Robotics - Smoking Pointers

Though there was a robotics meeting this Wednesday, I didn't log it here because I had more interesting thoughts to put here instead.

Since it was the first day of finals, there were not very many people there. In fact, it was just me, the supervisor, and a builder. The builder wasn't doing much of anything when I arrived; there really was not much to be done without the input of the lead builder. He left, leaving just me and the supervisor. As I am not a builder, I couldn't do anything at all (besides adjust a little bit of wiring). I did some poking around in the intrinsics definitions and learned all manner of interesting things about how RobotC does stuff. I finished coding my attempt at circumventing the field control system, which I began testing at the prompting of the mentor. It used jumps to hardcoded pointers in addition to all manner of other terrible stuff, so I really didn't expect it to work. However, it definitely did. Ending the program in the debugger failed to stop the motors, resulting in some smoke.

After those tests, an engineer from John Deere arrived to help us. We did some fiddling with the hanger bar, but discovered its motors could not maintain the position and trying to do so resulted in bowing of the channels. Since my attempts at end-of-game circumvention were uncontrollable, they were abandoned and we still have a lot of work left to do.