TED Report: Foiled by Air Conditioning!

Yesterday Jordi and his wife drove up with the BlimpBot to Monterey, where I was attending the TED conference, so I could demo it. This was a pretty high-stakes demo, since not only would there be 2,000 of the most influential people in the technology, entertainment and design (TED) worlds watching, but they included Al Gore in the FRONT ROW, Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page and movie stars such as John Cusack and Cameron Diaz. The bot worked great in the hotel room, and then we took it the the auditorium during a break to test it on the main stage. Yikes. We were getting IR interference from everything, from LCD screens to the bright stage lights, and our reception range dropped to something around three feet. Even worse, the air currents were overcoming the blimp's ability to fight them. So we gave up on the idea of a fixed IR beacon on the ground, and I decided to hold it in my hand to keep it near the blimp. Even then, the motors couldn't fight the currents well enough. So we rushed back to our staging area (my hotel room) and Jordi updated the firmware to give more power to the motors even at the cost of battery life (this demo only had to run three minutes) . We tested it again in the hotel room, it worked fine, and then it was time to go. When we got to auditorium and waited in the wings to go on, it was clear that something bad had happened in the firmware update. The vertical motor wasn't coming on at all sometimes and it wasn't clear why. Then Jordi realized that in changing the power settings, he'd also changed the timing of the loops, and we weren't resetting the motor controllers at the right time, which meant that the chance of them working when needed was random (and low). We'd just been lucky in the hotel room, but clearly weren't now. Still, I crossed my fingers and went on, carrying the blimp. Disaster! It turns out that one big thing had changed since our test run in the auditorium: 600 people had arrived. All that body heat had raised the temperature of the room, kicking in the air conditioning, which came out of huge ducts right over the stage. Basically I was under a raging waterfall of cold air, and the poor blimp sank right to the floor, its little vertical thruster completely overcome.

Lesson 1: Little blimps need still air
Lesson 2: If you can't find still air, you need WAY more powerful thrusters (which means more battery power, which means more weight, which probably means a bigger blimp)
Lesson 3: Don't update your firmware five minutes before you're going to fly an autonomous robot ten feet away from a former Vice President of the United States.
Lesson 4: Hey, it's a tech demo on stage, and they *always* go wrong--don't let it throw you. So I didn't. I just stood there holding the blimp, as you can see in the picture above, and went on with my talk and slides as planned. Points made, time limit met, applause gained. I looked a bit awkward, I'm sure (although hopefully not always as unhappy as I look above), but at least I got the sympathy vote! Now on to San Diego for Etech on Tuesday, where we get to do it again for an hour in front of the smartest geeks in the world. So much for the sympathy vote ;-) Jordi's hard at work fixing the firmware problems, so fingers crossed...

[Photo credit: Red Maxwell]

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Comments

Greg Dronsky January 17, 2014 at 5:44am

@Chris, recently i had somewhat similar "disaster" with blimp, and thought about it for a long time. Temperature differences are ugly for helium lift. After my encounter with this brutal law of physic i thought about it and got idea to put a simple device to keep the temperature level (simplest, lightest heater, like one short wire like the one for cutting foam), and optionaly thermometer inside of blimp. Best Regards, and good luck at Etech!
Ryansway March 3, 2008 at 10:35am

@chris If only money could afford a time machine :) Best of luck next time it's a big step beyond RC, great stuff!
Wayne Dancer March 3, 2008 at 9:45am

I should have thought of AC being bad for blimps. I have a indoor micro-copter that goes insane when my AC kicks on. I'll have to take that into consideration for the one I want to demo to Jr. High kids.
paul hubner March 3, 2008 at 8:45am

I feel for you, though it sounds like you did fine.

I did a tech presentation before the White House a few years ago and the lead presenter froze up (too bad you cant reboot people...) and I was "lucky" enough to step in for him and take over. It went well, but reminded me we all have a friend in Mr Murphy!

:-)

Paul
Patrick Egan March 3, 2008 at 7:31am

Yeah, and you’d had to sit next to Al Gore. Just kidding, I hear he’s a nice guy…
3D Robotics

Chris Anderson March 3, 2008 at 7:15am

@Michael,

Yes, Monterey, CA, but it wouldn't have mattered--it's incredibly hard to get into that conference (sold out more than a year ago, costs $6,000, etc)
3D Robotics

Chris Anderson March 3, 2008 at 7:13am

We had the budget, just didn't have the time!
Ryansway March 3, 2008 at 1:21am

That's tough luck, hopefully the people you set out to impress understand that not everyone has the budget to afford thorough testing, and that a device that's fundamentally dependent on it's operating climate had a good chance of being affected by the conditions typical of an auditorium filled with people.
Patrick Egan March 2, 2008 at 11:23pm

Well, at least you gave it the old college try. :-)
Michael Evans March 2, 2008 at 10:52pm

wait was this in Monterey CA??!!! dang didnt even know about it and its in my home town!

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