The annual micromouse and robotics conference in the UK - MINOS - was once again a virtual event because of the Covid regulations in place at the moment. If you missed it, here is a summary of the presentations and links to the videos. Copies of the slides will be…
In this month's presentation, Ian Butterworth describes how he managed to fit a Raspberry Pi Zero to the UKMARSBOT while ensuring that there is enough power for everything. UKMARSBOT was designed to have a replaceable processor. What we didn't think of was adding a Raspberry Pi Zero as a supervisory…
The UKMARSBOT robot was designed from the start to be a good training robot for aspiring micromouse developers. In this month's presentation, Peter Harrison describes some of the important considerations and features needed in the code that controls a micromouse. All the code that is described can be downloaded from…
We have been looking at the possibilities for a half size line follower challenge and Duncan has published a test track for printing in A1. I thought I’d see just how few special items were needed to try this out. So I used my A4 printer in posterising mode to…
You will have heard of Bluetooth. You will almost certainly have also heard of Bluetooth LE (BLE). Ever wondered about the difference? Want to know more? In this months online meeting, Rob Probin gives a bit of background on Bluetooth, describes some of the features of BLE, tells us how…
The purpose of the ISC project is to offload sensor control to an embedded controller which communicates over an I2C interface to the UKMARSBOT MCU. The ISC comprises a programmed ATtiny814 acting as an I2C Slave on a PCB which plugs in between the UKMARSBOT sensor board connection and cable…
Back in the late 20th Century, the micromouse contest we new and all sorts of designs were tried. Moderm micromouse designs have tended to converge but Derek and Jim, for their first half-size micromouse decided to made a new, and tiny, version of a classic - Thumper. Thumper had two…
I wanted to build a UKMARSBOT line follower but code it in Python. So here I describe how to replace the Arduino Nano with the recently launched Raspberry Pi Pico. The Pico is not ideal in many respects, particularly because it only has 3 A to D ports, where we…
The UKMARSBOT is very similar in concept to the robots I used to build for the IET and Techfest events around five years ago, so when I discovered the UKMARS website last year I decided to re-join the hobby and build one. The majority of Hammerhead's chassis is standard UKMARSBOT,…
If you are still not sure how to go about searching a micromouse maze and solving it to get an optimal route, this month's talk from Duncan Louttit may provide some answers. Duncan has been working for many years with small robots and he has many interesting ideas on how…