Where I've been

It's been a very long time since I posted anything, hasn't it. In case you were wondering if I had a good excuse or not, here is a list of things that have happened since my last update:

• Got a part time job,
• Got a full time job,
• Learned lambda calculus and LISP,
• Wrote a programming language and a compiler,
• Learned to sing,
• Sang on stage,
• Held some more Robot Wars competitions,
• Handed over the society to next year's president,
• Put together a tender bid for work,
• Won the contract,
• Bought and built a new computer,
• Set up a home file server and uPnP media server,
• Accidentally erased my MFT and boot sector,
• Managed to restore them,
• Built and programmed a robot for the New Inventors TV Show,
• Appeared on TV,
• Studied for exams,
• Finished university

So yeah. I've been busy. Fortunately, each of these is an excellent story which I hopefully will be able to recount here in the future.

But now that that's out of the way, we can get back to talking about robots.

I've been following the Google AI challenge (http://ai-contest.com/) and I highly suggest you check out the forums. Were it not for the aforementioned points, I would have loved to put an entry in, but as I write this there are only 6 hours left to go for submissions. Ooohhh.... now there's a challenge....

I also wanted to bring your attention to this amazing post. Give it a read while I go beat my head against the wall for even considering giving myself MORE things to do.

 

Hungry Hungry Robos!

Hungry Hungry Robos was an event for the 2010 Sydney University Robot Wars teams to get a chance to test their robots before sending them into battle. It was the first chance teams had to try out their robots and it was also heaps of fun.

The rules are very simple: The robot with the most marbles in their corner (taped off squares) when time runs out is the winner!

Below is the poster I designed to promote the event. As you can see from the dates, this actually happened ages ago, but I've been to busy to cut everything together until now. The next event will be some time in August.

Edit: Fixed the broken encoding on the video. Fun fact: This video took longer to encode than the entire event took to organize! Peas out.

Sweet Zombie Jesus!

This was too cool not to post.



I was also reminded of this single bladed UAV. Unfortunately, this design is pretty useless, since any efficiency gain you get from the one large blade to provide lift is overwhelmed by the tiny, multibladed propeller doing all the work. Still, it looks cool.



Coming up next: Sydney University Robot Wars videos!!