We came in today and went directly to the practice track. While waiting in line there we did a few warm up tests and discovered that the steering was not working right. It was turning hard left no matter what we did. So we took a look around and discovere the belt that turned our feedback pot had broken. So we had to drive back and figure out how to fix a belt a) without a new belt, and b) without taking off the steering column. We hashed around for a while but no clear solutions came up. Then Jeff arrived and suggested staples. I thought maybe the velcro we had would be a nice material to use since it was totally flexible but non elastic. So we threaded the belt around, used the velcro to tape it together (it had glue on the back of the velcro, and then stapled the velcro to the belt. Amazingly it seemed to work. We felt that this was a true MacGuiver moment. Turns out we found out later the belt was occassionally slipping and so we ended up having to recalibrate the center about 3 times during the day.
We discovered that someone had left Richards code commented out so last night’s run was really just waypoint following plus a small tweak (don’t just go straight if you go off course). Commented in Richard’s code and it started crashing. He fixed it and then we tried following way points but it just didn’t work. The truck would veer off course. I found that I had swapped latitude and longitude at one point, so we thought that would fix it but it did not. We asked for one more QID try but were told they had just declared the day done. Seems odd because usually they stop only after sun down but today it was only 5:30 or so. We don’t know if that is a good sign for us or a bad sign. Richard went to the team meeting but they said nothing about who qualified and who did not.
Came home and got to listen to music in my car and answer my email for the first time in 5 days. I had 1600 spams (that weren’t caught). Ugh.