McMaster Olympics

[MyPistolsIn3D]

Anyone going to McMasters science olympics? If so, are you doing the programming event? Lego robots, should be fun.

[Genesis]

I'm going.

No programming though. My school's too cheap to buy Lego Robots for me to learn how to program them. I wanted to do that though.

[Pickles]

oh ill be there.. hooray for tracksuits

[Tony]

Genesis wrote:

My school's too cheap to buy Lego Robots for me to learn how to program them.

you generally program them in C or Java anyways... so if you're familiar with LEGO and one of the languages above, its very easy to pick up on the consepts.

do I have to be a part of a highschool team for this?

[Pickles]

its not even Java or or C i dont believe, its using something called RoboLab atleast thats the software they said that is included in each of sets.. where its just like icons to show what to do.. ie you insert an icon that tells it to turn on and it does that.. it said it was meant for kids like 8 and up so we figure we can figure it out..


This is just speculation, and a bit of hope, cause if its in C we are royally screwed, and if its in java we have 1 guy that knows that watered down holtsoft java.. and thats about it.

[Genesis]

Oh really. Cool.

Well it's too late now, we didn't register for that event.

tony wrote:

do I have to be a part of a highschool team for this?

Ya you do.

[Tony]

Pickles : LEGO mindstorm is for 12+, but yeah, they got their own drag & drop logic blocks visual design entironment. Though you can imagine how useless that is...

here I'm suppost to program my robot in C for the project, but I want to try to convince my TAs to let me install java on the unit instead... I'll be talking to them tomorrow about it

[Pickles]

ahhh, you were talking bout the old real ones.. gotcha

How are you liking mechatronics? it seems to be an interesting program.

How many hours of hw do you have?

[zylum]

I'm going to be there too

if you need to find my team it's cald team Michael (me) and its got 3 ppl in it

[Tony]

Pickles wrote:

How are you liking mechatronics? it seems to be an interesting program.

How many hours of hw do you have?

I think I need to make a FAQ page about my degree program

in a nutshell, its awesome! I get about 5 hours of work / week, all done wednesday night. But you got to keep in mind that we have 30 hours of lectures (with some tutorials mixed in) / week as well.

[rizzix]

http://lejos.sf.net yep u can use java to program the mindstorm

[Pickles]

Lets hope mother nature holds off on the rain

[MyPistolsIn3D]

Go team Cheat! Man we got destroyed. But at least we lost with style.

[zylum]

my team won software engineering thanks to me even though i thought the even was a pile of crap with almost nothing to do with programming...

also a team from my school won the spiral something event... it was the wone where you had to build a protein molecule and take a chem test or something

[Genesis]

We didn't win anything either. Although I wasn't very impressed with the judgind system they had.

For my mechanical transporter, their target wasn't even centered with the ramp, and the guy wouldn't let me move it. And the ramp was kinda warped at the bottom and sent the car a bit off track. So we ended up perfectly in line with the target, but a few centimeteres to the right.

And in the photonics challenge (which was worth it just to wear the white suit) I think we should've gotten at least top three. Our shape was really complex, we hit every target in the most difficult way possible, had an awesome poem, and aced the test. But I think the chick judging our table was a little slow, she even spilled liquid nitrogen all over our thing.

Also our teacher clearly won the challenge! (Or at least came second, although I checked everyone elses thing and it looked like we won.) But somehow ended up in fifth! The girl beside her who's crane thing snapped and fell over got a higher place! I think they read the list in reverse.

Oh well though. Good times.