Picture taken by UCSD IEEE
I participated CAMM 2013 last weekend, generally that was a pretty good event, and I had lots of fun there after all.
Since the competition starts at 8:00 AM Sunday, May 12th, UCSD IEEE provided a practice session from Saturday 10AM until 8:00 AM Sunday.
I went to UCSD on the noon of Saturday, and the practice maze was set up at idea study lab at 4th floor of engineering building. There were a few teams practicing on the practice maze already when the time I was there.
I just simply made couple slow runs for my mouse on it since this maze was the old maze that UCSD had in the past, and the gaps between the joints of 2 boards made my mouse crash at speed run.Then I was informed that the maze for competition(better one) will be set up at 5PM for practice at qualcomm conference room at first floor of engineering build. So I was chilling around to wait the final maze being set up.
The final maze wasn’t be able to set up for practice until 1AM on Sunday since the paint wasn’t dried yet(they repainted it the day before). After the officer of UCSD IEEE set up the final practice maze, I was be able to step into the qualcomm conference room to practice.
Practice maze layout
As long as the maze was available, I quickly calibrate the threshold for sensors, and starting to make some test run. The walls are made by wood with glossy paint on the surface, and their posts are customized by using plastic. Technically, plastic gives higher reflection for light, therefore, I was a little bit worried about the transition between wood wall and plastic post. Once I made a search run on the maze, seems like my PID could over come this, even though it was still affected some where, but overall, my mouse worked fine on wood wall and plastic post combo.
Picture taken by UCSD IEEE
During the practice run, I was be able to make the mouse run at 0.7m/s minimum search speed. However, since the maze was more slippy than I expected, the mouse couldn’t turn stable at this speed, even though the mouse looked fine in the video for practice, but it did slip on turning at some other test run on this maze
Video for Practice Run
Something unexpected happened after I did several test run. The right motor mount of my mouse broke into 2 part after a heavy collision to the wall. Well, luckily, I learned the lesson from APEC this year, and I brought EPOXY glue with me this time. It was 4AM and I still have at least 4 hours to make the glue dry.
I put the mouse vertically to make the glue dry faster
in fact, this is kinda expected somehow, because both of the motor mount of my mouse had crack before this happened, since 3D printing at shapeways with detailed black option was as strong as I expected.
Crack on the motor mount, taken a few days before competition.
Since there is nothing I can do at the moment, I chose to take a nap until the competition started.
Other teams are still practicing on the maze overnight, when I was waiting for the glue to dry
At 8AM Sunday, we were asked to leave the room since they need to construct the maze for competition. At the meantime, we were outside waiting and the registration process started at 9AM. The competition finally started at 10 o’clock in the morning. The maze got revealed after a short opening ceremony, and it didn’t look hard generally. I notice that there is a IEEE sign on the top part of the maze.
There were 20 teams came and 18 mice be able to run on the maze. The order was randomly picked for each team, and I was at the last(I asked, because I wanted more time for glue to dry)
Video for all entries are embeded below, the MC was quite good at bring up the atmosphere, and laughter were heard all over the game.
My Competition Run
Video Compilation for all teams
After a lunch break, all team finished their runs at 2:30 PM. We had a group picture outside of the lobby of engineering building, and the entire competition ended here.
Group picture taken by UCSD IEEE
At the end, I wanted to thank UCSD IEEE to bring us such a wonderful event, to have us stay all together to compete and having so much fun 🙂 I am looking forward to compete at CAMM 2014.
