SW Robotics – Technobabbles

Archive by category "SW Robotics"

GIMP Script to Make SW Robotics Thumbs

dgw 2008-03-17 - 08:26 2009-11-03GIMP, Linux, My Code, SW Robotics, Windows 0

After making a whole bunch of thumbnail images for the member and mentor profiles on the Southwest Robotics site this past season, I finally decided last night to automate the process with a GIMP script, in preparation for next year’s new people. So, what does it do? It takes the image it is run on, scales it (gimp-image-scale) to 120px x 90px, and utilizes script-fu-drop-shadow to add a correctly-positioned drop-shadow. (Correctly is, in this case, the same as all the other images I did manually.) It’s a rather simple script; here’s the code: ; Script-Fu script to automatically; resize and…

FIRST Wisconsin Regional Results for Team 2129

dgw 2008-03-16 - 14:35 2015-10-29My Websites, SW Robotics 0

Note to visitors on this post: If you got here while searching for the full competition results, I apologize (they can be found at the FIRST website). My original title was rather general, and I have changed it to be more specific. Search engines might not pick up the title change for a while, though, so again I am sorry if you got here in error. Well, I got back from Milwaukee around 00:20 last night (this morning?) and went to bed within an hour. Among other things, the bus taught me that manufacturers don’t pay enough attention to uniform…

Milwaukee Status

dgw 2008-03-15 - 07:25 2009-11-03My Websites, science, SW Robotics 0

Yesterday we had the qualifying matches for the FIRST Milwaukee Regional Competition, which with the Southwest Robotics Team. The day before yesterday was practice matches, as an opportunity to work out bugs on the official arena before the actual competition. The good news is, our robot was moving up in the rankings. The bad news is, it completely underperformed what I, and many of my teammates, expected. We battled mechanical problems (our lift prongs got bent on Thursday) and yesterday we couldn’t seem to do anything with the lift arm until our final match of the day. The robot didn’t…

Going Out of Town (FIRST Milwaukee Regional)

dgw 2008-03-12 - 08:00 2012-05-28My Websites, science, SW Robotics 0

As you all probably know by now, I am a member of the wonderful (am I biased?) Southwest High Robotics Team, whose website I designed. Well, we’re going to Milwaukee this afternoon, and we’ll be back late Saturday night (CDT, of course). It is quite interesting that the team captain hasn’t posted about the trip yet on the team blog… But I digress. What that means for this site is that I’ll be publishing stuff I wrote yesterday (and this morning) and scheduled using that Blogger’s still testing (and recently [– ] in). The posts came from ideas that have…

New Photo Galleries

dgw 2007-10-12 - 19:05 2015-10-29internet, My Websites, SW Robotics, w00t 0

I just launched the new photo albums over at the SW Robotics site. If I do say so myself, they look snazzier than the gallery style I came up with last year for my other project. I might adapt the modifications to work with the older site, since they work so well. Creating the albums took a lot of elbow grease and patience, but it was mostly tedious copying and pasting filenames, adding captions, and adding more rows. Add organizing an extensible directory structure on the server, and everything took about a week, once I got all the photos. The…

A Second Robotics Job

dgw 2007-10-08 - 18:05 2007-10-08SW Robotics 0

Well, it’s official. I’m the new Media Captain of the Southwest Robotics Team. I’ll be doing photos whenever possible, with my trusty Canon PowerShot SD750. I’m looking forward to it; the previous captain will be doing video editing. This will certainly make loading new photo galleries onto the website easier; I won’t have to get CDs or anything from other people.

It’s Good to Have Talents

dgw 2007-10-07 - 22:59 2007-10-07MediaWiki, My Websites, PHP, SW Robotics 0

I deviate from my usual technobabbling to reflect on some of the things that have happened in the last couple of days. I designed a website for the Southwest High Robotics Team, the launch of which I announced earlier this month, and now the team captain would like me to be the Media Captain, in addition to my current position of Website Captain. This would mean that I would not only maintain the site, update the upcoming photo galleries and video pages, and develop new features like our planned wiki, but would also take photos and possibly create posters/edit videos.…

Southwest Robotics Website Launched

dgw 2007-10-02 - 21:47 2007-10-02internet, My Websites, PHP, SW Robotics, w00t 0

After weeks of work, the first version of the Southwest Robotics website has been launched. Upcoming features include a video page, photo galleries, a members’ calendar, and possibly a wiki, but the current site has all the basic info and a template that works pretty well in all the major browsers. Check it out at http://www.swrobotics.com/.

Category: SW Robotics