Yesterday, when we left of we had just upgraded to the PI four, and with the deadline coming up for the competition, the rest of the snowflakes started shouting at me to squeese one last blog; so it’ll be short, it will be jucy and it will almost certainly be not fun for me. So here we go.

With the completion of the PI, the snowflakes turned their adventuring attention to the next challenge, the Eco Disaster (did I mention that this Competition was disaster themed) or as I like to call it the pushy muckbober challenge. Why do I like to call It this name, because in this challenge, the snowflakes have to build a scoop to push ‘barrels’ around a course of some sort. So breaking out the saws and the drills again, the snowflakes thought it was about time to cue the music.

So as the scoop entered development the other half of the snowflakes began to turn their heads to wards decoration, in a disaster theme of course. So we were thinking something like… Oh wait, what, Just in the disaster themed competition, PI wars, has just been shut down by a disaster, how ironic. So what does this mean, it means that I don’t have to do any more work, yes, oh yea and also that we have more time to work on the illusive decorations until, hopefully when corona decides to shove off, the competition is reinstated on a later date.

So what’s next, of course I will be looking out for info on when the competition is going to start up again so keep an eye out for an update on that. But in the mean time I have started work on two more serious posts that will take much more time and care to produce. They are in order as follows, the Jobless Generation and Sentience. So what am I going to do now, I am am going to roll up a new character sheet for DND (Dungeons and Dragons, the best game ever) and so in the meantime stay snowflakey.

You know how the saying goes, pies in their eyes, nestled in a nest of spies, no you don’t know it. That’s all right because I just made it up, If you can remember from a couple days ago (I’d be surprised if you can, attention spans are nothing like they used to be, personaly I barley remember what I did yesterday, let alone some random blog on the internet) the snowflakes were stuck on the bolder of latency. So did we over come this problem, I can say with a resounding, sort of. You see our PI core could not handle the amount of data the camera was feeding it and as the PI we were using was out of date, it seemed like about time to upgrade to the PI four. (Ha I knew that I could wrap pies into this some how (what are you talking about, of course you did jack, you are writing the confounding thing, and you knew that we upgraded the PI, so stop being an) oh just shut up me and get on with the blog).

Upgrading to the PI four naturally with a couple extra problems, you might immediately jump to the conclusion that this was writing out new endless lines of code, but this only took a couple of back to back sleepless nights. Now the real problem came with not having unlimited power, even though we had already upgraded our power supply it was, on it’s own not enough. But that had a simple fix, spend, more, money, yay. Buying the new power pack was easy, I didn’t even have to do it, the other snowflake had to (yes less work for me).

With a more powerful battery pack there was still one lingering piece that did not quite wan’t to fit into place. Jeff could now Wizz all around the room, driven through the view of the camera, however a small shimmer occurs once you get to the furthermost reaches of the class room; despite the higher p.d. and the more powerful system, we were still getting some latency. I just hope that the course is not to big.

Now I know three days ago I said that this would be the last blogpost until the competition, but I might just slip one more in tomorrow before the Friday the 13th midnight curfew. So if this is the last you hear from the snowflakes, remember to stay snowflakey.

Nowadays camera’s are everywhere, in every ally, above every counter and on every person. Every individual meshes together to make one great surveillance system of moving camera’s; as it is so easy for state powers to access our phones and incorporate them into their eyes and ears. But, as some of you may very well be wondering, how has this got anything to do with robots; well apart from a dystopian future of hovering drones that monitor our every move (I am being silly, that would never happen, our phones do that for them already), we decided to add one more camera to that pervasive system.

This might be the time to tell you, if your here for a deep and Informative discussion of surveillance, this is not the blog for you but feel free to stick around to read the chronical of a not so epic, robotics building team and their struggle to build a robot, that hopefully does not fall apart at the PI wars competition on the 28th of march. Anyway, I was talking about something, Oh yes, Jeff (our robot) we had a problem; you see one of the challenges at the PI wars competition in Cambridge is a blind driver challenge. We have to drive the robot around a course in one of three ways; one, we code Jeff to drive around the course (way to complicated, + we are just to lazy to do that), two, we have some one shout directions to the driver (I mean we find it hare to understand each other face to face) and finally, three, to give Jeff an eye. Now I know what (some of) you are saying, ‘Jeff already has an eye, his line reading sensor already gives him vision’, shh, eyless jeff doesn’t like that. So we decided to give Jeff an eye, one that we could see through. Now coding a camera is quite complicated, but look on the bright side, I did not have to do it, the other snowflakes had to.

