support
were obscuring a lot of the pictures, but by now I didn’t care: I had some
pictures to show today, and I went merrily back to the birthday with the CD at
around 1900.
But if you think I was that easy off, you’re wrong: When I came home to
Copenhagen at about midnight, I decided to have a look at the pictures, but when
I inserted the CD, it made a lot of very nasty noise, and before I could get the
CD out, the outermost parts were seriously scratched and it smelled badly.
The strange ting were that although it seemed like the CD were destroyed, and
I’d lost the data I’d fought so hard for, perhaps together with my CD-drive, I
couldn’t even get annoyed: The situation were simply too absurd to leave you
with anything but a smile and I went to bed: With the luck experienced so far it
wouldn’t suprise me if I found out that the contest was over when I turned the
computer on today or that I would get a virus my sister tried to email it to me.
Today it seems like the luck has changed: It turned out that the drive had
survived, but the CD simply couldn’t stand 48x speed. And the pictures
miraculously survived the damage, so here they are (when moderated):
Now I just hope that the contest continue until after next weekend so I have
time to finish the Brawnsequence and photographing the other bots
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