And So Ends NCSS 2010
The past weekend has been a large on in programming for me, having both the finals for Progcomp (Run by the university of NSW) and the last week of the NCSS programming challenge.
In Progcomp my team managed to soar up the ladder from last in the finals to second last (that's still 6th place out of 13o teams or so overall) and was utterly flattened by James Ruse who finished all the challenges in an amazing 1:40. We Still had an awesome time going up to Sydney and having a look around the university on its open day and we look forwards to hopefully being back next year.
Last week was also the final week of the NCSS challenge where you are given 5 problems to solve for 5 weeks. The beginners division of this competition is a great way it get into learning programming/python if you are interested. This year i entered the advanced division and managed to place 11th on 188 points solving all the questions except for the last and rather evil Peg Solitaire question (worth 20 points instead of the usual 10) . I am reasonably happy with this and hopefully i am able to move up the board a bit more next year and so ends NCSS 2010.
openTrack V1
I wrote up a small tracker server for a friend on the NCSS challenge forums. Its intended use is for connecting users in simple P2P applications such as chat programs, games ect.
It can be accessed with brief instructions HERE
Also as part of the project i learned how to use GIT so the source of the project can be found on Git-hub HERE for those interested, so if you have any ideas or find any bugs that would be the place to leave them.
I hope somebody finds this useful, and if not i think i may have some uses for it in future projects (such as super multiplayer multilayer networked pong)
Stacker – Arduino
For the final week of the NCSS embedded programming challenge, we had the option of creating any program we wanted (to run on the ED1 board) to be entered into a competition. For my entry i decided to make an arduino version of stacker, see the video below.
I will add the source code after the competion
The game is quite simple to play (press either button to start/stop blocks and the board's reset button to restart), but gets ridiculously hard realy quickly, i am yet to get to the leds to the end.
I also failed to compleate any of the final weeks problems, besides this one becasue of being exhasted from shifting logs.
NCSS Programming Comp
I just finished the NCSS programming comp (http://challenge.ncss.edu.au/). The competition runs over 5 week with 5 problems a week and 6 problems on the final week
NCSS offers two courses Simple and advanced, last year i participated in the Simple division and managed to come first, this year i went in the advanced division and found it much more challenging but still managed to achieve a 6th. However the course did teach me about things like regular expressions.
This year NCSS was also offering an embedded course (i participated in the beta for this, where was given the arduino board in my other projects). for the embedded course you paid for a circuit board based of the arduino with many sensors and outputs already built in.
The embedded division still has one more week to go, so il update this post with my results in that then.