Thanks for making the 3π

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:

  1. Third place solved it in 94 seconds.
  2. Second place solved it in 57 seconds.
  3. 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.

Congratulations on your recent victory - you won by quite a margin! We appreciate your compliments on the design of the 3pi robot and we’re glad it was just what you needed for your competition. Everyone in the video seems genuinely impressed.

Thanks for sharing!