We welcomed back Hackers Group members Luke and Sean, who had projects at the Young Scientists Exhibition last week.  Details of their projects are in another post: Congratulations to our members who presented at the BT Young Scientists 2019!

This week we divided the group into two teams to work on our hide-and-seek robots:  One team to build the hider robot, the other to build the seeker robot.

The two robots can use many of the same parts, but the control systems will be different.  The hider robot will be operated by a person with an RC transmitter.  The seeker robot will control itself.

Team Hider started resurrecting a radio-controlled robot that we built last year.  The robot was involved in a battle-bots battle at the end of the year, so it is in pretty poor shape.
Teem Seeker worked on a colour tracking system.  We took the code that we developed on a laptop before Christmas and tried it on two Raspberry Pis.  We found that the original model Raspberry Pi wasn’t fast enough to do the job we needed.  It took 6 seconds to acquire an image from a webcam.  We tried a Model 3 B instead.  This was fast enough for our needs.  We then started work on tuning the colour detection.  There’s some more experimentation to be done to find the best colour range to work with.