Raspberry Pie... (July 2023 and a bit of August)

This month

This month a lot of time was spent and progress made on our journey towards Pi Wars 2024. Many small discussions and tests and some major achievements. First, we will provide an overview, followed by some more in-depth stories on specific topics.

We had our kick-off meeting on the last day of June and the day after, one team member withdrew from the team because he didn’t feel the team was a good fit for him. A few days later another person applied and joined the team. Some more on the team in one of the stories below.

During the month we had many discussions on our DRT discord server, about things like:

• Communication protocol between Raspberry Pi and other controllers.
• Sourcing of first components.
• Maintaining a parts list.
• Motor mounting plates and wheels:
• Allowing to reach the screws of the motor mounting plates.
• Allowing to attach bigger wheels for the obstacle course. 

• First prototype nerf gun.
• First prototype barrel gripper.
• Lava Palava requirements, resulting in using the camera as main ‘sensor’.
• Configuration management and having our bespoke Raspberry Pi image.

Within this month the DRT Realtime Controller PCB has gone from initial design, via review (including outside the team), ordering from China, and putting on the components, to our first working prototype. More on this topic in the story below.

We met three times online for general alignment and on August 5 we had our second physical meeting, where we discussed:

• The initial ideas on configuration management, including the DRT specific sd card image for our Raspberry Pi-s.
• Barrel grippers
• A ‘stock’ barrel gripper robot ...
  
  
  
• First round of other barrel gripper prototypes ...
  
  
  
• Different git repos
• One with everything that will be loaded on the raspberry pi.
• Another one with the rest.
• Serial communication protocol to use between the Pi and extensions.
• High level component wiring for power and communication
• Realtime controller provides power to Pi and extensions.
• Pi has serial communication with Realtime controller and extensions.
• some naming conventions
• Single word name per challenge.
• Standard names for realtime controller instance and nerf gun instance.
• Namespaces for libraries used.
• First prototype of our base robot, including:
• The motor mounting plates ...
• The wheels ...
• The first prototype of the DRT Realtime Controller ... 

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• First nerf gun prototype ... – More in the story below !!!
• We went over all challenges (again),
• resulting in base robot containing:
• Raspberry Pi 4
• Battery
• Realtime controller
• Raspberry Pi Camera 3 Wide
• and required extensions:
• Barrel gripper
• Nerf gun
• And off course Raspberry Pie ...