The more complex a system becomes, the more interesting it is likely to be when a catastrophe strikes.

Take, for example, a cup of water on an empty table.  When the cup gets knocked over, the water spills out on the table and isn’t terribly exciting.  Let’s replace the water with some Hawaiian Punch.  Now you knock it over and you get a red pool on the table and a red stain left behind once you clean it up.  See?  More interesting.

So let’s add a bit more to it.  Like, say, a computer.  You know, keyboard, mouse, tower.  Stuff like that.  And speakers.  And a rat’s nest of cabling to connect it all together.  Change the table to a computer desk.  Put a nice light colored carpet underneath all of it.  We can’t forget the power strips on the ground behind the set up, either.  And, oh yeah, a slight incline making the desk higher in the front.

Now tip over the cup.

The mouse pad, keyboard, speaker cable, and tower effectively contain all of the liquid in a small space on the desk.  Nothing spills out the front, nothing spills out the side.  However, let’s not forget the incline.  The incline causes what would be a containment fence on a level surface to become a funnel, which swiftly and efficiently drains the pool of sugary liquid through a narrow space between a section of the desk and the computer tower, and out the backside of the desk, where it produces a red cascade directly onto the rat’s nest of wiring, the power strips, and the white carpeting below.

Yeah.  That was -AWESOME-  You just can’t anticipate that kind of failure.

That’s it.  I’m calling it.  This Crazy Project Weekend is over.

And it’s a big truck of fail.

The biggest problems are the motors.  They just don’t do what I tell them to do.  If they did, this would be a different story.  But I’ve spent over three days tweaking the motors and the robotics and I just can’t get it working.  Maybe I can get a Stelladaptor and try tweaking it with direct feedback.  Maybe I’d be able to do continuous smooth motion if I could have tracked all the bombs properly.  Maybe I just don’t know what I’m doing.

At least I was able to identify the playfield elements and get the computer to tell what the next move should be, even if I couldn’t actually get it to make that move.  The basic recognition and logic was a lot easier than it was for Pong, mainly because trajectories didn’t really matter.  However, I wasn’t quite able to get the bomb tracking/prediction logic working, which would have reduced the tendency for the robot to get distracted temporarily and miss a bomb.  The full tracking also would have made it possible to detect patterns and move smarter.  I also get the feeling that there’s something already in OpenCV that would have taken care of the object detection and motion tracking for me.  That library is so big and I’m not a computer vision expert, so I don’t really know what’s there or how to use it all.  The book and the documentation aren’t always enough.

And then that virus.  Stupid virus.  Make me waste half a day because the bloody computer stops working.  THAT WAS AWESOME.

The segmented auto-calibration thing did work.  I was able to adjust the robot power and swap out gears and the calibration generally figured out the new pixel/degree ratio.  If the motors were more consistent, then it probably would have worked better.  At any rate, that’s a decent technique that I’ll have to remember for the future.  And I’ll have to clean up the code for it, right now it’s kinda messy.

In the end, I did not accomplish what I set out to do.  The best score the robot ever got was 63, and that was a fluke.  And I didn’t even get close to trying to get it to play on a real TV.

So, I’ve lost half the day to a stupid virus.  WONDERFUL.  After repairing my Master Boot Record from the XP Recovery Console, I’m hoping that it’s gone now.  Of course, I can’t tell because all of the Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware tools I’ve used are COMPLETELY WORTHLESS and didn’t catch it or any of the previous outbreaks there’ve been.  I wonder if it’s been with me for months and can explain these randomly recurring virus hits that come out of nowhere and never seem to die, too.

I’d really like for someone to explain where it came from originally, too.  There has to be something I did wrong, somewhere that I let my guard down, and I’d like to plug that hole.  If I’m going to get randomly hit with no explanation while being safely behind a firewall and anti-virus program, then to hell with it, I’m going to start going to porn sites and start torrenting WaReZ.

My computer is acting very odd today.  It seems like it can’t go more than five minutes without freezing up.  This is obviously causing a delay in the proceedings.  If I can’t get it straightened out, then I may have to build a robot to repeatedly hit my computer with a hammer.

So, I thought, “Hey, there’s a firmware upgrade for the NXT, maybe that will help.”

So, I installed the firmware update.

So, now the motor doesn’t move at all.

WONDERFUL.

See, here’s the problem.  It moves the distance I’m expecting very fast, a full 360 degrees in half a second, then it wastes another half second waggling to a stop.  And it’s always wasting about half a second.  It can do 90 degrees in about .2 seconds, then it loses another .5 seconds coming to a stop.  The movements I need for games are going to be less than 90 degrees most of the time, too, so the problem gets worse.

You absolutely cannot be losing half a second with every move and still expect to be able to play a game well, especially a game like Kaboom!

Because everything’s better in slow-motion, here’s what it looks like at 1/10th the speed:

It’s like it’s doing a binary search for the correct point.  If I could get rid of the waggle, I’d probably have something useful.

I’ve been on this Crazy Weekend Project all day and I haven’t even plugged in the Atari yet.  This sucks.

My CD-ROM drive is causing my CDs to go all choppy and weird.  Either that or my ears are experiencing a 5 hz glitch.  Not helpful.  Will likely make weekend more Crazy than Project if this keeps up.

And yes, I still listen to CDs.

Well, the upgrade to OpenCV 2.0 went just wonderfully.  Now, instead of having one function that’s not implemented, I have a hundred functions that won’t even run.

Maybe I should just give up and go back to playing games.

The function I was going to use doesn’t actually seem to exist.  That might be a problem.