The original Maxwell's Demons contest took place before I had even heard of the LRGoAA. I was really looking forward to trying the event, however. We modified the rules somewhat from the original event, eliminating the head-to-head aspects to encourage more builder freedom. We also change the definition of sorting to merely mean separating the different colors - not necessarily putting a color on a specific side of the board.

We actually tried this twice. We met on the originally-scheduled day and pretty much no one was ready. So we decided to try again in a few weeks. This seemed to really work to my advantage, as I was the only person who had much time to devote to improving my model.

Of all of the LRGoAA bots I've built, I may be most proud of this one. It almost, but not quite, lived up to my perfectionist requirements - it did its job very well and reasonably quickly. I even like the way it looks.

More details follow. As always, I have more pictures, so if you'd like more details on something, just contact me.

	The closest I could come to a picture of the whole thing. The edge-following feeler is the upright on the right; when the bot starts moving this gets deployed automatically. The left gatherer arm is already deployed in this picture; normally it starts upright and, like a dog shaking itself dry, the bot shimmies to cause it to drop. The bot sorts blocks by either kicking them towards the center or towards the edge; the cage at the rear right is to prevent those kicked to the edge from falling off.
	The feeler mechanism. The small lever rides against the edge; this is attached to a rotation sensor, which gives me feedback on how closely I'm following the edge. If the reading goes negative, I turn towards the board; positive, away from the board. This gives me automatic support for the board corners; I just keep turning until I get straightened out on the next edge.
	The gatherer drive mechanism. The motor mounted top-center powers the driveshaft, angled over the tire, which feeds through the turntable and to a worm gear which drives the chain-link gatherer chain. If you think this looks remarkably similar to the gatherer chain on a corn head for an agricultural combine, you're right. Growing up on a farm, my models have always been heavily influenced by farm equipment. You can also see that the motor is split to two outputs, one of which does nothing. This was my last major design decision - would both the long and the short gatherer be powered, or only the long? I went back and forth for weeks before deciding on just the long side. But the frame would support a similar short-side gatherer, and the power take off is obviously there as well. You can also see the two drive motors for propulsion built into the frame below.
	My patented jam-proof channeling mechanism. The channel starts out 6-wide. One side gradually gives up a stud of width, while the other side has an adrupt shoulder to reduce the width. The should works to pivot any blocks that come in at an angle; combined with the gradual reduction, I did not have a single problem with blocks jamming underneath the bot.
	The sorter. The light sensor is located in front of the kicker, unlike in my prototypes, and worked with nearly 100% accuracy.