Summary Post

 I found Virtual Pi Wars 2021 to be more challenging than the previous Pi Wars. This was partly because we couldn't meet up at Leicester Hackspace as we usually would, but it was also having my GCSEs in the same year. This meant we couldn't spend as long on the robot as we would have liked and the week that the videos had to be submitted Steve got a notification saying he had been in contact with someone who had COVID-19 meaning we couldn't meet as we had planned. We partially managed to achieve our main aim of getting the line following to work. The line following did work although it seemed to struggle on my course, as I have mentioned before. Another way that would have made my entry easier would have bean having two identical robots so both me and Steve could simultaneously work on the same problem. I have definitely learnt a lot from my experience in Virtual Pi Wars 2021. 

I want to thank Steve Gale and Bill von Anrep for all their invaluable help throughout my Virtual Pi Wars 2021 journey.

(James)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Introduction form Steve

 I think it was back in February 2018 when  James  turned up at Leicester Hackspace along with his mother and sister with an interest in building a robot and learning some electronics and software. That summer he successfully applied for PIWARS 2019, now we just had to build a robot. Our first entry, team RATAE, was based on hardware that James already possessed, a PI0W, Pimoroni Explorer Hat and a PI Supply Controller. So James set-to designing the chassis and I said I would help with the software. We did not realise it at the start, but we were effectively building the Tiny 4WD robot. The first chassis was built out of Mecanno . Documentation on the PI Supply website led us to “Approximate Engineering’s Python Game Controller”. This is going to be simple I thought, as the software for controlling the robot was already done, I just had to interface to my Je-Vois camera, add some line following sensors and we would be started,famous last words.   James would have no problems at home
Read more

Feed the Fish Challenge

I found this challenge very difficult as I wasn't sure how to get the nerf bullets in the top, because they would always either go straight over or hit the container.  I decided to try and raise my nerf gun attachment up so I could just point the gun into the top and drop the bullet in, however when I did this I hadn't read the rules well enough to realise there was a height limit. This resulted in me realising that the attachment was 170mm too high, although it did work very effectively (video of the mechanism in action - https://youtu.be/7mnbfLNHEIY)! Another problem was that it was slightly too wide. Although I did find a solution to this it didn't matter because we couldn't get the attachment below the height limit. I then tried to modify my original design to allow the nerf gun to fire straight up. However, this didn't give me enough accuracy and I couldn't find any other way to fire into the top within the rules. This meant I ended up just pushing golf bal
Read more