CNM HackerSpace

At Central New Mexico Community College there is a student organization known as HackerSpace led by instructor Kerry Bruce, a computer information systems professor. The organization is designed to help students practice the skills they have or currently are learning throughout their degrees in science, engineering and technology as well as given the opportunity to work on group projects and build team building schools in the world of technology.

School Year of 2019-2020

This year I have participated as a member of student leadership in the club. I was HackerSpace's secretary, or what we have decided to call, the class Scribe. The position entails ensuring note-taking on the digital scroll I have created for every session, primarily the main meeting for the group but also updating the roster for meeting on the subgroups like Pi Wars and E-Sports. During the meetings when open lab opened up, I would use my time to practice my python programming. A very simple program I was working on will have more detail down below under "Pi Wars 2020"

Pi Wars 2020

To assist the team that planned on flying out to Cambridge, England to compete in this international robotics competition, I was working to creating a simple python program the user can start through the terminal or through an editor that allows python file runs and will welcome the user to the Pi Wars competition and ask which challenge is up next. Once the user selects the challenge (the Artistic Merit will be an option as well), the program will all the user to select a song of choice. Once the user selects a song, the song and a preprogrammed light sequence will begin for purely aesthetic reasons during the competition. Unfortunately, this did not come to fruition due to it being at the start of the pandemic and the world almost literally shutting down.

I will be using CSV files to organize the list choices and display them in the terminal in an easy-to-read format and will be using classes and definitions to organize the various functions I will need in order for it to function the way I need it to.

#Programmer: Steven Perez

#Email: steph.perez1994@gmail.com

#Purpose: give the user a list of musical choices depending on the pi wars challenge and pulling the songs from a CSV File

#Python3

import csv

import pygame

from pygame import *

import sys

import os

#will show a list of the various challenges for pi wars 2020

def piWarsChallenges():

piWars2020List = 'piwars2020challenges.csv'

#to see the rest of the code, check out my GitHub!

School Year of 2018-2019

My fellow Hackerspace members have inspired me to continue my work on a website I created a few years back and not only bring it back to life but also publish it on a host and get a domain name for it to make it official and have something tangible on my portfolio, not just the projects above. To learn more about my work on my website, click on 'Holiday History' tab here on my portfolio for my process in created my website and all my struggles and success.

Pi Wars 2019

Original HAL

Chassis from Pi Wars 2017 & 2018. Used to test our code for Pi Wars 2019

HAL 3000

At Pi Wars 2019

Pit Crew Ready!

Pi Noon

Needle secured, balloons secured, batteries full, controller ready!

BATTLE!

Since my participation near the beginning of the fall semester of 2018, I have assisted on two primary projects and self teaching myself python. The primary project I have been assisting on in between self teaching myself python has been working on a robot we have named HAL 3000 that we used to compete in Pi Wars at the end of March 2019. We took code that last years' team used and revamped it for this years' competition. It's a small team of us that went and had been working on the robot. It was a team of 5, including myself, and Kerry Bruce. We've had 2 to 3 other HackerSpace members assist us on HAL 3000 off and on as they could as well. My primary responsibilities with HAL have been assisting the lead programmer in solving logical problems with python as well as re-positioning HAL during testing. One other member of the group was dedicated to designing printable parts for our robot such as the chassis and the pixi-cam holder and various other parts, giving our robot a modular design. Another was in charge of electricals and making sure we were giving the robot enough power via mathematics, basic electronics and physics. And the final member was in charge of posting all of our hard work on a blog, CNM Hackerspace HAL 3000. We were even interviewed by the school paper about our work to that point in time! CNM.edu.

If you don't already know, the competition involves 7 challenges total, 4 remote controlled and 3 autonomous. We had to program our Raspberry Pis in a way that helped us complete these challenges as effectively as possible. Some of the challenges involved shooting targets, completing a maze, and finding certain colors in a certain order. We have used a combination of a Raspberry Pi, thunderborg, and a pixi-cam to help us solve these problems. We have used python as our primary and only way to program HAL. This competition took place in Cambridge, England, UK. To learn more about the challenges, click there: Pi Wars 2019.

By the end of the volunteer work in judging the high school age group and competing ourselves the next day, we were filled with joy and excitement. We finished overall in the intermediate category in 2nd place! We got 1st in the Straight-ish challenge, 1st in the Nebula challenge, and 4th in Pi-Noon.

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