My Picks from the Virtual Conference

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

Progress – 15th February

Ah, one of those weeks. There have been various joys this week. First, learning about manufacturing tolerances. Taking inspiration from the design that PiDrogen showed in their Pi Wars conference video we strapped 5 Lego dart shooters together to fire all at once. (I had initially envisioned firing them individually and moving them along a

Retrospective – Costs

The previous post was a general retrospective. I thought it would also be interesting for future competitors to roughly estimate how much our entry cost. The main ticket items (although we had some of these already lying around) Lego Remote Control Stunt Racer £56 Raspberry Pi 3A+ £23.40 SD Card £5.99 Redboard+ £30 Line Sensors

Retrospective

The dust has settled, the polishing has finished, the videos are submitted, now we wait for the judges. From a robot building perspective PiWars 2021 is over. So it’s a good time to look back, what went well? What went badly? Let us start with the good stuff We finished with entries for every challenge

Progress – 2nd February

We’re back in one piece … Not quite as pretty as before and we’re moving ever further away from our original Lego model but hopefully for the better. The weight of the battery is now lower, and it’s easier to get to the battery to recharge or unplug. The line following sensors are attached (via

Progress – 25th January

No big news this week. We spent some of the weekend watching the Pi Wars Virtual Conference which offered a nice mix of reassurance, entertainment, and good ideas. There was a shopping spree on BrickLink and Pimoroni and PiHut (if I’d been a couple of days slower could have picked up one of the new

Progress – 18 January 2021

No post last week, adjusting to COVID lockdown number three rather hampered progress. But a big one this week – we have a mobile robot. This weeks progress involved building a Lego cage for battery (pulled out from a Tamiya RC car) and the Raspberry Pi. As a result we can now run the robot

Progress- 21st December

We’ve been going back to go forward (hopefully). Watching last years Pi Wars stream there was a talk on ROS which intrigued me. So I thought it would be worth trying. (The “not invented here” failing of a software developer is slightly tempting me with “could achieve the same with MQTT and some home brew.”)

Installing Redboard on Ubuntu 20.04

As will be explained in this week progress post I decided to have a play with Ubuntu 20.04 as our OS rather than Raspbian. This isn’t too much of a difference, they both ultimately descend from Debian after all, but ROS has packages for Ubuntu. However the Redboard setup script assume Raspbian. So these are

Progress – 14th December

No hardware changes this week. Instead I have been concentrating on connecting to the Bluetooth game pad we are using and then reading the resulting keypress. I plan to write a blog post about how that read process is done but in the meantime below is proof we have successfully achieved it …