Children's University at c4di

Future technologists

“They’re a lovely bunch” said Tina as we went up to the board room in c4di. She was right. A patient bunch too. Because the connection to my robot broke as soon as I tried to use it. So there I was, with a wonderful audience and nothing to show them. Wah.

This was a good time to show grace under pressure. After deploying some really terrible jokes I managed to get things working. Turns out that my Bluetooth driver had deployed some serial ports that were interfering with the robot. This was not something that happened last night when I was testing the presentation but today it did. So after killing the offending connections we were off.

One day I’ll practice…

Actually, it turned out that this was a good time to make the point that working with computers, like a lot of other things, ends up being all about persistence. I told the audience about my guitar, which is presently hung on the wall (see left). I can’t really play it because I’ve never really bothered to practice. It turned out to be a bit harder than I expected (and a tiny bit painful on the fingers) so I gave up and found other things to do (like mess around with computers).

When you work with computers you have to learn how they see the world. And you have to get good at dealing with tiny details. This can be hard work. Having said that, we did get to the point were we had made a cowardly robot, so I’m counting the event as a success.

begin
forever
  move 10
  d = @distance
  if d < 100:
    red
    turn 180
    move 100
    continue
  if d < 200:
    yellow
    continue
  green
end

This is the “cowardly code” that I was demonstrating. The robot creeps forwards in 10mm steps. If it sees something too close it sets its pixel to red, turns 180 degrees around and runs away.

Thanks to the Children’s University for Inviting me and the audience for being so wonderful.