its o-v-e but not r..: MUROC 2011

It's been 3 days since me and my friends got back from MUROC 2011 which took place at UNIMAP, Perlis. But the memories are still vivid. I really enjoyed having all of my team mates, college mates and even new friends there. Seriously the event was so fun even though we lost and by lost I mean we only managed to get 7th place out of 12 teams, I'm still glad I had the chance to participate in this event and be part of it.

I've been busy for the last few months preparing for our fire fighting robot but now I'm glad that it's all over and it ended in a happy way that me and my team mates got a lot of experiences, knowledge and the most precious thing is that we build stronger relationship among each others.

I'm lucky to have such an awesome team mates, Bro Mail a.k.a laoshi (my laoshi is my senior), and fellow friends who are always there by my side. We went through a lot of things, sharing almost every single thing; happiness, sadness etc. I'm thankful that even when I had my emotional breakdown moment, all of them were there to support me. Not to forget, an infinite thanks to laoshi. He's one of a kind and being kindhearted he is, he helped us a lot (like A LOT). He was there from the very beginning till the end and we learned a lot from him too. Xie xie laoshi!! In a nutshell, all of them are super duper AWESOME. (^_^)

For fire fighting robot, 1st place: UPM, 2nd: UITM S.A and 3rd and 4th place: UNIMAP. For our university, we tested our robot in our own field, the robot's movement was pretty okay but once we were in the real field, the problem occurred. We had few problems with our robot movement since the field we had in our lab was quite smooth as opposed to the real field in UNIMAP. Since we're using encoder to count the rotation, once the robot moves on the rough terrain, it kinda affect the robot's movement. You know once the robot got stuck, it still increment the count of rotation and it will then affect the distance measurement thus the robot will make a wrong turn. We had problems with our sensors as well since we only used two IR sensors (due to our budget limitation) compared to other institutions, most of them used at least 5-6 sensors.

Over all, even though we lost, I'm glad that I joined this competition since everyone is really friendly there and I noticed this event is a whole lot different from ROBOCON. It's somewhat interesting to look at other institutions' robots, like how they built their robot, what kind of sensors they used, what kind of IDE etc. We managed to exchange some ideas here and there.
I think if time permits, we're gonna join this competition once again next year. We'll see later since we're graduating soon. Haha.

Despite of everything I said about how happy I was, deep down inside I'm quite disappointed with myself. At first, I managed to balance everything; classes, quizzes, fyp, Mandarin class, fire fighting robot etc but towards the end, I've become heedless. I've thrown away my responsibilities as a student. I skipped classes and quiz in order to finish the robot. It's my fault and now I'm trying to catch up everything that I've missed for the last 2 weeks. Wish me luck. ;)

Once again, I'm writing to say that I'll keep these memories forever. We had so much fun together. Thanks for those involved, those who offered support and encouragement, and thanks for the amazing journey. Love you guys..!! =)

Here's our fire fighting robot:

We used Pinguino as our IDE.

Can you spot the cute sticker there?

Here's my chance to promote my laoshi's company: UMMATECH

Go and check their site.. You can buy range of stuffs needed for your projects and you can even ask them for project consultation.