As PiWars 2022 came to an end we'd decided we wouldn't carry on to the in person competition. There were lots of reasons; 2022 had been a tough year for free time with a bad job move and lots of events again. At EMFCamp we'd seen the Hacky Racers and …
Articles by Nathan Dumont
Where Did The Time Go?
This past year seems to have passed much quicker than the year before. We've not managed to do as much PiWars as I'd hoped, now things are opening up again there have been lots of distractions. As well as all the extra activities I've had a challenging few months after …
Starting Again
We're back, for another year. After PiWars 2021 there was no question when I asked John and Charlotte if they wanted to try again. This year's theme of farming is exciting for us as well as Katie's family are farmers, and while their farm uses more traditional human-operated machinery they …
Lessons Learned
Our videos are all submitted now. We managed to fit in filming all the challenges (thanks to my parents for their help). Time to look at the robot and the process and see what we've learned.
1. Read the rules all the time
I'd read through the rules initially but …
Too Big!
With only about 2 weeks to go until the deadline, I started to read the rules in a little more detail to check what we should be submitting. It was at this point I realised we were in breach of the size rules! I'd designed the robot to fill the …
The Claw
We realised we needed a way to pick-up toys for the "Tidy up the Toys" challenge. We already had the lift-arm as part of the chassis so a full stacked approach was possible. Initially I just went on Thingiverse and downloaded/printed this claw. I picked it because it looked …
Fish Food Cannon
We've been struggling with time to work on the robot over the last few weeks, rushing to get it finished so the blog posts are a little behind where we are. Here's some details of how we made our fish-food-cannon for the feed the fishes challenge.
We decided to go …
Catch up
We've been rushing to get some hardware working in time for the deadline and neglecting the blog in the process. Due to one thing and another we've had less time to work on the robot than we'd hoped. Now with the delay of the official competition date we've got room …
Pi Utilities
LCD Display
Installing Adafruit SPI LCD library:
sudo pip3 install adafruit-circuitpython-rgb-displayCopy the example from the readme at https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_CircuitPython_RGB_Display. It needs some modifications to match our pinout and to drive the backlight and reset pins:
import time import busio import digitalio from board import SCK, MOSI …Motor Board Bring Up
I've populated the critical parts of the motor driver board now. The connectors and pin headers can wait until I've verified the microcontroller is running.
Mostly just connectors to add, there are some missing ESD protection diodes which are on backorder The STM32G0 series microcontroller on our motor board is …