Forest Fighters Pi Wars 2021

Along with having some colourful, python powered colour changing windows, we wanted some additional festive cheer. So Amy's dad created a small pixel matrix display... ...and its now installed in one of the front windows! The four front windows are surrounded by rgb led strips each controlled by an ESP8266, with a master python program telling them what to display, via WiFi using HTTP commands. Happy Christmas everyone and hopefully 2021 will be better than this one, after all it has the Pi Wars competition in it.

For the Up The Garden Path challenge, we haven't quite decided if we are going to use voice commands or pattern recognition combined with line-following, (or even a mix of all three! ). Amy's dad has been looking at pattern recognition and converting some C++ code to Python to see if it was quick enough on a Pi4. We have previously used Open CV for line following. Amy's dad used the same process back in 2014 for the first line follower code that Ipswich Makerspace's Tractor Bot used, but that was C++. Back then the Pi wasn't really up to it. This example video was using C++ on a x64 PC.  The next video is from over six years later. In 2020 the Pi4 can match that and do a whole lot better with Python (especially since this is over VNC.) (The cube is a 50mm reject from the 3d printing earlier covered with self-adhesive printed signs). You can find the source for this to experiment with here: https://github.com/ForestFighters/Symbols  

Amy's dad here with a quick update on PiWars 2021 progress..... We have busy with other projects so its been pretty quiet on the Pi Wars front, however the basic robot software and hardware is essentially going to be the same as last year (2020) but with added voice commands.  I have been checking out Vosk as a way of getting a Pi to understand voice commands. Here is a quick video showing its not too shabby, especially for single word commands. The main advantage of Vosk is that it is local to the machine rather than using the "Cloud" so even if your cloud service provider is down (note Google authentication went down yesterday for a couple of  hours so not impossible!) you can still command your system using voice. Also it doesn't seem to use much processor (considering I recorded the video over VNC!)

Since the barrels of the 2020 competition have changed to cubes, the 3D printer is hard at work creating some new items. Including remaking the grippers so that they grip the cubes better. I will cover inner surface of the gripper faces after painting with some non-slip material.  Yes, I know we only need one of each colour but my green filament had not arrived.  We use Tinkercad for its simplicity and for generating 3D models quickly and accurately. It does an excellent job.