2015 FIRST Robotics build season

The FIRST Robotics season kicked off last weekend and I'll be spending much of my free time working with the Merrimack ChopShop166 software team.

Some handy links:

• ChopShop166 github repository


• ChopShop166 website (blog to be relaunched soon) currently here: http://chopshopt166.blogspot.com/


• 2015 Recycle Rush manual


• 2015 WPI Library & sw for the new Linux-based control system

7 hours of engineering pit from New Hampshire GSR FIRST Robotics competition compressed to 83 seconds

As soon as they opened the door at 8am this morning, I put the camera, tripod + arduino hack at the very top of the seating in the Verizon Wireless Center pointing down at the pit where the robots are prepped for competition.


*BEST* GSR (NH) FIRST Robotics time lapse in the pit (10fps)


GSR (NH) FIRST Robotics time lapse in the pit (5fps)


GSR (NH) FIRST Robotics time lapse in the pit (20fps)

After nearly seven hours (the length my camera's battery lasted taking photos every 30 seconds) there were 835 photos which were converted to an AVI using:

mencoder -nosound -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -o timelapse-10fps.avi -mf type=jpeg:fps=10 mf://*.JPG

and then converted to a much smaller M4V file using ghb aka the very handy Handbrake tool.