The University of Akron’s computer science club has been invited to compete at Case’s Engineers Week in the Lego robot competition. They normally compete against high school kids, but in 2006, they have invited the local area colleges to come in and compete as well. Trick is Case has Lego kits. Each team gets the same exact kit and has to build a robot which searches for a light source. Once found, it must go to the light source to score a point. Two robots go at it at a time. Another trick is we don’t have ANY of the robot gear Case has. All our testing and development will be based on wild guessing. Later on, we’ll get a couple hours to play with the equipment and then we’ll build on the day of the event. Oh yeah, the gear they’re using had cost $800 back in the day. Today, you can’t get it and what you can get costs $400. Its cool stuff, but out of all of our budgets.

After talking with a friend of mine who graduated from Case, I’m thinking we don’t stand much of a chance. They’ve been doing the robot thing on some level for probably at least a decade. Akron? I think they JUST started offering a robot course not too long ago.

The cool part is I think I have some tools for figuring out the light sensing (anyone remember back when I had wired up my apartment?). We need to be able to measure light, identify the location of the light and instruct hardware to move towards it. Doesn’t sound too bad, but the arena will not be perfectly dark and we have to be able to lock onto an 80 watt and 20 watt bulb (if I’m remembering correctly).
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J2ME (Java 2 for mobile) has had me curious. I have a J2ME friendly phone. I’m doing Java in DSA2. It can’t be that hard to write something for the phone, can it?

Turns out it really isn’t too bad. The bugger of it is fiddling with the right mix of software development kits and Eclipse’s Java settings. The other fun part is figuring out which SDK matches with the Nokia 6600 phone (for those wondering, its Series 60, v2 FP1 (feature pack 1)). I lost a good amount of time just trying to figure that one out.

But the development process wasn’t too bad once Eclipse was setup to compile and package. I haven’t mastered the art of persuading the emulator to run from the “run program” button, but I found I can use Nokia’s Eclipse add-on buttons to run the emulator from there.

The last thing to try was to actually write something to run on the phone. What better test than the current programming assignment (due this coming Monday, but already turned in). I had to water down the code since the phone lacks a lot of the features the desktop edition of Java has. Once I put together the interface, the rest of the Java class files just dropped right in with a little bit of tweaking here and there. Here’s some screen shots of the Slicing Floor Plan from my 6600:

The config screen – specify the plan here:

The drawing of the binary tree:

The drawing of the floor plan:

Feel free to browse the code. I don’t know if it’ll work on other J2ME gadgets. If it does, great!

Just like the desktop edition.
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The slicing floor plan has been posted on the site. I also posted the code to the Hexagon assignment. All of it can be found under the Data Structures 2 section.

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Duh.

I remember using U. Akron’s dialup to ditch AOL dialup back in the day. I also remember using UA when I was in a jam at a network client site and needed a driver for something.

Now, I’m able to use the UA dialup numbers to allow me to go mobile and maintain a ‘net connection when wifi isn’t available (*cough* Tri-C). I just persuade my notebook to talk to my cell phone and have it dial out. This solves the problem of getting stuck with T-Mobile’s Internet plan for $20 a month (ouch).

One setback (not counting the fact its a low speed connection): the UA dialup account is only good for when you’re a current student. Good motivation to keep taking classes, right? This is one of those “you know you’re a geek when…”
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The University of Akron is considered the THIRD most wireless college in the US. It was beat out by Ball University and Western Michigan University. I’m surprised to see Case at number 8. Although, they do have super crazy high speed ‘net access over there which I doubt is wireless friendly.

Most Unwired College Campuses Survey
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I’ve posted my Java assignments. You can find them on the school page (scroll down to Data Structures and Algorithms 2). I’ll post them as I complete them. For safety though, I won’t post the code to an assignment until after its been graded.

The hexagon fractal assignment was rather fun. Learning Java Swing wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Figuring out how to draw in a JPanel took a little bit of work (as I learned, simply drawing on the canvas is sort of a no-no since Swing components will overwrite the canvas every time). You’ll need Java 1.5.0 installed for the applet to work.
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