It was the Pi Wars Virtual Conference a couple of weeks back and they’ve now posted all the videos on their YouTube channel. I haven’t watched all of them yet but here are some that I have that I thought were particularly useful:
Dr Footleg – “Help, I’ve Been Accepted into PiWars”. Some of the examples included a Lego built tracked robot which is exactly what we’re building (for the same reason – easy to do with school kids). The idea to put elastic bands on the tracks to improve traction is one I plan to take.
Phil Hall – “Tackling the Pi Wars @Home Challenges”. Cool looking robot design and though we are going for simpler approaches for most of the challenges, am squirrelling away some of the ideas for future projects – the modular system; the use of Teensy boards. I’d never heard of motors with encoders but can foresee their advantages as with initial tests I did notice that our motors didn’t work well at low speed settings.
Neil Stevenson – “Speech recognition for controlling robotics”. I was hoping to get some voice control into our robot and this talk is going to save me lots of time. It’s slightly unfortunate that he rubbishes the cheap USB microphone I thought we’d try but Bluetooth headset sounds like a really good idea. The pointer to Vosk as a software library is going to the biggest help.
PiWars Arbie 