sigh. today [for programming/electronics] was one of those days where you work for hours, starting with a small problem, realizing it's a huge problem, thinking you'll never solve it. and, to make it all the worse, there WAS no problem to begin with. or at least, not the one we were trying to solve.
that's right - it was just tobi, me, and karlin late tonight when we tried to download the code again, after fiddling with IP addresses for a couple hours, and guess what? erin and caroline and i just didn't read the message correctly yesterday. that 34% it was stuck at was not 34-percent-downloaded. no no, it was finished downloading, it was happy. it had 34% free space. meaning - there was no problem to begin with, at least when downloading the way we were.
i think i am understandably frustrated by this realization - karlin, tobi, caroline, erin and i spent a ton of time tonight trying to understand IP addresses for the driver's station and the router and the bridge and the crio. and when it finally works? it's because it did all along. and we had just messed it up majorly in the middle in the processing of debugging.
granted, it only worked because we hard-downloaded it. the wireless still doesn't work, but that might be because we actually messed it up with all the reconfiguring and IP-address-messing. so tomorrow, we'll have to go back and undo all the stuff we did today and THEN see if the wireless works. i wrote us a note on the page karlin marked.
in other news, annie and sallie made an awesome visual representation of the trailer. that thing is HUGE!
we also discovered that the windmill design will likely not work, because it requires an enormous accuracy factor. thank you so much to those that made the [yes, another] prototype out of 80-20 and sheet metal - even if we may not end up using that design, that prototype definitely helped us to understand pros and cons of the design.
we are thinking of a conveyer belt concept involving surgical tubing. caroline made an ace run for some surgical tubing. i'm not sure what happened after that, to be honest. that's when i became consumed by pinging and replies and IP addresses.
an enormous thank you to karlin. after she discovered that HEY there was no problem to begin with, she only laughed instead of being annoyed we'd just wasted a boatload of time. so THANK YOU.
i guess it's officially robotics season.
we're meeting saturday 10-1, not on sunday, and monday at a time tba.
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