Event Log

All times given are in CDT

Day One

• 9:00am – James completed the auto submission code for the competition.
• 12:00pm – Dana picked Caleb up at the airport, completing the assembly of the Five of Six team.
• 1:00pm – Everyone was gearing up for the spec release. To help with pre-game jitters, we went to the snow cone shack down the street.
• 2:00pm – Spec Released! Printed three copies and had entire team read through spec.
• 3:30pm – Spec discussion began after the release and lasted until now. We broke into teams and began developing the different pieces necessary to get going.
• James and Dana began pair programming the basic obstacles - craters and boulders.
• Caleb and Greg began working on getting the server to work. Figured out how many calls can be made back and forth in a set amount of time.
• Jia and Ed began working out geometry between rover and the boulders and craters.
• 5:00pm – Caleb got the LiveCD to boot.
• 5:30pm – Everyone cheered as we watched the first rover make it to home base.
• 6:15pm – Took a break and had Haystacks for dinner. Refined strategies and worked out new ideas.
• Caleb: "So when a sky writing pilot gets his first job, does he write Hello World?"
• Goal for the evening - to get the run home code working.
• Greg to set up controllers to run James' code.
• Caleb: "Just ignore incoming data and run straight for the goal."
• Discussed how to collect, store and use telemetry data. Do we need to store or ignore all calls except for the most recent?
• Decided to keep boulder and crater data for future reference. Tabled the enemy martian problem until tomorrow.
• Ed: "If the choice is between collision and home base, choose home base."
• Caleb: "Choose life!"
• James: "If he makes that choice, would our rover become self-aware?"
• 7:00pm – James added the rover stats.
• Ed and Jia helped figure out the angle variable in the telemetry data for the rover's angle of direction.
• 8:00pm – Greg and Jia ran to Crest for groceries.
• 8:30pm – James cleaned up some of Greg's code.
• 9:30pm – Everyone but Dana sat down and hashed out the angle of direction. By 11pm, successfully sending data to test server. Bot can make it home!

Day Two

• Caleb and Dana began creating evil maps for testing purposes.
• Created a map of craters that touched in the shape of a C. Rover crashed and burned on both the crater version and the boulder.
• Also created a map called evil_test that has four quadrants. Quad one is 250 boulders, Quad two is 250 craters, Quad three is full of martians, and Quad 4 combines all three at once. initial runs in this map fail miserably.
• James worked on rover's ability to determine unknown statistics.
• Greg, Jia and Ed worked on path finding, stopping and driving behavior.
• 1:15pm – Got the rover to come to a complete stop in front of craters are boulders. Next step is to go around obstacles.
• 4:30pm – Basic boulder avoidance working. Craters are still eating the rover.
• 5:00pm – Break for dinner. Drove to Johnny Carino's so Greg could see exactly what country Italian was. He was hoping for BBQ spaghetti or red sauce and spare ribs.
• 6:30pm – Caleb and Dana designed a few additional maps for testing purposes.
• Greg and Jia continued working on collision detection and compensation for detection of obstacles after a collision or an avoidance occurs.
• 8:30pm – Rover doing fairly well at random spread maps, not evil_test. Fails miserably on walls of boulders or craters.
• Greg and James started arguing about who had a particular idea. Dana piped up and said, "If you two can't get along, I'll take the idea." Caleb then looked up over the edge of the couch and asked, "Who's taking my idea now?"
• Dana began preparing images for use on the website.
• 9:45pm – Greg and Jia called it a night.
• James and Ed brainstormed some more on the collision detection problem and implemented a smarted collision detection system. Replaced a bunch of Greg's code but the system is getting better.

Day Three

• James continued to refine the collision detection system with Ed's math skills helping a bunch.
• Jia found a large number of bugs for James and Greg. The fixes to these bugs improved performance a bunch.
• Caleb helped James run the collision detection system tests.
• James integrated the various systems so they work much better together.
• Greg and Jia developed and implemented alien detection systems. Initial tests were quite promising.
• Greg added in functionality that allows the voting system to combine votes. Helped to increase the accuracy in finding it's way home more efficiently.
• Dana put together the web page you are now reading.
• In an attempt to develop alternate ideas to collision detection, Jia forked James' code and worked on it.
• 6:00pm – Decided to add the evil_test map to the mailing list to determine what kind of luck other players have with it. Caleb wanted better scores before posting.
• 6:15pm – James began adding path finding functionality to code. This is a hope to get around the c_crater wall of obstacles test that Dana and Caleb built.

Day Four

• James fixed a few minor bugs after discovering the rover making kamikaze runs at craters it didn't know existed.
• James built a system for navigating mazes but was unable to complete it before the contest ended.
• Caleb performed LiveCD testing to make sure our code worked there. He scared us blind with initial reports that our turning code didn't function there. This was solved by fixing /etc/hosts and that's why a SysAdmin is a wonderful pet to have!
• Greg tried to write "Watch Your Ass" code for the third time, but gave up. No one can keep track of Greg's ass.
• Dana had to work today and could not help.
• 1:55pm – We submitted our code to the organizers!