Final Results - 2006

		Round 1		Round 2
	Team	Points	Time	Points	Time
1st	Team OCTOPI	59	37.7	59	42.8
2nd	Irvine Underground	51	5:00	42	5:00
(tie)	EVA	51	5:00	25 (black)	5:00
4th	M1DDL3BR0W	43	5:00	48	5:00
5th	MX	21	5:00	29	5:00
6th	Team Kelvin	26 (black)	5:00	16 (black)	5:00

* Two rounds, only the best round counts, points count first, then time.

Congratulations to everyone who competed!

The arena opened for practice on Friday around 11am. I set up the demo gun to give the crowd something to look at. It sat there firing away merrily for about an hour as several other teams showed up to tune their guns. There was room for about three bots on the table to fire at once and most of the time they all were firing and being debugged. I left around dinner time but everyone was welcome to stay as long as they wanted since they all knew how to reset the arena. I believe one of the teams stayed there until very late that night.

On Saturday I arrived around noon, the competition was scheduled to start at 4pm. There were already teams there practicing, but I had to shut down the arena to do some last minute repairs to the targets. It turns out that some of the more powerful guns were denting the targets, which was breaking the circuit on the back, which was turning off the LED's. So some soldering got a few of them back to working condition, but still not very reliable. The power supply which ran the LED's also had been overheating and shutting down, so I zip-tied it to the metal frame which acted as a heat sink :) I set up the scoring computer which automatically tracks the points and time and we started doing timed practice runs. I was very happy to see that my scoring software worked quite well.

As the competition started, the team order was pretty much first come first serve, there weren't any conflicts over the order which was really nice.

Team EVA was the first to go since he had a flight to catch. His gun was a machine gun with a spring clip (which caused problems reloading, but not too bad). His frame was made of aluminum and used the servo gearboxes to aim. His control circuit was home made and very cool. Control was via a webcam and the software ran on the laptop. His first round he got 51 points (86%) in the 5 minute time limit. His second round he got unlucky and the black target and ended up with 25 points.

Team MX
   Alvaro: Just me! (Lowest budget)
His gun was by far the cheapest and quickest built. I think he said he put about two weeks of effort and maybe $50 into it. The servos could just barely hold up the gun, but everything held together and it all worked really well for being on such a tight schedule. He racked up 21 and then 29 points.

Team Irvine Underground
   Var X, H20, Bartender, Prion: Thinks with Java, and fueled by Jolt. The ultimate caffeinated bot.
IVU used a stripped down AK-47 with a custom hopper. They had a full computer and LCD monitor to control it and used the heavy duty geared servo boxes to aim. They scored 51 points their first round, and 42 the second.

Team Kelvin was fourth to go, using a small airsoft gun and the geared servos to aim. The USB webcam on the barrel to let the software aim. Unfortunately they got extremely unlucky and hit the wire near the black target *TWICE*. If the black target had stayed up then they would have tied for second place.

Team M1DDL3BR0W
   Featuring mildly intellectual solutions to problems of all kinds.
M1DDL3BR0W went second to last. His very impressive setup was one double-barreled machine gun plus a second independently moving single barreled machine gun. They all moved quickly and accurately. Unfortunately, there was no safety switch, so when the driver board crashed the guns would lock in the firing position, which made resetting the arena a hazardous job. Next year I'm requiring safety switches! :) The team shot down 43 and then 48 targets.

Team OCTOPI
   Brandon, Colby, Scott, n8: Built circleK. It's Aluminum!
Octopi wanted to go last since they had a rather bulky set up. They used two machines to control the bot, and their gun platform was large and extremely well made. The gun was a pretty basic machine gun which was mounted to a pan/swivel base. The stepper motors controlling them were large industrial models connected to a very nice commercial stepper controller unit. The computers connected to that. The software just looked at the visible light and detected all the targets. They then proceeded to fire 31 shots to shoot down 30 targets. It only took 37.7 seconds! Their performance was absolutely amazing and it wasn't a fluke, their second round only took 42.8 seconds. After that we moved all the targets in as close as I could get them and had them do a demo run, it shot them all down even though each was within about an inch of every other one.

Media Coverage
CNet
Seattle PI
Team: OopsYou'reDead.com

Photos
Schnivic.net
Flickr: NateOne