Smoke
It was a hot and muggy morning, towards the end of May 1995, together with three other classmates (one of whom was Andrea) we were called in audience by our professor from the Systems laboratory. His proposal was very simple, for the following year he thought of having his students build a Robot and he had thought of us, the Robot would serve both as a term paper for the maturity, and to participate in competitions, so he left us giving us homework for the holidays, or studying some documentation to get us on with work, never were homework for the holidays so welcome. In September we began to work on the project, dividing the tasks. I took care of assembling and testing the Motorola 68HC11 microprocessor board, all assembled with the Wire-Wrapping technique. The initial idea was to create three small robots each specialized searching for a specific source.
Robot Explorer competition
I’m talking about sources as our Robot, which at the time did not yet have a name, had to participate in Explorer-type races. In these races, the Robot is placed in an unknown environment, a 4x2m competition field, within it obstacles are inserted (30hx20lx30p), in some of these Light sources are inserted (a bulb at 10cm from the ground) and Sound sources (a speaker that emits a note at 4KHz 15cm from the ground). Another source is composed of the vapors of ethyl alcohol, in the jargon called GAS sources, which come out from grids placed on the competition floor.
The purpose of the competition is that the Robot, in a completely autonomous way, turns inside the competition field in search of the sources and avoiding obstacles, trying to acquire the greatest number of points over the duration of the test. For each source a score is assigned, the sound is worth 3, the light 2 and the gas 1, an uncontrolled impact against an obstacle is worth -1. For this reason, at first we thought of building three robots, the regulation does not place limits on the number of robots, the important thing is that all of them fit together in a check box measuring 20x20x30cm, but then for reasons of time the choice is relapse on the single piece, this led to some structural and mechanical problems, especially pitch. But let’s get to the name, one of the members of the TEAM proposed to call them with the names of 3 characters from a famous street fighting game on the computer, then since we switched to only one robot we changed the name giving it that of a character from the same game that he had all the powers of the other 3, so Smoke was chosen.
The first race
Never name was more appropriate, at the first competition in which he should have participated (University of S. Anna di Pisa) during the night, all three copies of the ALTERA CPLD of the card with the microcontroller we had burned, while the boy who took care of the software was trying to complete the program for the race. When I and the others arrived in Pisa we found that the Robot had been mistakenly entered in the race with the name of Tortellino, but unfortunately it could not participate as we no longer had CPLDs programmed to use, disconsolate we participated in the race only as spectators. Back at school after a brief investigation on the Robot we found that the power supply was a bit too dirty and the fact that we hadn’t inserted the filter capacitors yet had played a bad joke on us.
After school
The maturity arrived and made us make a good impression, we continued to participate in competitions and events where we took the Robot, but the group of 5 people began to decrease, until it was just me and my friend Andrea. The first races weren’t the most exciting, but as the years went by the Robot improved, and on his tenth birthday in the school that gave him birth he won the first cup as first classified, from then on others followed, in the he year 2007 in the 4 races in which he participated he collected two second places and two first places, not bad for a toy that is beginning to be of a certain age, will it be the experience he has gained on the racing fields in so many years?