The theme for PiWars 2024 was “Most Disastrous Robot”, to include vehicles that are in response to a disaster. We decided to base our robot on “Firefly” from the Thunderbirds TV show, from the 1960’s, since this was a fire-fighting machine.
This is the machine we built:
Firefly Construction Notes tells how we went about designing and building Firefly.
We developed a custom robot control board; details are here.
This is Firefly in “Full Ceremonial Dress”…
…but it can be re-configured for the various PiWars challenges. Click the images below for more information.
This is an image of the robot without it’s posh frock. It’s pretty packed in!
This is the video we made for the Technical and Artistic Merit part of the competition:
Results of PiWars 2024
The full set of results are here. We entered the Advanced Category in Sunday’s competition.
In summary, we came second in the Advanced Category. We were pretty pleased with that; although we try to win the competition, we scored zero on Minesweeper so were pretty amazed to get the second place overall. It’s frustrating; our tests for Minesweeper suggested it should work and we could have used radio control if we thought there was a problem. I guess the lesson is that reliability is perhaps the most important requirement for a PiWars robot.
I was delighted that we won the Artistic Merit award. My son was heavily involved in the aesthetic design of the robot and it was lovely that his efforts were recognised. We also won the obstacle course, again I was pleased because this was largely down to my son’s driving.
Team PiDrogen 