I recently heard about a robotics competition that was going to be held, it consisted of simply going to four points in a grid in the least amount of time. The only thing that was a little bit hard, was that there were two red lines, totally invisible to normal infrared sensors, and the grid had very thin lines in one axis.
Anyway, while I was designing my robot, and searching for some good wheels, I got to this website, saw the 3π and realised that it was exactly what I was going for… and even better! (I wouldn’t have thought of boosting voltage to 9.5V to get a reliable motor speed no matter the conditions of the batteries)
So I bought the little robot, I didn’t have enough money to also buy the ISP programmer, so I had to make one myself using an Arduino I made on a breadboard.
Then, after a couple days programming and testing; in which I noticed I had to change a little portion of the PololuQTRSensors::readLine method, as some lines were just too thin; I went to the competition, and here are the results:
- Third place solved it in 94 seconds.
- Second place solved it in 57 seconds.
- Me and my 3π solved it in just 9 seconds!
Here’s the video: youtu.be/a2mwofWpM7Q
Notice the nervous laughs when they notice that the little robot that was smaller than the other robots’ wheels is going that fast and with no hesitation! Haha, priceless!
I won US$250 in cash and a sensor kit with a commercial value of US$750, you can be sure that I’ll reinvest some of that money in this store again!
Greetings from Chile.