Tensions of last minute robotics

"Robotics" what a glamorous ring this innocuous looking word carries with it! And it was this very ring that sounded in our eager minds when LEVEL3 robotics was announced as the event in TECHNOVANZA'06. And it was this very ring that urged us to scan website after website on "how to build Robots"

We felt like those sacred engineers in those sci-fi movies, as we oogled at pages with pics of robo cars using cutting edge technology! Our egos swelled. It did not take us long to realize that to employ even a mite of this technology our wallets needed to be swollen too. And so began the cost cutting. Finally we settled down for a decent looking automobile that our slim pockets could support & our limited capabilities endure.

Piece-by-piece the chasis become a reality. We rejoiced! Unbelievable as it may seem, we had surmounted the disabilities associated with being "degree engineer" when asked to work with his hands and not just on paper. The ckt was ultimately assembled.
Ebullient now, we began to burn the microcontroller. Burn we did & in what a way! Burn it did & literally! Only we shouldn't have done it by tossing it into the fire. It smoked away & with it fantasies of ever making it to Silicon Valley.

What took the cake in bugging us though, was the debugging. Were we really expected to find out exactly which pins were shorted every time the ckt didn't work? Assembling had been (atleast comparatively) a piece of cake but debugging was like looking for a needle in a haystack . and why the hell did that LED keep blinking at us?

We have now to begun to resemble tramps, what with disheveled hair, unshaved faces, bloodshot eyes after innumerable "sleep" overs and never ending excursions to lamington. Surprisingly enough our robot car looks well on its way to success. Just when we thought all was over all the motors began whirring in sync. Maybe one of the loose hairs from our beards had shorted the right pins. And the wheel alignments look pretty good too. We are guessing that one of our numerous thuds leveled them in place!

Whatever it is our car is all set to roll tomorrow. How wouldn't it ? WE have made it!!!