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PiWars 2024: The Challenges and Their Challenges

There are seven challenges at the in-person event for PiWars 2024, each with their own problems to solve. They are split in to three categories: Autonomous only, Autonomous/Remote, Remote Only. For the second of those, if you are in the Advanced/Professional category you have to attempt the challenge autonomously. State of the Onion NE-Five exists […]

Installing RedBoard+ Library on Ubuntu

Macfeegle Prime is heading back to PiWars! A lot has happened in that time, ignoring the whole *gestures broadly at the world*, a lot has moved on in software terms. We now have Ubuntu 20.04 for the Pi, ROS Noetic has been released for it, and Approximate Engineering has rewritten the RedBoard+ library from scratch. […]

Big News, Going Pro!

I have taken the plunge and I’ve gone part time at work, dropping to three days a week, to give me far more time to concentrate on my lifelong passion of robotics with the aim of making it my career!  This wasn’t exactly planned if I’m honest but the result of a recent epiphany, building […]

Raspberry Pi – Docker on USB Drive

As per my last post I’m using Docker on my robot with ROS. The last task is to get docker running from a dedicated USB drive to split resources between that and the SD card the OS is running from. A good guide to mounting a USB drive can be found here. Note, rather than […]

StereoPi Image Mods

I’ve been using the Ubiquity Robotics Raspberry Pi ROS image to run both the robot and controller, it seemed the easiest way to get ROS running, but now I’m trying to get low latency streaming working from the cameras it is proving tricky. New Plan, use the Stereo Pi image with Docker to host ROS […]

Pi to Pi Comms Using ROS

I’ve decided to use ROS (Robot Operating System) for my PiWars project as it’s industry standard and this is an excellent excuse to learn it. For some reason I thought that ROS was a realtime operating system, turns out it is a bunch of libraries and services that run on top of existing operating systems, […]

MFP MVP TBD…

MacFeegle Prime, Minimal Viable Product, To Be Decided… Time’s pressing and though I started with lofty goals I need to set a minimum that I’ll be happy with that are acheivable, in software engineering (and probably other fields) we refer to this as the minimum viable product. The Challenges There are seven challenges in PiWars, […]