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.
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.