Post Robotic relaxation

Everything is calming down now after the FIRST Championships. I'm trying to capture some lessons learned and keep some thoughts and idea's for next time. If anyone has any fund raising idea's I'd like to hear about them. The money was probably the biggest hurdle.

We, team 704, does have pictures from Atlanta. One thing I'm doing now is buying a new and better camera with stabalization. A lot of my pictures came out fuzzy.

Below are some pictures on the team 704 odyssey that, mostly, I took. Also another link to the Google pic

FIRST Championships

This has been an exhausting weekend at the FIRST Robotics Championship in Atlanta Georgia. We arrived Wednesday night but it all started early Thursday morning. We got in un-crated the robot. We ran some practice rounds and started scouting teams as well as warming up the Robot.



More fun was on Friday morning...the real thing started...qualifying rounds. We started out strong, three wins in a row. Unfortunately the win streak didn't last. We had some poor luck of the draw, our alliance was with some weaker robots and we were against 3 robots that all wound up in the final rounds. Our alliance lost. We lost one more Friday when two robots were blocking us and our alliance robots weren't coming to help break us loose.

Saturday looked promising at first, at least until we lost our first round...then our second round. There were no good explanations except not much cooperation between alliance teams.

Alas, at the finals team selection, our team number was not called. The race for the Championship was over for us.

It was an exciting weekend. The high school kids had a lot of energy and some of it translated to me. I had a lot of energy...more or less. Over all it was fun and tiring, it's most certainly a labor of love.

Headed for the FIRST Championships!

Team 704, the SGP Robotics club, is headed from Atlanta GA for the FIRST Robotics Championships! This will be SGP's first trip to the big game!



We have the airplane tickets, another team will be taking some of our equipment to Atlanta in their trailer, and the excitement is mounting. I'm very excited! I contacted the Lockheed Martin internal newsletter about doing a story on the FIRST Championship. It's an event where there are potentially hundreds of future employees!

I was so excited I pulled out my NXT robot and started playing with it. I've also updated my personal web page with the robotics stuff from Dallas and Lone Star tournaments.

Building Robots to take over the world

I apologize for not writing lately. I've been busy lately working with the South Grand Prairie Robotics team. I tell everyone it's to build robots to take over the world but it's really to build a robot for the FIRST Robotics Challenge.



The FIRST Robotics Challenge is (FRC) is a great organization where high school kids are given a game, a “kit”, and 6 weeks to build a robot to play the game.

The game is called Lunacy. Basically, you try to put your balls in your opponantes trailer. Every robot has a trailer behind it and so while you're trying to dump in someone's trailer, they're trying to dump in someone elses trailer.

The kit is a set of parts to build a basic Robot with enough programming to have a joy stick control it. From there, each team needs to figure out how to dump balls in opponents trailer, what to do in autonomous mode (the first 15 seconds of the match)

FIRST is a national challenge sponsored by a lot of technical companies who will need engineers in the future and want to get the kids interested now. They are a very organized group who have regional robot tournaments in various parts of the country.

The team I'm working with is Team 704, associated with the South Grand Prairie High school Robotics team. Each team, once a number is assigned, keeps that number and the numbers aren't re-used. If a team disbands, the number is no longer used. Team 704 has been going since 2001 sponsored by physics teacher extraordinaire Phil Harris.



I'll write more later. I just want close by saying that high school kids who are even vagually interested in robots should go to usFirst.org and find a team in your area. If you're an adult (who is a kid at heart) you can help mentor a team. (Even though they're using LabVIEW)

Thankful for Family, NI, and Sarcasm

It's the season to be thankful. So in the spirit of the season I want to say what I'm thankful for.

First, of course, I'm want to thank God for all my blessings. Next, I want to thank my family. My Mom and Dad for giving me a good foundation and work ethic and encouraging me to go to collage in spite of their very limited education. I'm thankful for my kids for keeping me grounded through a bunch of tough years and for putting up with me and my warped sense of humor the rest of the time. And I'm even thankful for my hard driving have-to-be-right brother and sweet sister.

I'm Thankful for my really good friends who helped me get past my shyness, helping with my introversion, and helping me get through my tough years. They are fun to hang out with when I don't have a date. In other words, we always hang out.

