Reasoning

Initially, I started working directly with the acrobot.  The complexity of the robot itself made it difficulty to tell whether the problems I was having arose from the robot or the hardware and the software that was supporting it.  So, using the paradigm that simple is good, I took apart the acrobot and restarted from ground zero using a pendulum instead of an acrobot.  I then wrote code that would make a pendulum do neat tricks and invert.

This page contains the hacks that I wrote to make it do random things.  I call them hacks because I had write code specifically for the task and tweak parameters myself to make it work.  This isn't very powerful, since every time the task changed, I had to manually change a lot of code.  In Stage 3, I used a more general technique which was much more powerful.

Type source setup.332, cc332 to compile, use term to communicate with the Sun.

The first hack that I wrote simply damps out the natural oscillations of a free-swinging pendulum.
Damping Code (zipped)

The next hack was a program that would pump energy into the system, turn it two revolutions counter-clockwise, damp to a stop, and then go back two revolutions clockwise, damp to a stop and repeat.
Spin Code (zipped)

The final hack that I wrote inverted the pendulum from a stop and held it inverted.  This is the most complicated task and took a lot of tweaking of the parameters to get it to work right.
Invert Code (zipped)