March 4, 2000
On March 2, 2000 Drmrboy (Aaron Wright, head of competition robot for 2000) officially stopped work on the competition robot for the IEEE Region 2 competition for the year 2000. The team is still planning on attending the competition and supporting all other teams present. Photos of the progress made and a technical report will be made available on the web site once the decision that this robot will not be continued next year is made official.
While this is a sad chapter, it is opening new possibilities. Now that there is no focus on the competition this year, focus can be put on expanding the Marvin Team to the original vision, and perhaps beyond. Click here to visit the recruitment page for more details.
March 25, 2000
Things are going slowly because of school, but things are getting done. "Wraith," a robot chasis made from a Radio Shack remote controlled car, has been successfully hacked. The chasis can now be reprogrammed to allow any external circuitry to control it. It is currently running a PIC16F84, and it is controlled by the R/C car's original controller.
A 68000 robotic core is also underway, but due to lack of time it is not yet completely running. It was able to run a small segment of code, but then "flips out" and randomly writes all over RAM (sometimes sequencially, sometimes not). I am almost completely convinced that it is more of a software problem than a hardware problem. This is to be the new robotic core standard. It will be capable of running either a MC68000 or a TI92/TI92+/TI89, possible both simultaniously. A multi-processor system may be developed in the future (up to 4 processors maybe?). This will allow the robot core to do complex tasks like image recognition/processing while it can still think about what it is doing.
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