Behind The Screens
dalessandro.org
dalessandro.org
So the Cellbots team were at Google’s Cloud Robotics shipping container, prepping a demo of an “Antlerbot” – an RC car controlled by a Nexus One connected to a Sparkfun IOIO board – when disaster struck: the Antlerbot ran up under one of the doors of the shipping container, which was just too high for the sensors – but just low enough to hit the upper chassis smack in the window that showed off the IOIO board … shorting out the car beneath.
So Chaitanya, Arshan, and Charles worked hard to get the bot running again, transplanting the brain from the shorted bot over to the larger Antlerbot which was going to be running on a tablet. After some surgery, they got the bot rewired, but the output was still bad: the IOIO was fried too.
Then they replaced the IOIO board, and still no luck: the new board wasn’t outputting the right signals. It turns out the board was on the wrong firmware version! Chaitanya, the Antlerbot developer, had to go, so Charles, the Cellbots code lead, took over. The source control server with the right code was down, but JP, a random Googler, swooped in to save the day with a laptop full of the right source code he’d downloaded just that morning.
Behind The Screens
dalessandro.org
dalessandro.org