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Hardware Competition
STATUS UPDATES
This just in...hot off the press...
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Added barcodes to the download section. If you have not received your barcodes in the mail you need to send an email to Matt Hinchman: mhinchmn@memphis.edu. |
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Renamed the "Downloads" page to "Resources". We updated the board layout and moved scanner information to this page. |
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We updated the overview section to include information regarding the competition challenge, track, approach, and places to buy discounted scanners. |
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Our new website went live today! Visit frequently to see updates and try out new features. We welcome your feedback. |
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The new chute was affixed to the board and photographs taken for posting to the web site. |
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Bar codes were affixed to packages and tested. We tweaked the ramp and chute design. Scoring rules were revised. |
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The playing board (now called the "ramp") was adjusted to give robots more maneuvering room. An AutoCAD drawing showing the layout will be revised tomorrow, then will be posted to the website. Next Monday, after the paint has dried, we will take photographs to illustrate aspects of the contest and post those to the web as well.
Barcodes have been printed, and we are setting up a sheet of labels to mail to each registered team.
As soon as they are posted, we will send out an e-mail to alert everyone who has sent questions to us that answers are online. We reworked this document several times over the past two days.
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All the questions to date have been collated and answered. These will be posted as soon as our webmaster reconfigures the pages to accommodate. Our goal is to answer all questions within 2 business days, so you will now see what questions have been asked almost immediately, and the answer shortly thereafter.
From the start, we have been worried about the cost of the barcode scanner being a hurdle for teams, plus, we wanted to level the playing field so budgets don't win as much as good engineering design. So we have been looking for CHEAP. We have located a scanner and negotiated a group discount of or , depending on whether you want a keyboard wedge or USB interface. Purchase information will be posted on the web as soon as we are comfortable with performance tests.
We gave up on creating much variation in the size of the wood blocks used as packages. All will be the same size. We are going to put two barcodes on each package to reduce the need to manipulate (rotate) the packages to read the label.
The playing field has been modified to provide lines that intersect at right angles, and position markers have been added to alert robots when they are approaching a plane's loading zone.
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We have received some excellent (and detailed) questions, but most of all, we appreciate the advice provided about how other contests were run. (Thank you's particularly go to the University of Alabama (Huntsville) and Mississippi State University.) We intend on keeping our rules as simple as possible, hopefully to one page. Our end of the contest is going to be as low-tech as possible.
We are rethinking/refining the rules at this point, considering how much time it would take for a robot to travel over the board in the allotted time. To help this, we are reducing the dimensions of the playing field. A significant effort is going into finding a cost-effective scanner to recommend to the competitors. |
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