Continuing on, they used this platform called motion to manage the camera, hooked it up to run 10 frames per second and a resolution of 320 X 160 and for the most part Jeff Worked. There was one problem thought, can you guess it, aye, that day the giant of problems decided to hurl the bolder of Latency at us. It was not fun. The camera worked, but for only up to 3 meters away from the screen the feed was running to; then it would become choppier that a storm, a thunderbolt and an explosion’s all coinciding in exactly the same place right out in the middle of the ocean. It was as they say, completely useless. So what was the issue, well to sum it all up our model of the pi was to outdated, small and underpowered to run the camera, we were going to have to upgrade.

Join us next time, for the final blog before the pi wars competition, will we fail or will we win. I don’t know, don’t ask me and there is still one week to go. Any way stay safe and stay snowflakey.

The wheels were wobbling, so what solution did the Snowflakes come up with to fix Jeff the robot? Well, to screw them into place of course. I know, I know, I did last week specifically say that we would not do this as we were not ready yet, and yes we were working on some solutions, but those wheel brackets just look so good and plans change, you know (mainly as the other solutions proved unfruitful and inadequate). So down to screwing we went.

All of course was going swimmingly, as they do, the brackets where a bit of a pain to screw into the wood and took some elbow grease and the rewiring/attaching the motors to the brackets was a bit fiddly but it was going well. Notice the WAS, how do I explain this, some body thought that they could do the last bracket all by them selves, taking over from the Snowflake who had done the last three brackets, and of course they thought that they did not need any help. Half way through this particular snow flake stopped as they did not have the ‘strength’ to screw the screws in all the way, so I had to take over, but it was to late, the damage had been done. What damage I hear you say, the last snowflake had half screwed the bracket in the wrong way round (facing the wrong way) and naturally I did not notice; so when I finished completely screwing the bracket in and took a step pack to see the irreparable damage I had done, I went ‘oh that does not seem right’.

Because the bracket was facing the wrong way, mixed the the fiddly wiring of the motors, this meant that the wheel/motor, that was attached, would be facing the wrong way. What to do, what to do, we can’t simply take it out because that would be effort and would damage the integrity of the final body (as we were going with this block of wood as our main frame).So you know how they sometimes say on Star Trek, reverse the polarity, well that is what we did. It took a hot minuet of arguing, scuffling and despair, for the band of misfits (the snowflakes) to come to this conclusion and a further five of messing around with the pi, but we did it, this new Jeff could Finally drive properly and we could control him , yay. Time to testing it was.

Next time, our band of not so epic edventures ‘battle’ the task of; smile, your on camera, and ‘shocking’ revelations await (oh I do love click bait).

Well the wheels were wobbling, or to be more exact they seemed to be forming a nice v. Sorry can we pause for just a second and reverse time, we are a bit to far ahead in the story, yes thank you very much, just slide back a bit more, and stop there. Lithium ion batteries, chunky boys, that’s what we settled for; a five inches long, two inches wide and half an inch thick device, we had found our new power supply. With this additional power of cores there came additional problems, mainly it did not fit, the battery did not fit in the chase. Fortunately for us we had foreseen this and included that detail in our newly completed plans, so it was time to cue the music and hue a great block of wood into a desirable shape.

As one can see the decorations are yet to come, but for now this is Jeff’s final layout (tweaks may come in the future), why the pen well Jeff has to communicate some how. Now with a proper frame and a more powerful powers supply we commenced programming for the challenges, the first challenge we chose to tackle was the line reading challenge, to warm us up. After two long nights (I mean to long nights for the coders) the program was done and the tests commenced.

It all seemed to be going swimmingly but something seemed off, the robot was following the line perfectly (it does have trouble with the corners, some fine tuning is still required) and Jeff moved at speed; but slowly over time it slowed down, it began missing the corners by more grievous amounts and Jeff got closer to the floor. What was happening was that the wheels were not held in place properly (it was only held together with sticky paper) and the new weight made the wheels bend inwards, creating a nice upside down v shape. This caused all sorts of problems.

The upside down v mainly effected the driving and efficiency of the motors, and soon it was impossible to make Jeff turn even when manually controlling him. The speed was also hit hard, by the end of the day he was reduced to relative crawl. We need to sort out this issue, it will not effect us in the long run because ultimately we are going to screw the motors in but until we do that, this bending is going to severely effect our tests and we don’t yet have a solution.

