Chassis

James has got the chassis 3D printed at UCC (the school he goes to), everything fitted apart from the holes for the motors which needed a bit of filing down.

James and Steve have got the robot moving with live camera stream. James has started designing the chassis in openSCAD.

Out chassis design so far.

Last hackspace session James and Steve found out that the reason only one motor was spinning was because we were using a 2A battery for a Pi 3B+, redboard+, four motors, and an OLED display! They are now using a bigger battery. The robot is moving but the chassis needs a rebuild and some reliability issues need sorting out (see video).

More updates

We downloaded the redboard software and got one of the example programs to work. Bill 3D printed some orange Lego blocks which can hold the Pimoroni motors for James to prototype with.

This is my first prototype (with spoilers!)

My current prototype

Welcome to Eco Amica

Competing in the 2019 competition

Welcome to the first post about our journey leading up to the Pi Wars competition 2020. We were inspired to enter after the great experience of taking part in the 2019 competition. We have fixed the code for the remote control challenges we used in 2019 and realised that the code shouldn't have worked!

James did a lightning talk at the Pi Wars mini conference on 5 October, where he also bought a RedBoard+ to make our robot more competitive. On 22 October we found two Nerf guns in a charity shop (to reduce waste and support a charity) which we hope to use for the Zombie Apocalypse challenge. We are trying to sort out some code for a distance sensor to work with the controller code to stop the robot bashing into the walls on the escape route challenge.

Robot wired up with RedBoard (left) Nerf guns (right)