New Year Progress - Pins and Needles!

Now well into the new year, we got together again to review progress and where we were. 

We now had two Zyderbots to practice with and a visitor from another team, Phil from PiDrogen, came to play too.

Of course most of the meet was about Zyderbot and exchanging what we'd done so far. 

Getting the right version and configuration of OpenCV working on the Raspberry Pi platforms had been a significant task, if only for the compilation time involved. Difficult to show that in a blog, so here's some pictures of laptops with running code. 

This is our idea of a zombie for training the recognition engine. We'll have to revisit this on the day when we get to calibrate against the actual competition zombies.

We didn't get an updated demonstration of the Zombie gun though, the experimental use of solenoids for the trigger mechanism now reverting to more powerful servos for reliable operation. 

The line follower for the Lava Palaver has now reduced to a single camera sensor which detects the white line position, the course 'bump' and the end of course, sending out positional data to the controller on request.. 

The picture shows a streamed version of the detector output which actually slows it down quite a bit but gives confidence that it's doing what it's meant to, here showing three detection zones. Turning the image update and streaming off improves the response time dramatically and isn't necessary for the actual challenge but gives confidence that all is working as it should.

The sensor for the Minesweeper challenge is the same design as the line detector but with a different mounting and software setting. It wasn't setup for demonstration at the meeting, but works on the same principal, reporting the observed relative position of the red square to the controller. The following picture is a test view of what it 'sees'.

This is an uncalibrated image of a red A4 sheet on a noisy floor, we don't have an illuminated 'disco' floor to test it on! It's also surprisingly undistorted for a 160 degree lens, I'm sure the final version will 'fix' that! Code for this sensor will be on Github here.

A lot of the afternoon was occupied with High Noon and we were intending to have some practice with the PiDrogen robot Firefly, but we didn't have a compatible controller so it became a Zyderbot vs Zyderbot challenge. 

Wire coat hangers are becoming more scarce, but we found a couple of ex dry-cleaning hangers and  cut them to size. 

Using bolt cutters might be overkill but works!

We now had the 'official' wire mount and both robots were duly equipped. 

The video is of Phil from PiDrogen vs Colin from EastDevonPirates trying out their skill. We really didn't have enough balloons but we had fun, quite a bit of skill to acquire yet though. It was also a try out of mecanum vs tank steering as the two robots dance inexpertly around each other.

What we now need is more practice and a lot of balloons!

Finally, we took a team picture, might have to do another one, bit of an odd distortion!

Next up will be smaller team meeting to ensure we have solutions for each challenge and possibly some technical info!