Robotics - Fixed Everything

Today was an extremely productive meeting day of the robotics team! It started with three members, myself included, walking down to a nearby hardware store to purchase some string. Once everyone arrived, we started fiddling with some gears on the robot in preparation for allowing the conveyor belt to be swung around. While that happened, I did more research on using controllers through a laptop. After a few more attempts at actually running it (some of them failing due to not turning on the battery pack), it succeeded! Controllers hooked up through the RobotC dev environment could control the robot's motors! The problem was that I had not opened the Joystick Control window, which is essential for relaying the instructions. After calming down from that accomplishment, we then noticed that only one of the motor control switches was receiving power. It did not take long, upon inspection, to notice that we had actually not connected the battery to the secondary switch. Once that was done, the controller could also run the conveyor belt! Still having the better part of an hour left, the team's captain wanted to try to install the Samantha module (a device for connecting controllers to the NXT wirelessly). After scrounging a flash drive and a few short cables, the Samantha module was configured and communicating with the Cisco router on my development desk. Apparently, last year's team had never managed to correctly install the Samantha module, so they were very excited that it worked perfectly. The last few minutes of the meeting were used to show off our immense progress to the other team in the building.