The annual Robothon was held on October 7th through the 9th in Seattle. Eileen and I went again this year and had lots of fun.

We left Vancouver about mid-day on Friday and stopped at the outlet mall on I-5 on the way. Shopped for a bunch of clothes, bought some, and so did Eileen. This is quite unusual for me as I tend to not “shop” as much as “buy”. Outlets are different from normal malls, though. Not sure why.

I took four robots with me this year to Robothon: my microsumo AL (just for fun and to show off, they don’t run an event for this class at Robothon like they do at PDXBOT), my minisumo Velox, my new six-legged walker named the Metal Insect (yeah, I think I need a better name), and my maze solver Hyperion. This is the second year for running Hyperion and the third year for running Velox, although both had extensive modifications since last time.

Saw lots of friends from Vancouver who also made the journey, and caught up with other great guys including Nathan and Ben from Spark Fun Electronics. They were doing another display of cool stuff (including the now famous rotary cell phone) and Ben entered his new minisumo into competition. Nathan didn’t finish his line follower in time but it looks promising for next year.

The contests were excellent, as usual. My own personal results were so-so. My new walker failed miserably. It walked out of the course about half-way down, although it did so very fast. Sigh.

Hyperion came in 5th out of 6 entries, so although it doesn’t sound very good I was still quite happy because the new code is working very nicely; some bug or another stopped it cold at a particular intersection but this problem was very repeatable and probably not fatal to the software design. Still, it was a personal best – two years ago my first attempt at building a maze solving robot was too erratic, and last year Hyperion version 1 couldn’t run more than 10 inches without losing the line.

The best showing was Velox with second place in Advanced Minisumo. Got beat by Dave Hylands, again. Dave’s robots are typically very good, although a hilarious event happened where his robot Stinger (fast minisumo wedge) got beat by Pete Mile’s six legged walking minisumo! Dave forgot to change batteries for the event so Stinger ran so slowly that it simply couldn’t push anything so it eventually got ran out. The crowd loved it! I lent Dave a new battery and of course he returns the favor by beating me!

Looking forward to another great event next year. By that time I hope to have a serious start on a RoboMagellan entry although I am not sure I’ll have it ready in time. Back to working on the robots!