Quintin and Brandon spent the time there talking to the kids who came by the booth and working on the Outreach robot while also tweaking some parts on the Competition Robot. One unfortunate turn of events began when Quintin attached the top lift’s motor wires to a battery. The motor struggled to push upwards for a second then started smoking before it blew out. It gave off a terrible grease-motor oil smell that can only be described as the cause of brain cancer. After Quintin and Brandon removed the motor, they tried another with a red X on it. They then thought better of using that one and decided to just remove it and not try to lift the overweight arm.
On the other hand, the Outreach robot's NXT brick needed a firmware update so that Quintin could compile and download the Tele-Op program. He grabbed the roller dolley, put the computer, outreach robot, and USB cord on it and zoomed around to look for a connection. After he looped around the whole room without a bar, he went out to the main hallway and managed to leech a lobby connection.
After that adventure, they had a problem that wouldn’t let the robot respond from output from the Computer with USB, Wireless, or Bluetooth. Brandon replaced the DC Motor Controller, tested the motors with the battery, and Quintin fixed a broken link in the battery’s connectors. We got help from Annika from Team Genius, and she figured out that the DCMC was plugged into Port 4 on the NXT rather than the correct Port 1. After correcting this little oversight and getting the robot drive working with USB, Quintin decided to use Wireless. The only problem is that there was no connectable network, and he, Brandon, and a RoBugs member couldn’t figure out how to activate Bluetooth on the computer. After a good while we noticed that Delta had a stand at the convention, and had small, light wooden airplanes that we decided to throw around in our free time while the kids were listening to the speaker. All in all Quintin and Brandon feel like they had a good experience with the kids, and were glad to be able to get a few things done on the competition robot.
