The Final Countdown: A Melodic Send-Off As the countdown to Pi Wars 2024 reaches its final moments, Team CyberWar stands at the precipice of a journey that has been as exhilarating as it has been enlightening. Today, we share not just another milestone in our saga but a testament to the creativity, technical prowess, and sheer determination that has propelled us forward: our artistic and technical video submission.
The Rhythm of Resilience In a fusion of technical merit and artistic expression, we’ve created a video that does more than showcase our robot’s capabilities; it captures the spirit of our team and the adventure we’ve embarked upon.
Serial Saga: Decoding the Mystery Byte In the vast and intricate world of robotics, every byte matters, and a single misbehaving bit can lead to days of troubleshooting. Our recent odyssey with the SerialTransfer library, is a testament to the meticulous nature of debugging complex systems. This post recounts our journey through the frustrating, yet ultimately enlightening, process of identifying and resolving a bug that nearly stymied our project’s progress.
Engineering Precision: The Odyssey of the Ball Flinger In the world of robotics where theory meets practice, the journey from conception to completion is seldom a straight line. As we ventured into the realm of the undead for the Zombie Apocalypse challenge at Pi Wars 2024, our quest to develop the ultimate ball flinger attachment epitomized the iterative process of engineering innovation. This post delves into the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of bringing the ball flinger to life, underscoring the relentless pursuit of precision and performance.
Navigating the Future - Milestone Achievement in Waypoint Navigation Charting New Paths We’ve hit a significant milestone in our journey towards Pi Wars domination: the successful implementation of advanced waypoint navigation. This breakthrough allows our robot to traverse a series of predefined x,y points with precision, marking a leap forward in our strategy for overcoming the Minesweeper, Lava Palava, and Escape Route challenges.
Speed and Precision: A Balancing Act One of the standout enhancements in our latest navigation code is the ability to set different speeds for each waypoint.
Navigating the Eco-Disaster: A Manual Prelude to Autonomy In the heart of our preparations for the Eco-Disaster challenge at Pi Wars, we took to the arena in manual mode, a crucial step before unleashing our robot autonomously. This challenge, a test of precision and speed, requires our robot to distinguish and sort barrels of ’toxic slime’—a task demanding both agility and strategy.
In our manual test of the Eco-Disaster challenge, the “Virtual Ackermann” steering showcased exceptional maneuverability, laying any concerns to rest.
Odometry Matters In the journey towards Pi Wars 2024, we recently achieved a significant milestone that might sound deceptively simple but holds immense importance: we synchronized our wheel speeds with steering angles for the first time. While it happened relatively late in the build process (we embarked on this project back in 2021), grasping the significance of this achievement requires us to revisit the lessons learned from our past robot, Tauradigm
First Test Drive with Mecanum Wheels Mecanum Mastery: The Start of Omnidirectional Movement Our latest test drive marked a major step forward in our Pi Wars journey—the debut of our robot’s mecanum wheels, driven by our custom mixing code. This first foray into omnidirectional movement was exciting, though it highlighted some areas needing refinement.
Traction and Balance: Challenges Encountered During the test, we noticed a disparity in traction between two diagonal sets of wheels.
