The Pi Wars Challenge Begins

In a moment of madness we've submitted an application for the Pi Wars 2019.

So we're committed to building a working robot for next March - whether we're accepted or not - since we'll hopefully be on the reserve list.

Since the reboot of Robot Wars a couple of years ago, robots have been a popular theme in our household with both our boys (now 5 and 8) building and battling robots from lego, or playing with the Hexbug robot wars toys.



So - we're a robot family.

We've played with the the Arduino and Raspberry Pi a little bit - and I did build an Arduino robot kit last year and got it to do some simple obstacle avoidance - but nothing to the level we're going to need for Pi Wars.

My wife recently organised a technology day for kids during the summer holidays with one of the tasks to build a Raspbery Pi Google AIY Voice Kit. As part of her research she found out about the Pi Wars competition and suggested we enter a robot for next year.

The seed was sown ....

The Good News:

• I've been developing software for nearly 30 years, so the process of writing software isn't a problem. 
• We own a Raspberry Pi
• We've got lots of technical lego for prototyping.  
• We have a spare PS3 controller lying around. 

The Bad News:

• None of us have any experience in electronics. 
• None of us have any experience in mechanical engineering. 
• Basically we don't know what we're doing! 

Time to start learning.