What a day!

Before noon it was quietly yet. Different features like recognising the ball and goals were tested and improved, the optimised animation for standing up was tested (standing up from the front works quite well), just walking was making difficulties.

After a referee training, where referees-to-be were taught the rules, our first match began: A friendly game against the Fumanoids.

The game endet 0:0, the Fumanoids had noticeable problems with the turf, and our way smaller Darwins were as able to walk as a three-year old in a bouncy castle full of twelve-year olds.

 

It became clear to us: We wouldn’t be able to walk on the artificial turf that way. After a team meeting, in which everybody suggested ideas, a group went to the hardware store. Back in the hall crafting began, one team of us attached spikes to Tamaras feet, another tried sliding shoes on Wilma, the third tested rubber mats.

As matters stand, the studs (spikes) work best (and are football-alike!) Till the late evening we worked, and today we’ll see if the concept works out.

Standing up from the back doesn’t work on the turf, but we had an animation for rolling over, so we got that going for us.

Hambot is now able to stand and is currently learning to walk. Due to his height the turf wouldn’t be a problem for him, that’s why we are increasingly working on it.

 

We have mixed feelings for the first match at 13:15 against the team “Photon”. On the one hand, the change of rules this year will be painful for the teams, on the other hand such conditions make room for innovations.

Since 9am the first group of us entered the hall. The artificial turf to be played on was examined immediately:

Afterewards we were setting up the team area:

After all boxes were unpacked, all Computers were set up and wired, and all of the food was stored in a shelf, it was time for the first team meeting, at which we discussed what was to do, and who’d deal with what.

Especially the artificial turf will be challenging to stand up and walk on, ad well as recognising the white ball and the white goals.

Everybody arrived safely in Magdeburg!

After storing all of our stuff in two rented buses – both having a lot of storage space – we left for Magdeburg at 1 pm.

Four and a half hours later, with a stop at a fast food restaurant, we reached our destination. Since the booked sleeping place had burned out, we were accommodated at three holiday apartments, with more space than we’re used to, even with a dishwasher and a washing machine!

A few people went grocery shopping, then we prepared food together, which was to everyone’s liking.

A last team meeting, and now everybody is working despite the lateness of the hour, either on the robots or the code, while we’re excited for tomorrow.

Breathless suspense. Our pulse is not back to normal yet. After we had lost narrowly against the Fumaoids in the semi-final (0:1), we competed against MRL in the match for third place.

Having the third place in plain view, which would be our best performance at the Iran Open so far, we were quite excited as well as nervous.

After normal time neither side had scored, so a penalty-shootout began.

Tamara made it 1:0 at the first try, MRL didn’t manage to score, and both second tries missed as well. On third try Tamara scored again, and after a fourth round it was clear: We won 2:0!

We keep our fingers crossed for the Fumanoids in the final!

Pure excitement. In a tight match our defense stood like a wall. (Nearly) every shot of the strong attackers (also twice the size of our robots) was stopped. Especially Fiona had big moments and prevented a huge goal chance. The match ended tight with a 0:1 at overtime.

Placed third after the round robin, we are now playing in the second semi final at 15:30 Hamburg-time. Cross your fingers!

The match for the third place and the final match will take place tomorrow.

Here the results of the championship so far.These are not the official results (which are supposed to appear here in the future). Errors might exist, especially as the plugin we use for displaying the results is a little tricky.

[championship league_id=7 template=noPrelimary]

Today is the first setup-day, not only for us but also for the competition hall itself. Around us there is a lot of sawing, painting and even welding.  For us of bigger interest than the interior and flower-decoration: We do have electrical power, finished game-fields,  and a little internet.  All luggage arrived safely and neither robot nor human was hurt.

Our basic setup is done and we are now busy testing. Not least because of the effort the translators put up for us everything is going well so far.

Once again our robots passed the security checks at the airport. And of course we had a lot of questions from other passengers and airport staff again. Despite that we passed faster than the family in front of us, who had several toy pistols in their hand luggage.

Right now we are using the last moments of Internet in Germany to take a look at our airplane. We assume that it is not only the same, but also the identical airplane (joke got lost during translation).

More updates will follow later, when we spot internet access at our destination.

As you surely have noticed, things look different here since some days.

Our site really got long in the tooth. Since we have nobody working full time on it, we always have difficulties keeping the site in an adequate state. Of course we put most of our time in the development of the robots — but we kept you in mind. Before we don’t have any time because of the running season, we now want to use the time to make some improvements.

The most important improvement is probably our “responsive” design. It means that the content of our page it automatically adjusted to your screen size. Smartphone users can now read our page without having their fingers hurt because of excessive scrolling.

The menu now follows your scrolling, so you have access to it at any time, no matter where you are reading on our page. Our website’s calendar is now automatically synced with SOGo, which is a groupware solution we have used internally for a while now.

Photos are a considerable problem for us. We would like to present you as many of them as possible, but it costs a lot of time to sort them, prepare them for the web and publish them in a good way. Therefore you will miss photos at many places. We even have more than thousands photos (yes, really!) of the last championships, which we want to release. In future people are asked to keep the camera only on a few interesting motives, but you may know how difficult it is to restrict yourself =)

From a technical point of view we already did a larger change some time ago: We replaced the free (as in beer), but restricted and increasingly less well maintained version of NextGen by the public domain plugin WPPA+, because we were increasingly dissatisfied with NextGen. (Those of you who visit us more regularly might have noticed that our gallery didn’t always work). WPPA+ is quite new and the functionality is already really great (means: we want to make some more changes). It was a lot of work to migrate the 1264 photos into the new system, unfortunately all titles and comments were lost during the procedure. It wasn’t worth for us to write a software which rescues this data. Also the order of the pictures isn’t optimal, as automatic ordering fails because of missing meta data — and we didn’t have time to order them manually.In the near feature we would like to add more photos successively and edit the existing ones. Just visit us from time to time!

tl;dr?

On the new website everything got better now, but nothing is perfect!

If you notices things which may not work as expected after the conversion, feel free to write us an email or a comment. We will prioritize by the amount of complains — and of course we take praises too 😉

It starts again! After many months of preparation, we will start up the new season by attending the Iran Open (06. – 10.) in Teheran. There we are going to make up for the early elimination of the preseason. After a 10-day break, we will aim at winning the German Open in Magdeburg. Afterwards, we will prepare for the world championship in China where we will compete by the middle of July.

There are not only tournaments, but of course lectures will take place, too. And, by the end of the year, we are going to organise the 2nd RoHOW together with the HULKs again.

Additionally, we will release Hambot soon. Hambot is our self-constructed robot and the successor of GOAL. Over the last months, we went to great effort to put the final touches on it.

You see, this season promises to be intensive and interesting!