2021-9-7
This is the third post in draft mode that I have about last PiWars (PiWars at Home 2021). A new PiWars has already been announced for 2022. Here I am still trying to catchup with my blogging from last year. Hopefully this one will see the light of the day. This one is about how I made a foldable arena for PiWars challenges. I showed a glimpse in my last post, here are the nitty gritties if you want to build one for yourself.
2020-11-20
Last year, we had qualified for PiWars 2020 and were happily chugging along when personal tragedy struck in October. After a month of suffering, my Dad passed away in November. This dealt a serious blow to my making and blogging morale. (I did give up my PiWars position last year late October). Dad was and will always be my biggest making cheerleader. My hobbies excite me, and I know these things excited him a lot, too. Anyway, the show must go on.
2019-10-10
So... we applied for and made it to PiWars 2020. We have managed to expand on our previous sketch and send off the application one day before applications closed.
2019-9-15
By this time you all know PiWars 2020 is happening, same place same dates as 2019. This time there is more direct involvement from the community. Some of the courses have been suggested by the community and are going to be built by the community. In previous years, only a select few bits were built by the community, everything else was done by Tim Richardson and Mike Horne, the organisers.
2019-6-3
It has been two months since I wrote my last post. It has taken a bit to fully get over the disappointment. But last weekend marked the official end of Robot J2...
2019-4-1
So we attended PiWars 2019 yesterday, and failed miserably with our robot - J2. It broke down on the second event of the day, struggled with the third event and went up in smokes on the fourth. We came 15th (last) in our category. It was a sobering lesson in robot building and failures. I have blogged a lot of what I did with PiWars bots in the past, but not always focused on the fails, so I think the time has come for me to detail the fails, if nothing for myself to refer to.
2019-3-14
So here we are... 2 weeks to go! Honestly I didn't want to write a post yet but today is the last day for submission into the competition, so I thought I'll share some more of the progress. Actually a lot of stuff has happened on the mechanical end of things and not enough has happened on the software side. So end result is a fairly good looking bot that still needs a lot of integration and testing. However, lots of lessons were learnt, so I'll try to cover some those today.
2018-11-30
Many apologies for the delayed update, I have been failing at doing detailed blog posts rather badly,
2018-10-17
It's been a month since our last post and our PiWars build has been chugging along slowly but surely. Unfortunately I am not getting solid chunks of time, instead it is little bits at a time, but I've managed to do it regularly. A few things happened since our last post a month ago:
2018-9-18
I sent my PiWars 2019 application in about ten days ago (weekend before last). I wasn't ready to the extent I wanted, but then again, you never are, and I didn't want to wait for the last two weekends. Hopefully the application has enough meat to see it through the first round of eliminations. I can't reveal much about the application until the results are announced so, suffice to say, brand new, built from scratch, robot, by the same team as last year. It does have a new name though :).
2018-8-8
Last weekend a fellow PiWars competitor (Vishal) pinged me and said my instructions for installing OpenCV on RaspberryPi were not working. OpenCV was getting installed but Python wouldn't load it, with missing dependency errors. My entire OpenCV series is for the sole purposes of a gentle introduction to OpenCV including how to set it up. If it wasn't working, we had a major problem. It was time to go digging...
2018-5-9
Finally managed to collate all the images from friends and family who had come along to PiWars 2018. Here's a glimpse of Team Pi-O-Steer's action packed day at PiWars 2018.
2018-4-30
This maybe a controversial topic and I fully expect to get panned for it, however, I thought I should write down what I spent on my PiWars bot (First time and in the Beginners category) for two reasons:
2018-4-25
In the last post I wrote what went right and wrong with the build. However, build is only a small part of the event preparation. Attending PiWars is a full scale project. To be successful you need to manage your team's time well and split the work up correctly for things to line up correctly for success. Work needs to be split up into Software, Hardware, Design, Fabrication and Integration.
2018-4-24
... and just like that it is all over. PiWars 2018 was a smashing event last Sunday (and we did smash a few things literally :D)
2018-4-22
The day is finally here. Six months ago when I started building the robot even without knowing whether it will be competing or not, little did I realise I would be where I am today.
2018-4-16
... is often the headlights of an oncoming train 🤣🤣🤣.
2018-4-13
Only a week to go and panic has well and truly set in. We have nothing working.
2018-3-28
It's been a while since I posted an update. We have been head down in a - coding, building, designing printing and repeat loop. Unfortunately, it still doesn't mean we are done with all the challenges. However, we have made some progress in understanding how computer vision works. Must add Pixy has made our life much easier. We have done a part of ball follow and redone straight line speed using PixyCam.
2018-3-12
Another weekend... and yet another, smaller than expected turnaround... but we have made progress. As mentioned in the last post, I have been racing to complete the Pixy camera integration before I finalize the routing logic for Pi-o-steer. I thought this week would be it, but we had a scope creep... we ended up designing, 3D Printing and assembling a full Pan-Last mechanism. On any other day I would have considered that a big achievement but in the big scheme of things it wasn't as big.
2018-3-6
Getting snowed in last week caused a lots of problems for UK but it resulted in some unexpected gains towards our PiWars project.
2018-2-25
Two weeks have flown by since the last update and as I sit down to write this I realize, inspite of what seems like quite a bit of progress, we maybe falling behind. Anyway, we made some progress in the last couple of weeks. Following are the highlights in no particular order in which they were achieved.
2018-2-7
Happy new year everyone; Oh wait, it's February already (how did that happen O_o ?!?). January just flew past and among all the excitement of New Year, squat in the middle of NDC London, I got the magic email from Mike Horne, one of the organisers of PiWars - there had been a drop off and our team had been bumped into the qualifiers list. So team Pi-o-steer is going to PiWars, Yaba daba doooooooo! This news provided impetus to my sagging morale that had seen me procrastinate about the bot for over a month.
2017-12-2
As I mentioned at the end of my last post, I was planning to re-design the front motor mounts and the entire steering mechanism. While this would cause a delay, I thought might as well get as deep as we can given we didn't have any time pressure. Even if we got the bot moving with sensor input by Christmas 2016, it would leave enough time to hone the software for guidance. Though chances of getting the nerf dart launcher built looks a little sketchy now.
2017-11-7
It's been a couple of weeks since I posted, thought I would share an update.
2017-10-26
... and how not to apply for it! Beginning of the month we found out our maiden application hadn't made the cut for PiWars 2018. Made me sad, momentarily, but it faded away fairly quickly. We were too invested in this to not do it. Sadly for us our commitment and intensity wasn't evident in our application.