There are two days to go until the UK micromouse championships at Millennium Point in Birmingham. The competition will be held on Saturday 28th June 2008 and the day starts at 09:45. Decimus is as ready as it is going to get now and I am afraid to tinker any more in case I break something. The code is fairly safe in its revision control system but there is always the risk of physical damage…
The final session of testing was today when Decimus was put through a variety of different maze configurations. There is only room for a 5×5 maze at home so there is only so much that can be tried. I think I have covered all the critical movements and combinations. Here is a bit of video of some of the tests:
It will all come down to the actual competition in the end. Leaving aside the fact there are may be better mice, luck will play a big part. The maze design is the big unknown. Competition mazes can end up being designed by folk who see the design process as a chance to find out how many mice they can crash and/or confuse. There is no fun for anyone in seeing mice fail. What the spectators (and builders) want to see is a good competition with lots of successful mice.
For better or worse, I shall be a bit relieved when Saturday is over. Decimus is my first DC motor mouse. All the previous models have used steppers. This difference has been much greater than I had anticipated. This mouse has been hard work!
Sweet! Nice tuning you did in these days.
Good luck and have fun!