UK Micromouse 2009 preliminary

IMG_3721 The UK Micromouse championships were held at the Technology innovation Centre in Birmingham on Saturday June 27th. A good number of mice ran this year, some for the first time. The morning practice was a nerve-wracking affair which looked like it would result in another win by MouseX. However, a couple of mechanical repairs, some software tweaks and an unusually fortunate maze configuration saw a new champion emerge…

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UK Schools Micromouse 2009

By Bernard Grabowski

The 2009 National Schools and Colleges Micromouse competition took place on Saturday 27th June at the Technology Innovation Centre in Birmingham.  The team from John Hampden Grammar School were once again strongly represented.  They have dominated the event for several years but this time were pushed to the limit by teams from three debuting schools.  Competition was intense and new event best times were recorded.  The existing drag race record (2.132 seconds, set last year by the team from Singapore) was smashed several times and now stands at an incredible 1.699 sec.  The track is just less than 7m in length and the mouse had to stop under control within 1m beyond the finish line.  Peak acceleration must now be around 1g in this event and braking has to start at just past the halfway mark.

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Simple ADC use on the STM32

Here is a bit of a look at how to use the ADC on the STM32 for simple applications. The ADC peripheral on the STM32 processor is a flexible but complex beast. The peripheral driver library should make it relatively easy to use. After all, there is no need to remember the names of all those pesky registers and bitfields. There are anything up to 18 multiplexed channels that can be converted singly, continually, scanned or discontinuously. The results can be transferred to memory through DMA and some devices have two or more ADCs for simultaneous conversions. With all those options, simple reading of an ADC port is a little tricky…

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