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We only found out about Techno Games 2000 about three weeks before the event so there was not much time to do anything. We found there was an event called "gymnastics" which was for any robotic "art" display. One of our neighbours is a 15 year-old who wants to do media studies at A level so we asked him to produce a display for the TV. We loaned him demonstration PIP robots and sponsored him for materials and the result is The Prime Time Swimmers.
James Lawrie
There was a lot of discussion about a suitable theme. What started as "Come Dancing" ended up as a synchronised swimming team. The original plan of using 6 PIPs proved very complex in terms of programming so it reduced to 4 swimmers and a shark. The shark adds a little humour at the end.
The other constraint was size. James needed a reliable background surface to run on and it made sense to paint it to resemble a swimming pool. Unfortunately it had to be small enough to fit in the car for transportation to the Dome. The best we could do was white hardboard about 1100 mm square. The shark starts in its own small space on a separate piece. The pieces were cut to size at the local DIY shed free of charge and then painted with matt emulsion.
James worked very hard to make the display in the time available. He found suitable coloured paper for the PIP covers. Starting with the fashion show cover, he added skirts to hide the sides of PIP. He scratch-built the shark with paper and card stuffed with tissue.
The mannequins started as the standard fashion show items. We used a photocopier to magnify them from A5 to A4 size. James did the design using felt-tip pens etc.
Once he had the idea, 5 robots all dressed-up, and a swimming pool to run on James thought it was almost done. Unfortunately there were lots of programming issues to resolve. James soon found that programs had to be written down! He also found that he needed to position the PIPs very consistently. The "hi-tech" solution to this was a couple of marks on the swimming pool for the positions of two of the PIPs and a jig made of two bits of wood glued together to get the spacing between PIPs correct. All in all it took him about 4 hours to get the programs he wanted. The easiest one was for the shark as all he did was to time the programs for the other ones to the crucial point and put that time as a delay into the shark before it started to move.
For the technophiles, each of the swimmers' programs is only 14 steps long. The shark's program is 2 steps long. The original idea was to make a display that lasted 2 minutes, the final version lasts 45 seconds.
The biggest technical problem was getting all the PIPs to start together. Four of them start in a row close together and the shark has to start some distance away. James doesn't have enough hands for this and there was no time to make a satisfactory "multiple PIP starter", so he used me instead. We practiced countdowns for accurate timing and we could get it right most times.
We left the Prime Time Swimmers in the pits in the morning while we went off for filming the Micromouse events. We were only able to get back to set them up about 16:00. That was when we discovered that someone had moved all our stuff and piled heavy things on top of the PIP covers. They are only made of paper and all except the shark were ruined. You can imagine James' feelings.
However, James set to to make replacement skirts and I started making replacement covers. Fortunately the mannequins themselves were O.K. Within an hour we had the full set together. Then we were transported to the Dome again for filming. We laid out the swimming pool, took out the PIPs and ran the program. It all worked fine (thank goodness for nonvolatile memory!). We repeated it with the covers on and again all was fine.
There were some people from the BBC website watching this and they were keen to record it so we ran it all again. Then they interviewed James and me. I haven't seen anything on their website yet but you never know!
Then we waited. And waited. Eventually TV21 called us onto the display area for filming. The swimming pool went down O.K. but there was a panic as we couldn't find the jig to set the PIP spacings. It was found in a couple of minutes so we didn't hold things up much.
Then it was time for the filming. Once the director said O.K., James did his count down and away they went. We were about a tenth of a second wrong in the timing but all went well. Then they asked us to do it again. This time the timing was absolutely spot on. All went well. Then they asked us to do it again. Everything went well again. Then it was over.
James was very pleased with his performance. He had demonstrated that he could perform under pressure on the TV. He had delivered a useful display in a short time from a completely standing start.
Afterward we found out that James had not won, but the director sought him out and said some very complementary things about the display. We look forward to seeing what TV21 have made of it, if it is broadcast.
Duncan Louttit