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WSS Engineering

A collection of stuff I think is cool.

I love what I do and I love making a difference through what I do. Seeing someone else smile because of something I did is my greatest goal.

Who am I?

I am Anthony Pizzimenti.

I'm a Java and web engineer from Iowa City, Iowa. For the last year, I've worked freelance, improving my skills in frontend and backend web development as well as software engineering. I now work for the West Side Story as a web developer, IT consultant, and podcast guy.

I don't have a lot of spare time, but when I do, I play ice hockey for the Varsity high school team (also, LGRW!). I like doing crossword puzzles and playing StarCraft II, probably my favorite video game of all time. I also enjoy playing recreational soccer (although I'll be trying out for the school team next year) with my friends and cooking. My friend Louis and I run a podcast called TechTalk, where we discuss recent news surrounding the technological news sphere as well as do a whole portion of the show dedicated to helping people troubleshoot their PC problems on reddit.

My Tools

Brackets, my HTML/CSS/JS editor. With a few added extensions, it (almost) becomes an IDE.
eclipse, my Java IDE. It's a great editor and not TOO too heavy. Easily my favorite feature is auto-building.
Not really a tool, per se, but Chrome is a great browser. I'll post a list of the extensions I use soon enough. Also, the devtools are great.
I use the command line for a lot of stuff. I use Git to organize and publish my work, and as I don't really like the desktop app, I use the command line. I also use SASS as a preprocessor, so I run SASS commands from the command line as well.

I'm Anthony Pizzimenti. I'm a Java and web engineer from Iowa City, Iowa. This is my blog about music, web and software engineering, robotics, dinner parties, and whatever else I can muster. This is the mobile version of the site, so if you want a better experience with more content, visit this page on a computer.

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Full mobile version by Anthony Pizzimenti, © 2015

February 27, 2015

Robots

Intro

Today was spent building a robot.

The Hardware

So my friends Louis and Ike are in a class called Aerospace Engineering, taught by one of my favorite physics and engineering teachers. There's a set of hardware extremities like wheels, SONAR detectors, and bumpers that do all the analog work. Most of the structuring is done on steel rods (think Sandlot-style robots), and all of it is powered by battery packs.

The Programming

The robots are programmed by a language based off C called ROBOTC. There's a good informational video that explains how it's similar to C and its interaction with each bit of hardware.

The Problem

So David, Derek, and I were called in to help fix this robot. We sorted through the code with Ike, trying to find a logical error and went with Louis to try and test to see how the hardware was working. Actually, we're doing it right now - it's kinda scary to see what's happening. For example, if you have a statement like this

if(SensorValue[Sonar]<6)
{
    sleep(500);
    Motor[RightMotor] = 30;
    Motor[LeftMotor] = 120;
}

 else
{
    go = 0;
}
which says 'if the SONAR senses something within 6cm, I'll stop for 500ms, then the right motor will turn at 1/4 the speed of the left motor to turn right; otherwise, don't go'. However, the value SensorValue[Sonar]>6 creates an issue. The SONAR sensor reads the distance to an object, but when it tries to measure a value farther away than its range, it returns a value of -1. This generates an error because even if there's nothing in the way, it'll turn.
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