I'm also thankful to National Instruments for making it easy to do my job. LabWindows CVI is a great tool for Test Engineers and makes it easy to develop code for test sets and for easy to use hardware. I'm also thankful for all the helpful people I've met and worked with there at NI like Joel, Wendy, Santiago, and Conan. I especially thankful for NI Week and the Wednesday night party they throw, maybe happy they do it than actually "thankful". And, yes, I'm even thankful for LabVIEW, it's a good language and most likely a piece of the future of software.

I'm also thankful to both of the Directors I work for, especially JT. They believe in me and know that I'll work hard to do a good job for both of them.

[Start Sarcastic Voice]
I'm also thankful for the boss who said I couldn't follow a process. Now that I've helped deveop our companies processes and reach CMMI level 5, you proved how well you know people. To the same boss who said I would never work in software at our company again. She was right, I'm not in the software group, I'm Test Engineering doing much more and fun software.

I'm thankful to Electrical Engineers. Since most of you guys don't think I can tell the difference between a resistor and an FPGA, you make it very easy to impress you. Especially, to they lead EE guys who couldn't find the problem between the IMU and GPU on LOSAT. You made it easy for "Just a software guy" to find the 25ns glitch that was reseting the IMU with just a schematic and an OScope.

I'm also thankful to the boss who believes that software is just a passing fad. You make everyone else seem so much smarter.

I'm also thankful to the place I work. [insert almost any sarcastic comment from Dilbert and it applies. I'm pretty sure he works where I work]

[End Sarcastic Voice]

The reality of it is I have a lot to be thankful for and I know that I am truly blessed.

Thank you

NI Help

Since I work a lot with different instruments and don't have the luxury of completely learning the ins-and-out of one product, I rely on a companies help functions to get my job done.

Lately I've been integrating some Agilent RF equipment into a test set. I now have a much better appreciation of NI help. I've always felt like NI has some of the best technical help around, examples, and documentation but I've come to appreciate it even more.

I'm trying to use TestStand to control an automated test on an RF Signal Generator, RF Power Meter, and an RF Switch, all from Agilent but having trouble. Agilent really is trying to help but still have a really long way to go to get close to NI help. When I had problems I entered a couple of on-line help requests but received no responses. I had to call the local sales rep to get the e-mail of a tech rep. I have been e-mailing him and he has been helpful in a limited way. I did get the manual web sequence to control the RF Switch, but for automated tests, that doesn't mater.

The RF signal generator was easy because I've used it before and figured out it's quirks. The examples for the RF Power meter had nothing to do with actually reading power, hmmm. When I made calls to the driver functions, they came back with error messages that gave no hint at what was needed. The funcion panel help gave no hint at what the parameters were looking for. I wound up using some low level SCPI commands in combination with the driver functions. I couldn't get it to work with all SCPI or all driver functions.

As for the RF Switch, the examples seem to include calls to driver functions for many different switch types. For my RF switch, the driver functions generate a lot of "Not supported" error messages. But it was very hard to figure out what is supported or what calls I could make. Also, once I loaded the Agilent IO Drivers (which are required for the system to even see their switch) the Pickering switches disappeared from the PXI chassis, at least from a logical standpoint. I still haven't figured that one out.

It's been a week and a half trying to get the RF interconnections to work. I think I'm close but compared to the NI instruments, it's taken way to long.

Using Agilent instruments has given me more of an appreciation for how good NI help, discussion boards, phone help, and e-mail help really are. I especially want to thank Joel Garner, NI Sales Engineer extraordinaire, for his help.

Misunderstood

I've found that the Test Engineering group is misunderstood, at least where I work. Most of the engineering groups have an identity. The Electrical Engineering group builds the hardware, the Mechanical Engineers builds the moving parts, Software Engineers write the software to control the hardware, and the Systems Engineers glue it all together.

It seems what Test Engineering does is a mystery to the other groups. We are called in late in projects because Project Managers don't know why they need us until they realize they need to make more than one widget (or whatever it is they're making). Then they realize their widget (or whatever it is they're building) was designed in a way that makes it incredibly hard to test.

It's too late but that's when they figure out they needed us to begin with.

We're trying to educate the programs on what we can do for them. We can do is:
- We do hardware and we do software.
- We develop systems (Test Systems)
- We can help them design their widget so it can be tested.
- We can make their tests automatic and repeatable.
- We can help with developmental testing
- We can make sure the widget is built correctly
- We can test your system in the field or on the production line

...Bottom line is we can help.