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Tag archives: piwars-2018

PiWars 2018: Team Pi-O-Steer's day out

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.

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Cost of building a robot for PiWars

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:

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PiWars 2018: The Aftermath - 2 (Lessons learnt)

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.

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PiWars 2018: The Aftermath - 1

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)

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Update 10: The day is here, but the robot isn't...

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.

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Update 9: Light at the end of the tunnel...

2018-4-16

... is often the headlights of an oncoming train 🤣🤣🤣.

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Update 8: Panic setting in with seven days to go!

2018-4-13

Only a week to go and panic has well and truly set in. We have nothing working.

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Update 7: Zoom Zoom... some progress at last

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.

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Update 6: Pan, tilt, see... Vision challenges in progress...

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.

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Update 5: Getting started with Pixy camera

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.

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Update 4: Sound, Vision and fury, stumbling along...

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.

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Update 3: We are going to PiWars 2018!

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.

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PiWars Update Two: Steering Geometry, say what now?

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.

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PiWars Update One: Steering (out of) control

2017-11-7

It's been a couple of weeks since I posted, thought I would share an update.

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Getting started with PiWars!

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.

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