Making sure we have atleast a functional basic robot

Dearest Electronics Team,

Here are some important next steps:

1. VISION SYSTEM: PLEASE SAVE AND PRINT OUT ALL YOUR CALIBRATED VALUES. This is WORTH GOLD right now and all we have. Shirin or Sophia, I implore you to print out the values for RGB and error values etc. that allow your camera to work. Please do whatever you need - i.e. nail it to the ceiling if you have to. I don't want you to lose these values in the many versions of saved code you have on the desktop (ack, do we need to learn and use CVS in the future).

2. DEFAULT CODE: Let's make sure that we have atleast a moving robot. That would suck if we spent ALL our time trying ot get the camera code to work and didn't have a running robot (and if you look closely at the code, you'll see that in user_routines.c, that all the code that allows your robot to work has been commented out, which means you can't currently run the camera at the same time as your regular default code; gross). Let's make sure the deafult code compiles and that we can actually run our chassis on it - electronics board and chassis nearing completion, unfortunately a lot later than we had hoped :( :(

3. HELP FINISH UP THE ELECTRONICS SETUP: Bud is building a layout board for you. Jen now knows how to solder and Chrissy knows how to crimp lugs onto different sizes of wire. We should get this whole gig set up real soon and have all the wires connected except to the output actuators and sensors. I'm relying on you to get this done!! Jen also knows how to use heat shrink so let's try to use that rather than lots of electrical tape all over the place!! Oh right, you know what, Erin knows how to too because she did that in 8th grade tech challenge!!

We'll come back to the vision system when we have atleast a basic robot that works during the non-autonomous periods of the game. At this point, I *AM* concerned that if we focus all our time on vision tracking duirng the autonomous mode, we'll end up with a robot that sits there THE ENTIRE GAME. Should we not aim to atleast have a robot running during the non-autonomous part of the game??

That's just my opinion for all it's worth.

Thanks for listening to and surviving yet another Emily blogpost.