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Personal Reflections

Roboknights 2007

RoboKnights 2007 was held at Delhi Public School, R K Puram on 3-4 November 2007. Sadly, it was pretty much of a bad outing for us. We did win the first place in the quiz event (me, Arjun, and Abhimanyu); but pretty much tanked in rest of the events.

RoboKnights 2007 Quiz trophyThe beautiful looking RoboKnights 07 Quiz trophy – I like the design, really.

Frankly, we hadn’t prepared. Really. We were so busy doing stuff for Code Wars 2007 (our own event) because school was closing down for the Diwali break that we didn’t get time to work on our robot. In fact, I started working around midnight one day before the event, and finished around 4am in the morning. Basically, it was just a block of wood with four motors on it.

Day 1
Was bad. I’d got to know that some 102 teams had registered, but the actual event showed a different story…

RoboKnights 2007 opening ceremonyTurned out, that 102 teams meant including all events. So on ground there only happened to be some 20 teams. And then their principal gave a drab, boring long speech (BTW, she said that ‘I see everyone’s getting restless, but I WILL give a long boring speech)…

Shyama Chona speaking at RoboKnights 2007People were getting restless because they got see an (unlocked) iPhone, which happened to be Waris’s. We had the Straw Bridge event first, where we had to make a bridge out of straws (duh), but because of a miscalculation all our weight got concentrated at the wrong point and ours could support only 4 kg (winners could support 12.5 kg or something!).

The other one was Tough. Out bot had NO reverse, so it was a tad difficult to navigate. Suffice to say that it got stuck on three attempts, so we didn’t qualify in that too. TOUGH luck. For a fuller account of Day 1, read Vivek’s version of it. Also, there was no Domino’s Pizza this time, it was the school hostel. I must admit though, that the food was really good, way better than OUR school’s hostel. What had happened is that their Math Society hadn’t got sponsorship for their event, so the suckers went and cried to their principal, got good food (aka Subway and Domino’s) cancelled at RoboKnights and Exun, and got money from that for their own event.

Oh BTW, also had the Quiz prelims. Damn easy. We qualified for the finals.

Day 2
Happened to add reverse this time, two wheels going front, two back. Still, our bot didn’t have enough traction for the Robotics (Football) League event. It was to be played on a small arena with ping pong balls, which happened to be so small that we discovered that it would pass right beneath the bot. So we came up with a plan using a copier paper box (the ‘package’ in which our bot came). We even have a video of the fabrication of this high tech bot…

[yahoo 4858509]

As you can clearly see here, our stuff was cutting edge tech. We finally decided to stick tape (sticky side out) with adhesive on it wheels to give it traction; it just so happened that it came off right away within a few seconds of the game starting. Since a bot ‘can’t leave a part behind’, we were disqualified.

Lunch time was fun. We decided to order pizza, bypassing the hostel food. Had a tough time convincing a joint that we were genuine buyers, because we were telling them to deliver at the front gate of a school. Anyway, we did order it, and waited at the front gate. The delivery guy happened to come along, and even though we’d emphasized main gate, the guy went off towards the sports complex. This had Abhimanyu (!) running (!!!) off there. He finally caught the guy, and we got our pizza.

Quiz finals later, where we basically won hands down. The others had been telling me the whole day that I hadn’t studied anything, and that I should have studied, and I should be studying. Turned out that in the end, I got most answers on stage. Our team name, BTW, for the events was WSOGMM – Whole Sort Of General Mish Mash – a perfect description of our bot.

WSOGMM RoboKnights 2007 Quiz winners on stageThey kept calling us WSOGGM because of which they got a nice shouting from us right during the prize distribution ceremony. Nice quiz though, real good questions, especially the ones Bharat came up with.

The winners of RoboKnights 2006 couldn’t reclaim their trophy. Let’s hope next year’s better…

4 replies on “Roboknights 2007”

When we get teh pizza guy, Abhimanyu actually asked me if we could have a “race”, I declined, and so he ran along with teh pizza guy, who was on his scooter!

RoboKnights was quite fun.

@Illusion: Did I really contribute to your hits? Wow, how many?

@Arjun: Yes yaar, it was so much fun…the ‘TV guy’ who couldn’t find channels, ‘jugaad’ technology, all was fun.

@Anon: Yes, we were there. Ate a bit, but kept (most) of our stomachs empty for the pizza.

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