Last Sprint

So it is now just 6 days to go until the Sunday of Pi Wars. This is the last weekend to get things sorted before the big day. So we’ve been frantically 3D Printing and testing.

For the Somewhere Over The Rainbow challenge we were concerned about the way the course was going to be lit. There was no confidence that illumination would be even and that our robot would not cast shadows onto the ball (It’s a pretty tall robot). So we have added some LED lights to the camera side of the robot to hopefully give the camera a better view and to ensure the robot is not thrown off by shadows. We have yet to test this though!

The golf attachment has been through a few revisions as it was found to be very difficult to control in testing. The printer is beavering away right now printing out the new parts.

The Duck Shoot stuff is all working great. Shame it is taking up the majority of the internals of the robot though. Space is tight inside there!

The Minimal Maze challenge is working fine. We are just praying for no bright sun on the day as this will ruin everything as we have not had time to fit any backup sensors.

The straight line speed test works fine. We are not going to be the fastest robot out there (I’ve seen some videos of super fast competitors). However, we are confident we will get from one end to the other without touching the wall so will at least collect some points.

Finally there is the obstacle challenge, which is mainly down to practise as well as Pi Noon.

All in all we have had a bloody good crack at this competition and although we are not fully prepared as we hoped we would be we should be a strong team. Fingers crossed for the day. It will be great fun and we are all looking forward to it. I am personally looking forward to getting my life back past Pi Wars and have the time to get on with some of my own personal projects. The last 8-9 months or so has been dominated by Pi Wars and it will be nice to finally get it done and get things back to normal.

However, I now have some fantastic new skills since starting the Pi Wars competition that will be invaluable for some of my up and coming projects and for that I am very grateful.

Hope to see you all in Cambridge next week. Please come along and support us !