The annual winter micromouse contest was held at Millenium Point in Birmingham by the University of Central England on Saturday November 19th 2011. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend this year but I gather everyone had a great day. I have managed to gather some results and the finals maze though…
At the Japanese contest, Peter said there is a closed form solution for the maximum number of walls a legal micromouse maze can have. (more…)
A comprehensive set of results for the 2011 All Japan Micromouse Contest is now available from the NTF web site. You can find the maze layouts, prizes and results tables for all the events that were run. (more…)
Once ZV had explored the maze, it did a speed run and the path it took in the upper right portion of the maze was very different than the other competitors. (more…)
All the preparation and practice was over. The qualifiers had been held and the wheat sorted from the chaff. Now it was time to see who had what it takes to be the champion – the builder of possibly the fastest robots on the planet… (more…)
The All Japan micromouse contest attracts a large number of participants. This year, the expert class has an entry list of 84 and there are 99 entries in the freshman class. With so many mice to run, Saturday is needed to thin the field and select the best contestants for the finals on Sunday…. (more…)
Today is Friday, November 18th and I am back in Tsukuba for the 32nd All Japan Micromouse Contest. This is my third visit and it is just as exciting as the first… (more…)
My next mouse will have to have one of those small LED matrix displays. Not only is it actually useful to have a way of getting some feedback from the mouse, but these days, you feel a bit left out without one. There are numerous examples of 5×5 matrix font data available but when you need to design special characters it can get a bit tedious. Not being able to find anything suitable to help me, that would also run on a mac, I turned to Excel for help… (more…)
The standard JTAG connector for ARM processors is the huge 20 pin IDC header. It has a whole bunch of unused pins and takes up a lot of board space. There are a several alternatives that reduce the pin count but, for a bare minimum, you can use Serial Wire Debug (SWD)… (more…)
The recently announced STM32F4 series of processors using the ARM Cortex M4 are very attractive. High speeds, large memory space and a floating point unit are among the obvious benefits although there are many other architectural changes in the ST chips. This evening, I managed to get my STM32F4-Discovery board doing something…
(more…)