WE WROTE FUNCTIONAL CODE!

Hey so today (Sunday) we got a TON of stuff done. We had as many mentors (Jessa, Judy, Karlin, Trae, Eric) as programmers (Erin, Sherri, Mary, Alecia, Caroline). We took the electronics board off Rosie, and harvested all of her speed controllers, labeling them 06. After that, our mentors gave us a very useful introduction to C programming. The silly stuff we couldn't figure out was explained, and it all finally made sense. There were lots of "OH! That's what wasn't working!" moments, and it was all very good.

We then had a group brainstorming session on how to make the robot work, number of joysticks, etc. We finally decided on one joystick for driving, and another controlling the arm and the ramp. Preliminary arm ideas included forward as going down, backward as coming up. The joystick would control the direction/speed of the robot but the direction joystick is moving would not matter. It's the joystick position controlling the speed, if that makes sense. A combination of buttons would spin the motor controlling the ramp, because we do not want the wings unfolding by accident!

After that, we broke into groups to actually write code. Working code. It was pretty impressive. Anyhow, Caroline and Alecia were working on arm code, Mary doing the wings/ramp code, and Erin and I worked on the driving code. Following our lovely mentors' instructions, it was much much much simpler than in the past and we/I actually understood it. First, we drew pretty graphs and talked about how it would work, coded that and *gasp* it worked. I know that arm/wing people also had success. We also started talking about deadband stuff and doing preliminary coding for that. And then I had to leave.

But it was a great day, and we ACTUALLY WROTE CODE. I think this is really exciting.

And the food was really good, too. Thanks, Mukherjees! ;)

-Sherri