Possibly OT, but it amused me.

Well, I am easily amused.
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Caught.aspx

I was educated. From that article I learned that if you bit copy a 32 bit IEEE754 float to a DINT and then right shift the DINT 1 bit, then subtract that from the magic hex number 5F3759DF , then take that result and bit copy it back to a float and square it, then multiply it by 1/2 the original float and subtract result from 1.5 and multiply that by itself again, you get a very good first approximation of the inverse square root of the float.

Pretty cool magic trick. I could totally use that somewhere.

Wow, just wow.

Yep, and now I'm working for a distributor.

Ha ha. Cute story.

A Company I used to work for was shutting down a plant here in Charlotte and we had 2 robots on a line that had been idled since the line they where on was dismatled. For fun we made some "gloves" for the robots and tossed a beanbag back and forth. Took a bit of work but we got it where the robots would spend hours tossing without a miss. Suprisingly it was not as hard as you would think to make this work. We even had different pitches ( fast ball, side arm, lob).


Gotta admit though throwing engine blocks would seem a bit much. I would figure the robot doing the catching would overload its servos.

I liked the part, where the robot stopped to calculate the trajectory, speed, and correct rotation each time. I don't think the author has done any robot programming. Can you imagine the variables to consider in doing this?

Maybe they figured the right "pitch" by trial and error? That would have been exciting!

If the robots ever form a softball team, I would be willing too sponsor it.

Tom Jenkins said:

Maybe they figured the right "pitch" by trial and error? That would have been exciting!

Click to expand...

LMAO. What would the errors cost you? You have to scrap an entire engine block... Now that has to be some expensive R&D

I liked the part, where the robot stopped to calculate the trajectory, speed, and correct rotation each time. I don't think the author has done any robot programming. Can you imagine the variables to consider in doing this?

Click to expand...

This part seemed a bit far fetched to me also. You throwing from 2 fixed points, It is not like the pitching robot has to figure out where the catching robot robot is at each time. Once it has it why would it need to change the pitch.