Equipment Updates

Equipment Updates

Hello. Since our last post our team members have been very  luck in the Pimoroni black Friday yarr booty twitter challenges. This has left us with £45 of vouchers which we are using for the team!


With this we have decided to buy one main thing. A pan tilt hat.

Picture Stolen from Pimoroni

Our thinking behind this purchase is primarily for the maze challenge. We hope that it will enable us to turn our sensor mounted on the hat to enable us to work out which way to go. This should make the maze challenge easier because we are using one sensor instead of our original 3 or encoders on the motors. By the way the sensor we are using (primarily because we had it spare) is the Sharp GP2Y0A41SK0For a ultrasound and we will update you later on the choice.

 

Mammoth Blog Post

Mammoth Blog Post

A lot has happened since we first accepted our place in Pi Wars 2018 so this is a blog post to record it all.

First of all we wanted our robot to be as cheap as possible and this explains our choices of parts for the bot. First of all we are using 4 50:1 motors and an explorer phat we already had. We are also using a Raspberry Pi Zero W and a zero lipo to power it all.

With this in mind our first job was designing the chassis. We wanted something small which would hopefully give us an advantage in the maze and so we came up with our initial idea.

This robot is a 13x13 square and the sensor at the front is an ir distance sensor.

By this point we had spoken to the DT department at our school and we were told we could use the laser cutter so we needed a design with the holes in and so the following was created.





This retains the 13x13 cm design and has the holes for all the screws. Notice the lack of holes for the motor wires, that comes back to haunt us.

So we then visited DT to cut out the design on the laser cutter. We returned with the chassis and then began working on attaching everything to it and now we have this.

 



As you can see it is a bit messy at the moment but it is now time for code.

The only bit of code we have so far is for control with a keyboard and to do this we followed this guide here:https://learn.pimoroni.com/tutorial/robots/controlling-your-robot-wireless-keyboard

And our next piece of code will be autonomously stopping when a wall is sensed.

That is all for now.

Thank You for reading

Will