I just got home after another busy weekend of working on our robot in preparation for Ultimate Ascent, this year’s challenge. This was the final weekend of the 2013 build season for the FIRST Robotics Competition and I am convinced we’ll be fielding a great competitor this year. The video below shows off our autonomous mode, fully tweaked and dialed in. After I filmed the video I learned that we do have two additional days left before we’re required to crate up the robot. This is fortunate since we still have to finish the climbing mechanism and fine tune a few unpolished bits of code.
FRC Team 3711 Disc Launcher Demo
Whew, what a weekend of progress on our FRC robot! I think between myself and my student, we put in about 30 hours over the last two days. As of right now, we’re caught up with programming everything on the robot, but we still need to add code to drive the lift mechanism when it gets bolted on in a few days. This year we’re using C++ for programming so the entire process is much easier now compared with Labview. I shot a video at the end of the day to demo what we’ve accomplished:
We’re Expecting a Son
Hi!
My wife will be starting her third trimester in a few weeks, carrying our second child. This one is a boy and we plan to name him Gabriel Connor! We learned his gender at her last ultrasound, around 22 weeks gestation. She had a follow-up ultrasound about a week later and the technician was able to capture a 4D image this time. Apparently the baby has to cooperate for the image to be usable.
I also learned that today marks the 40th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. This revelation was chilling as I find the entire concept of abortion distasteful. In fact, 784,507 abortions were reported in 2009 according to the CDC’s latest statistics. I see my son’s face in this picture and I know that he is alive, a human being entitled to the same civil rights as as any other person. He can think, feel, and even hear my voice. In this nation, it would also be perfectly legal to abort him. There are four abortion procedures that may be used to terminate his life, and each one of these would cause him tremendous pain.
Roe v. Wade was decided before the advent of high-resolution, 4D ultrasound technology. I can only wonder if the decision would have been different had the justices seen the faces of the unborn children whose very right to exist was being questioned.
Lighted Boat Parade
We headed down to the marina Saturday evening to watch our local yacht club’s Lighted Boat Parade. Six boats participated this year. While we were waiting for the event to start, I set up my tripod while Siena and my wife headed down the waterfront trail. As they returned, Siena decided to run ahead toward me, crossing the path of five very large dogs with glowing LED collars, reminiscent of the robotic dogs from the movie Up! The dogs were friendly, but it gave us all a momentary scare to see them bounding toward her in the dark.
After gathering at the mouth of the harbor, the lighted boats headed off in formation toward their party spot. Sadly I didn’t get to join them; I could only shoot pictures from afar. Siena yelled “Merry Christmas!” to each boat as it passed closest to us. They were friendly and returned her greeting, some coordinating their effort to the count of three.
We were ready to head home as the boats crossed under the bridge and out of sight. Just before we reached the car, our daughter befriended a 5 year old and they took off running in the opposite direction. Together they followed the waterfront trail under the bridge to a nearby hotel where the boats had gathered to put on a show for the hotel’s guests. We definitely got our exercise trailing these preschoolers with boundless energy.
As we were headed home, Siena whined that she wanted to ride on the boats, to which my wife replied, “we ride in airplanes sweetie, not boats”. I smiled.
Happy Thanksgiving
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! This was our first Thanksgiving at home and we cooked a feast!
Hiking Near Lake Lenore and the Grand Coulee Dam
I drove up to Grand Coulee to visit an old friend from college, Kylee. We were engineering students at Cal Poly where she earned her mechanical engineering degree. Now she’s working at the Grand Coulee Dam on temporary assignment through the end of the year. In addition to giving me a tour of the dam, we also ventured off into the surrounding wasteland for a hike near Lake Lenore.
The landscape of Northeastern Washington is dry, hot and barren, but strikingly beautiful as well. The land was created by fire and shaped by water over millions of years:
- 40 to 60 million years ago: Granite bedrock formed deep in the Earth’s crust, eventually being uplifted to form small mountains and an inland sea.
- 10 to 18 million years Ago: The Grand Ronde Rift experienced a series of volcanic eruptions which filled the inland sea with basaltic lava.
- 2.5 million years ago: The Pleistocene glaciation covered much of North America with ice sheets, which blocked the Columbia River causing it to divert to the south, creating a channel which would eventually become The Grand Coulee.
- 18,000 years ago: Glacial ice advanced to block the Clark Fork River drainage in present day Idaho, creating a massive lake which covered much of Montana. The natural ice dam failed, releasing roughly 500 cubic miles of water in 48 hours. This process is thought to have occurred periodically resulting in a cataclysmic event that we now know as the Missoula Floods.