Its the final countdown! - One week to go

This time next week I'll be in Cambridge participating in PiWars (Assuming no more magic smoke escapes from my robot) and I have a busy weekend planned to try and pull everything together. I've been busy doing some more soldering this morning and will be doing some more this afternoon, after visiting Maplins to get supplies!

Main focus today is to get my line sensor mounted on my newer chassis, as the previous method is no longer viable. This is going to mean moving the Arduino that controls it off the bread board and onto something more permanent. I did consider moving the sensor onto the same Arduino that drives the motors, but I just don't have enough pins spare, and it would be a little fiddly connecting it up.

After that I need to work out a mechanism for holding the 'wire' for the Pi Noon challenge, which is slightly trickier now that the motors and wheels are mounted forwards of the chassis, and then tweaking the code for the autonomous challenge.

Hopefully that will then leave tomorrow for sorting out a device to help with the Skittles challenge. I have some plans but have not had time to actually build anything!  Worse case I'll just have to give the ball a good push.

There's a few other things I want to work on, but as they are extras they can wait until later.. As for other deadlines, well the 'blogging' challenge completes today (in about 30 minutes!) to ensure there's enough time for them all to be judged before Saturday. Obviously that doesn't mean I'll stop blogging, I should have at least one post before the event that (hopefully) shows OptimusPi fully functional, and I'll have a post-PiWars update as well.

So, with the clock ticking, its back to the soldering!

Leo