Its show time! - 9th Egham Raspberry Jam

This weekend I took Optimus Pi for its first public outing at the 9th Egham Raspberry Jam. Overall it was a successful event, but not without a few problems..

I've been to most of the previous Egham Raspberry Jams, so I know that it attracts a mix of people, ranging from those who have never used a Raspberry Pi before, to those that have used it extensively. With that in mind I was fully expecting to hear the question 'PiWars? What's PiWars' so, as well as taking along my robot, I went prepared with details about the PiWar's website, the list of challenges and print outs of some of the more complicated challenges that the visitors could read through.

My stand! Complete with robot, skittles and line following sensor demo.

As I'd gotten my range and line following sensors working the previous weekend I wanted to be able to show them off. The range sensor itself I mounted on the front of the robot and quickly hacked in the standalone test code into my main 'PiWars' code and set it up so (in theory) if there was an obstacle within 150mm of the front of the robot then it would stop and refuse to drive forwards (Of course if you were travelling fast enough you can still crash). Originally I was just querying the range sensor every time I processed input from the joystick, but this seemed to be causing the controls to respond a little sluggishly (As they had to keep waiting for the sensor to respond) so Sunday morning (A few hours before I had to leave) I quickly moved that out to a background thread that updated a global, atomic variable. Something I completed much faster in C++ than I would have managed in Python. For anyone interested these changes can be found over at my GitHub account on the EghamRaspberryJam branch.

Lots of wires and the range sensor attached on the front.

As both the range sensor and Arduino motor driver communicate with the Raspberry Pi via i2c I needed a way to plug both devices in together, so I quickly soldered up a break out board to allow both of them to be connected to the Raspberry Pi's i2c pins.I also added a logic level shifter to convert from the Raspberry Pi's 3.3V to the Arduino 5V which, whilst not technically required in this setup, will allow me to add additional 5V sensors at a later date.

At the Jam the code worked as expected for about 10 minutes, after which the range sensor no longer seemed to respond and cause the motors to stop. So some investigation and fixes will need to be done later. The rest of the robot worked happily for the next hour or so... and then one of the wheels fell off... I blame the kid driving it at the time :)

A three wheeled robot!

The other sensor I got up and running last weekend was the QTR-8RC module that I'll be using for the line following challenge. Now I haven't yet worked out how to mount it on the robot so I needed a different way to show it off. The module itself is comprised of eight individual sensors, which conveniently is also the width of the LED Matrix on the Sense HAT. By taking some code from the example 'snake' program that come with the Sense HAT I was able to set things up so that as you move the line sensor across a white page the lights on the Sense HAT would go out to match the black electrical tape on the page.

The final props I brought along was a wooden skittle set. These spent the first half of the Jam up on the table, but later I moved them onto the floor and some of the kids tried knocking them over with my three wheeled robot. The best result was knocking over 2 pins (followed by a strike when they drove the robot into them) but most of the time the ball was rolling slowly enough it just stopped when it reached the pins. I know this would have been slowed down a bit by the carpet tiles and the ball should move faster across hardboard, but it definitely looks like I need a little extra something to get the ball moving.  Of course it was shortly after this that another wheel fell off!

Down to two wheels!

Over the three hours of the event I spoke to a lot of people, talking about my robot and PiWars, how the challenges encourage people to learn about robotics, sensors and writing code to connect them together, with several people saying they may grab tickets to attend, others on how they could use this encourage the children they teach and one or two even talking about entering into Pi Wars 2016 (If it happens of course).

This Jam was extra special as there was a Show and Tell competition taking place, with prizes graciously donated by various Raspberry Pi related companies for both an under 16 and over 16 category.

The 16 and over prizes, with the list of  donators.

Each person attending the event was given two tokens to vote for their preferred under 16 and over 16 exhibit and by the end of the event I had collected 7 on my table. Unfortunately that wasn't enough to win the prize, which went, I believe, to a robot arm with laser targeting (a table I didn't manage to get to myself). The under 16 prize went to a nice 3d printed, articulated robot hand!

Albert talking through the under 16 prizes.

So it was another good Egham Raspberry Jam, which has hi-lighted a few issues with my robot that I can now work on improving, and hopefully I sent a few people away with a few more ideas on what to do with Raspberry Pis.