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 […]
NE-Five Upgraded? Yukon Bet On It!
Upgrades galore in this latest post! Raspberry Pi 5, Pimoroni Yukon, and a banging sound system?!
NE-Five Visits The Touring Toolshed!
NE-Five meets the legends that are Sir David Jason and Jay Blades MBE on The Touring Toolshed!
NE-Five Mk4 – It’s All About That Base…
An update on the design of NE-Five Mk4
NE-Five (Re)design, Lessons Learned
One common questions I get asked about NE-Five is “is it open source” and I always give the answer “mostly…”, there’s a reason for that. The code has been available for a long while, along with a basic simulation that you can run in Gazebo, but the CAD model has never been shared. That’s becuase […]
Making the RedBoard Work on the Raspberry Pi 5
I’ve been using Red Robotics excellent RedBoard for years now, and while upgrading NE-Five to use a Raspberry Pi 5 I discovered breaking changes which means the available libraries wont work. Basically, the way that GPIO works on the Raspberry Pi 5 is different as it uses its shiny new RP1 chip to wrangle its […]
ESP32-S2 – Deep Sleep & The EN Pin
I’ve been working on a remote control for my cargobot, more on those little teasers soon, and I’ve been having an annoying problem with something that should’ve been simple. The Problem? Switching it on. The controller is running on a Sparkfun ESP32 Thing Plus which has an ESP32-S2 at it’s core. It has an EN […]
PiWars 2022!
So, for those who follow me on Twitter will know I’ve been accepted to PiWars 2022! The theme for this year is agritech, something I have a bit of experience with from my time at my old company. Here is a list of challenges, there’s three arena challenges plus a freeform obstacle course of our […]
MacFeegle Prime, Lessons Learned, and PiWars 2021!
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. […]