VICTORVILLE, CA – In case you are holding your breath, you can let go. We have finished mounting ‘our’ two new Ibeo Scanners and two radars (thanks again to Team Cyberrider and Team Overbot). The sensors have been completely integrated into the system. We still need to run some tests to assess the improvements. It sure cannot be worse than what we had.
This is a miracle, considering Joshua was down sick. Or may be it is because of that. We had five people doing things that he does. Now that his territory is encroached, it would be hard for him to keep others off.
It was John Loftin (christened Big John) to shine. He is a gentle giant. A big frame with a very polite demeanor. He rented a gas welder and got to work. With specs from Joshua, he knocked out the mounts for the two sensor suites in no time.
Dalls Griffith finally got to do what he has so often offered, but has previously been shooed away. He got to drill a hole in the Jeep. (No don’t choke.) Its a hole to route wires from the under the hood into the cabin. Dallas did a meticulous job laying the cables. Goes to show you cannot judge people by their clothes.
The big surprise to me was seeing Chandan Uddaraju helping with routing cables in the Jeep. I didn’t expect to ever catch him looking in the engine block of a vehicle. But there he was his hands deep under the hood. Goes to say you can not judge people by their degree either.
After the hardware was integrated to the vehicle, Christopher Mire and Chandan took charge of integrating the sensors to the software system. Since we have other similar sensors, integration was simple enough.
But nothing is straightforward. More sensors, means more data, means more cpu cycles, means our one ‘main’ computer was choaked. In normal situations this would have been an issue. But Joshua has already loaded up spare machines on the computer rack. In no time Christopher had distributed the computation to the ‘overflow’ machine.
With all these additional sensors, I think we have significantly addressed one of our weakness. CajunBot is still limited in its sensing capability in comparison to other challengers. But the sensors we have are likely to be sufficient for our needs.
- Arun Lakhotia
From previous wiring (and eventual fire) expience, be sure to protect the wires at the point where they go through the hole and into the vehicle. These can easily be rubbed raw by the metal, thus conducting heat and starting an electical fire. I\’m sure you\’ve done it, but couldn\’t let it go without comment.