Thoughts on Hungry Cattle

I designed this hopper for the Hungry Cattle game. The door hinges are set at the correct pitch to allow synchronisation by a pair of Lego gears.  A servo would be mounted at the back to drive the doors.  Each hopper is 70mm wide and the plan would be to mount three of them acrossContinue reading “Thoughts on Hungry Cattle”

The Angle of Repose for Dry Rice

I did an experiment. I want to build a path for the cattle feed for Hungry Cattle. I wanted to know the minimum angle the rice path should have (from horizontal) so that the rice would flow reliably. I set up the experiment shown above. To start with the inclined plane (which is a 3DContinue reading “The Angle of Repose for Dry Rice”

PJD is ready for the farm!

We’ve reached a major milestone.  PJD is ready for the competition!  Well, the base robot is ready, but none of the game specific parts or game specific software have been done yet. Take a look here to see more details. Getting that video wasn’t all that easy.  We ended up writing software to keep DoofusContinue reading “PJD is ready for the farm!”

PJD’s Robot Control Board

When I was building P21 I promised myself that I would not build another circuit on stripboard.  As a result, I started designing PJD’s control board in KiCAD.  But then I realised that large amounts of the circuit were untested, and I wondered if I might design a lovely shinny new PCB that wouldn’t workContinue reading “PJD’s Robot Control Board”

Mk2 Chassis

Back in December we blogged that our Mk1 chassis was too slow, so we had started development of Mk2. Well, here it is! In this design, the motors drive the track sprockets directly, with no reduction gearing. This results in a top speed of 1.2m/s; the same as P21. Hopefully that will be fast enough.Continue reading “Mk2 Chassis”