AVC: Midnight Hacking

As the days count down to the Sparkfun AVC, I thought I'd share a little bit of my insane world with you. Things are going just ducky right now.

I drove up to Boulder last night to do some more trial runs. At 10pm. I had planned to try my approach of smoothing out the turns to see if it would help.

Of course, I forgot to compile the code just before I left. So that's bad. But I'm now finding out that the code I was going to compile had an evil bug lurking within it. So it's good that I forgot.

Had I brought that code to Boulder, the robot would've followed a swoopy, loopy path, like this... so... pretty... the gentle curves of failure...

I had made one little change to a variable normally used only for logging... not realizing that the vital steering routine depended on it for calculations. Really? What idiot wrote this code?!

The number of days left before a deadline is inversely proportional to

• the number of bugs introduced, 
• the difficulty in accomplishing anything, and 
• the time required to do even the most rudimentary tasks. 
• It's also directly related to the success rate of anything undertaken.

So I have, full force, entered a crazy-zone, the kingdom of Murphy, who's Law makes sure not even the tiniest little thing goes right, so as to wear down every last nerve and further shred every tattered semblance of sanity to which I cling with feeble, keyboard-worn hands that regularly introduce more problems than they solve.

Ah, good times. You should try entering this AVC thing.

But I will not be beaten that easily. Nay, I am not going down without a fight. I shall bend this robot to my will. I shall unleash the rubber chicken charms to fend off evil bugs, and I am going to kick this gyro bias problem to the curb. The very curbs that Data Bus keeps crashing to.

So there.