This blog post is part of Makers Jönköping entry to Pi Wars 2024. Pi Wars is an international, challenge-based robotics competition in which teams build Raspberry Pi-controlled robots and then compete in various non-destructive challenges to earn points. The competition takes place in Cambridge UK, over a single weekend and at the end of each day, prizes, medals and trophies are awarded to those competing.
Here are some videos of the progress of our robot!
Here is a bonus cat video…
This blog post is part of Makers Jönköping entry to Pi Wars 2024. Pi Wars is an international, challenge-based robotics competition in which teams build Raspberry Pi-controlled robots and then compete in various non-destructive challenges to earn points. The competition takes place in Cambridge UK, over a single weekend and at the end of each day, prizes, medals and trophies are awarded to those competing.
A really important part of Pi Wars is to build the test arena… something that we can use to develop and test our robot. Here are some pictures of our arena build..
This blog post is part of Makers Jönköping entry to Pi Wars 2024. Pi Wars is an international, challenge-based robotics competition in which teams build Raspberry Pi-controlled robots and then compete in various non-destructive challenges to earn points. The competition takes place in Cambridge UK, over a single weekend and at the end of each day, prizes, medals and trophies are awarded to those competing.
The Zombie killer Pi Wars robot will be an American school bus design of course. Because have you ever seen a disasterous zombie apocalypse movie without an American school bus? Exactly.
We are grateful we might actually have a design this year and this one is looking great indeed!
This blog post is part of Makers Jönköping entry to Pi Wars 2024. Pi Wars is an international, challenge-based robotics competition in which teams build Raspberry Pi-controlled robots and then compete in various non-destructive challenges to earn points. The competition takes place in Cambridge UK, over a single weekend and at the end of each day, prizes, medals and trophies are awarded to those competing.
For the Zombie Apocalypse we have designed a nerf shooter. We will load it with laser guided munitions. Here are some pictures of our Zombie killer machine.
This blog post is part of Makers Jönköping entry to Pi Wars 2024. Pi Wars is an international, challenge-based robotics competition in which teams build Raspberry Pi-controlled robots and then compete in various non-destructive challenges to earn points. The competition takes place in Cambridge UK, over a single weekend and at the end of each day, prizes, medals and trophies are awarded to those competing.
Of all the one hundred thousand Raspberry Pi motor driver HATs on the market there was not a single one that fitted our needs. Exactly. As we are makers we are used to make it ourselves. So for this project we designed a PCB which would manage the sensors and drive motors. We wanted to make it as professional as possible but still manage to assemble in a home setting.
All components worth mentioning are surface mount and down to 0608″ size capacitors and resistors. Below are some photos of the PCB that we made for Pi Wars 2024. We ordered PCB and solder stencil from Aisler who are a PCB manufacturer based in Europe.
At the maker club we have a IC Heater oven where we are able to surface mount the boards.
This blog post is part of Makers Jönköping entry to Pi Wars 2024. Pi Wars is an international, challenge-based robotics competition in which teams build Raspberry Pi-controlled robots and then compete in various non-destructive challenges to earn points. The competition takes place over a single weekend and at the end of each day, prizes, medals and trophies are awarded to those competing.
As always we like to stay at the forefront of technology and enjoy the glow of the state of the art. So we wanted to use this new AI technology everybody is talking about – just because, because why not, right?
Well to be more specific, we wanted to train a machine learning model to recognize barrels for the eco-disaster challenge and use the model for navigating the eco-disaster arena.
This ambitious idea of employing machine learning to solve the problem would also include training the model from a simulated environment.
After pain-stakingly recording images of our 3d-printed barrels and annotating them, we trained the model with some promising results.
Further training yielded even better results (which is what I try to say to my children every day to no avail). Even Australians will be pleased to no longer be classified as Green Barrel.
This blog post is part of Makers Jönköping entry to Pi Wars 2024. Pi Wars is an international, challenge-based robotics competition in which teams build Raspberry Pi-controlled robots and then compete in various non-destructive challenges to earn points. The competition takes place in Cambridge UK, over a single weekend and at the end of each day, prizes, medals and trophies are awarded to those competing.
This blog post is part of Makers Jönköping entry to Pi Wars 2024. Pi Wars is an international, challenge-based robotics competition in which teams build Raspberry Pi-controlled robots and then compete in various non-destructive challenges to earn points. The competition takes place in Cambridge, UK, over a single weekend and at the end of each day, prizes, medals and trophies are awarded to those competing.
Every long journey starts with a single step. Each major achievement starts with a great plan. But as any half-decent engineer knows, you also won’t get anywhere without coffee.
We look at examples and the current state of the art. Looking for inspiration from our immediate environment and surroundings.
Then we get down to the more serious planning. Everybody has a say and all ideas are worth hearing! Our youngest team member is also our project manager and lead design engineer.
This is our first blog post about Pi Wars 2024! Each long journey begins with a single step and we are excited to have taken our first small steps towards our journey to competition day in Cambridge, UK on the 21st April, 2024.
Pi Wars is an international, challenge-based robotics competition in which teams build Raspberry Pi-controlled robots and then compete in various non-destructive challenges to earn points. The competition takes place over a single weekend and at the end of each day, prizes, medals and trophies are awarded to those competing.
Our team is called ”Makers Jönköping” and consists of members from the Makers Jönköping maker club. Our maker club is located in the city of Jönköping in Sweden – so a fair way away from Cambridge.
Everyone in the maker club was invited to join and we are still in the process working out who is on the team. Here is a photo of some of us.
We have started making an inventory of what we have available in terms of parts etc for making a robot. The general idea is that the robot will have wheels, motors, battery, and a raspberry pi – so most is in the air at the moment! Going through boxes of stuff from previous competitions was an experience and there is probably more to be found in old boxes.
The strategy will be to build a robot fairly quickly from the parts that we already have in order to enable progress by those working on the software while those focusing on the mechanics build the actual robot that we will use in April.
That’s it for this first blog post! We will try to not make these blog posts too long winded but short and sweet with many photos. So the next blog posts will have details about our plans for electronics and about building the first prototype from existing parts!
Thanks for reading and see you soon!
