Today, I began work on finishing the “Toughbot Command Center” program. When loaded onto a PC, the program can communicate with the robot, store mission information, display maps, et cetera. Earlier, I managed to get the program to transfer a map file from the robot and store it in a file on my computer. Now, I had to get the program to do something with the data.

Starting at around 7:00 pm, I worked on the program for around three hours. During this time, I ran into several problems that I was not expecting. For instance, when you save a control code character such as NUL in Visual Basic .Net, a computer programming language, the character is actually saved in proper format for use in XML files. However, when you read the file, Visual Basic .Net returns the character, not the XML equivalent. This caused much confusion for me, as I was expecting to see the XML equivalent of the character, not the actual character, when reading the file.

Despite these problems, I finished the “Toughbot Command Center” program at around 10:00 pm. The program is ready to be demoed at the California State Science Fair on May 21, 2007 and May 22, 2007.

After finishing the “Toughbot Command Center” program I began to pack up the robot, its support equipment, and my display board. I spent extra time double- and triple-checking my robot shipping container to make sure that I had all of the parts. After finishing these checks, I sealed up the container with large amounts of packing tape to make sure that it would not come open during shipping accidentally. I then covered my display board in plastic and taped it up. I finished all of this at 11:45 pm and then went to bed around midnight.