Venue

We are here at the venue. This morning consisted of struggles to get internet, power, final lighting conditions, food and water, and some moral. Lizzie arrived with cupcakes and Ben came with water (9 half liter bottles for just a euro!) and some other snacks as well. With food in our bellies and moral lifted, we determined that the lights we not going to change in the venue any more. This is important because it lets us calibrate our robots’ cameras with confidence we won’t have to go through the process again. Everyone started taking some pictures and soon after, we had a bunch of logs to create a color table so our robots would know which colors to look for in the images their cameras take. Chown made us a “very good” color table, which is very rare on the first day. Usually we struggle to get a solid table for a few days, but this competition looks promising so far.

Internet also has worked out, pretty magically. We only had to wait 5 hours before we got ethernet at our table and we are told that the wifi access points for our robots are working, though we do not have the correct IP addresses for them quite yet. Power, on the other hand, is a bigger worry. Josh and Wils found that out the hard way, after blowing a fuse in their hotel room trying to charge our batteries. After a pop, some sparks, and smoke, they found out that our power strips are only rated to 125 volts. As you may or may not know, Europe uses 240 volts. But everything was ok. We have a transformer to convert the voltage! POP!!! … Apparently it isn’t an actual transformer… So we are using the limited number of adapters we have, most of which are not grounded, to power our computers and charge our robot’s batteries. Ben made a journey to get more adapters and returned with two more grounded ones. While Dan ventured forth to return with the wrong kind of adapters, but at least he got 6 of them.

Here are some pictures of the venue. Games do not start until Thursday, so don’t get too excited yet, but we will try to keep you entertained with some friendly scrimmages and the like.

Some of our fields for our league.

Our table. Home for the next week.

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