January 19, 1999
The I/O port was tested and worked. A bug in the software (reading from it in 8-bit when it should have been 16...) said that it was failing .79% of the time. After the bug was spotted and fixed, a true reading of .1% of the time was reported. Using higher voltages and shielding brought that down to a complete 0% failure. Over 400MB of data was both written and read from the I/O port with no errors.
Calan is now designing the structure of the robots. The team will meet a week or two from now at Vader's house to spend the night and work until a hovercraft is completed. Then two more will be completed as time goes on. Another night will be devoted to the competition robot, then to the tanks when desigining them is complete.
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January 23, 1999
We are taking steps to make sure that Marvin is Y2K compliant. We want to make sure that the motors do not keel over when the date changes. We even have evidence that the very metal or wood that Marvin is made from may simply evaproate because it would not know what to do. :)
On a more serious note, much of the initial coding is finished. It has not been tested, and therefore we still have most of the work ahead of us. The sensor grid for the competition robot has been disigned. This one will give the new competition robot a great advantage if we have enough time to program the driver to use it to its full extent. The motor circuitry is in process, however until Geneva gets us the motors and the PCB material we desperately need we are still not moving anywhere with actually getting something built.
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