Category Archives: Uncategorised

I’m rather proud of our aquarium. Here’s a picture: It is a 3D printed frame into which you can slot two (or three) iPads.  The red circle on the bottom is a target for the robot to align on. The outside of the box is the regulation 200mm, but the hole in the top isContinue reading “Take a look at our Aquarium!”

I built the new catapult (that I talked about in my last post) and tested it. Immediately I could see many of the improvements that were expected of the new design: However, I found that it was still too inconsistent.  Specifically, the energy stored in the system would gradually decrease as the catapult was usedContinue reading “Testing the new Catapult”

Back in November I made this design for Feed the Fish. At the time, I was pleased with it.  Initial tests went well, and I had occasions where the catapult delivered five rounds into the aquarium in one shot.  Since then, however, I have become less satisfied with the design.  Here are the problems withContinue reading “A New Catapult for Feed the Fish”

I’m a bit late to the voice control party.  But that’s good news because everyone else has done all the hard work.  In particular, Neil Stevenson from Team Dangle has blogged how to install Vosk (https://dangle.blogsyte.com/?p=199) on a Pi.  I copied Neil’s instructions and had a voice control system up and running (on a RPi400)Continue reading “Voice Control Taking Shape”

Two blog posts in one day!  Whatever next? Version 1 of the junction detector has a problem.  Frequently the angle of the road ahead does not match the preset angles of the coloured bars in the detector (see the earlier blog).  As a result, the code misses road options. So, I have developed a newContinue reading “I want Doughnuts.”

You may recall that we have managed to complete the Up the Garden Path challenge using a mixture of video guidance and odometry (see our blog from the 25th January). The next step in our plan is to remove the utilisation of the odometry.  This requires that the line follower code be changed to understandContinue reading “Line Follower Junction Detection Version 1.”

Building software to control a robot based on a video feed is tricky.  Generally, you get an idea how your algorithm should work so you implement it.  But when you try it the robot does something completely different to your plan and you have no idea why.  And the next time you try it, itContinue reading “Vision System Development”

I’ve done quite a lot of work on UTGP over the last couple of weeks. To start with I made the course. Then I used our 2019 line following code to time the course under vision control.  This code doesn’t know about junctions, so I made it work as follows: This method is a mixtureContinue reading “Up the Garden Path Progress”

Wow, it’s been a month since our last update.  That’s partly because we’ve been working on a talk for the upcoming conference, and partly because we’re too lazy after Christmas.  Anyway, lets update you on progress. Feed the Fish We have progress on this game, but there’s more to do. The robot does the appropriateContinue reading “Happy New Year!”

P20 (the robot we built for PiWars 2020) had loads of improvements over P19 (the machine we entered for PiWars 2019).  But most of the improvements were kind of… “incremental”: none of them resulted in a big performance increase.  For PiWars@Home we decided there was opportunity for fundamental change. So, we present P21; our machineContinue reading “Move Over P20!”