Join us next week to see if the snowflakes fix the bendy problem (don’t worry the solution is almost finished, I think) and in the meantime, stay snow flakey.

As you may no doubt know, building a robot is hard; but then again easy, with the Pi starter set, however this set will not get you very far, underpowered motors, low voltage batteries, no proper frame and a whole other host of shortcomings. I mean gosh it is almost as like they had designed the thing so that you could not win the competition by simply building the set. So I think the phrase back to the drawing board is appropriate here, except from the fact that we were never really there, and so the snow flakes got down to designing.

As you can see here these are our plans for Jeff mark 2, you can’t see all of it, security reasons you see, we can’t allow spies from other teams to gloat over our immaculately drawn schematics for our Jeff mobile 9000 and steal ideas. Saying that, I highly doubt any other teams are looking at this as – wait one- I just decided to look around at the other blogs and gosh some people have access to a 3D printer, what have we got, some wood a couple sharp piece of metal and the empty attics that we call our brains. I was going to say it seemed a bit of a futile effort but on second thoughts you really can get some useful pieces of information from the blogs. Snowflake command was right, we do have to guard our secrets carefully, not that we have any. Any way where was I, oh yes covering our research, while part of the snowflakes were actively designing Jeff mk2, the rest of the team was researching the challenges, through the use of YouTube (‘definitely’ watching related videos) and using the official pi wars website, so that we could use this information to aid the design team. One problem that we repeatedly bumped up against was the power problem, to put it simply the few double a batteries we had were inadequate, It’s time to up the voltage.

Return back next week (hopefully we will have decided by then what batteries to settle on and my lazy ass has finished the task of writing the blog -I know, it’s a longshot but cross your fingers and dream) to see the what new batteries we settle on, woo how exiting, and the continuation of the snowflakes robotics adventure. In the mean time keep calm and stay snow flakey.

Last time we left our not so intrepid and not so adventures heroes (the snowflake team), the spinning death machine, uh I mean our little out of control robot could move, its wheels spun like, well I guesses wheels; yes we had little control over the machine but it did move. So with Christmas fast approaching we called it a year and headed home, fast forwarding roughly a month and a whole load of test, and yes they did go horrifically thank you for asking, the snowflakes got back to work on our definitely not evil machinations.

Having made a relatively unstable robot, the team decided that the robot, we will call it Jeff for now, needed a more stable base and for that it would need to have more wheels. Seeming to have learnt a thing or two from Jeff 1.0 and some how grown more competent over Christmas, set upon the task with speedy and relatively smooth haste, Jeff soon had his new upgrades.

And they worked, no flying wheels, no failing programs and no jiggly chasse just a firm responsive vehicle that went whizzing about the whole class room (I would show you a video of it but I don’t feel like spending an exuberant amount of money (any amount of money is a lot to a teenager) on a small part time competition blog).

So now we can walk, next week were planning to run (meaning, moving is walking for robots, running is being able to complete tasks and we are also designing attachable components). But you will have to tune in next week, ok probably in two weeks time, to see whether or not we scuffed up (highly probable) and what tasks Jeff can do.

(Ah, Jeff’s like a crawling baby, he has so much potential; I just hope that he does his laundry).

This is the first post of snowflakes, snowflaking away in our it shed coming up with all different manner of crazy designs but first we had to get the basics sett up.

^codding the Pi^

I remember first opening up the kit and looking at the tangle of resistors, plastic and all different zig-zagging wires and thinking what the crap, this is going to go nowhere. Fortunately one off the snowflakes had the bright idea to use the internet, this led us to CamJam EduKit 3 the brilliant set of instructions so you can first get to grips with your pi. Following the worksheets we set about building the basics, mostly plane sailing up to the point where we actually had to make the infernal thing move, the photo above is us first putting the movement code. This literally took about a Minuet. so we gathered round, got the popcorn, and holding our breath ran the code; nothing happened, it stayed still as a deer in headlights. Quickly we flicked through our code, checking every little detail and the following happened, Execute code, nothing, Execute code nothing, Execute code, nothing, It turned out we had got the polarity of one of the pieces wrong quickly flicking it around it rand, how do i know it ran, because one of the wheel came spinning off and hit me in the leg. Fastening the wheel back on to the motor, making sure it was properly in place, we all gathered round for the final time that day, motor, prepped, code prepped, lights green, execute code, and right on cue those beautiful babies began spinning.

Return next week for an new post is what I would like to say but we are breaking up for Christmas so do not expect another blog to the new year, but keep an eye out, in the meantime, keep calm and stay snowflakey.