APEC 2012 was a great micromouse event. Held at the Disney Coronado Springs Resort in Florida, there were some fantastic entries. Derek Hall and Jim Chidley have produced a compilation of the speed runs from the contest... You may notice that the apparent speed of the mouse does not seem…
I can't believe this isn't done more often. Hayama Kiyoteru has put a video camera on one of his mice and set it loose in the micromouse maze. http://youtu.be/DbnPSz3S_x8 Find out more about this here http://plaza.rakuten.co.jp/CPU4Edu/diary/201202100000/.
When I applied power to the motors on Zeetah VI (ZVI) for the first time, the motors seemed to struggle and the PWM value to get the wheels to rotate seemed higher than usual. Since this was my first four wheel mouse of this configuration (ZIV is a four wheel drive, four wheel steer mouse), I wasn’t sure if the higher load was normal or not.
Having seen quite a lot of variability in the output from the encoders on my micromouse, I got to wondering how much backlash there really is in the gear train. Finally, I figured the easiest way to measure it would be to send the motors back and forward alternately while holding…
You could be forgiven for thinking that a micromouse contest - particularly the All Japan micromouse contest - is one of the most photographed and filmed events there are. All day there are cameras going. Pretty well all of the resulting imagery does not get to see the light of…
A wheelchair configuration micromouse has the wheels in the middle and skids at either end. Those skids cannot both be on the ground at the same time or, when the mouse encounters a step in the maze surface, the drive wheels will be lifted off the ground and the mouse may come to a halt. But, if there is too much clearance, the mouse will be able to rock back and forth quite a lot. It turns out that can have quite a big influence on behaviour…
Analog Devices recently release new vibration rejection gyros which seemed a perfect fit for use on a micromouse. Since I was using the ADXRS610 on Zeetah V, I temporarily mounted an ADXRS642 to ZV to compare the two.
Finally, a way to solder the Analog Devices ADXRS610 gyro… The last time we attached a gyro, we overheated the board and the board delaminated. This time, we use a skillet and avoided that problem.
Most commonly, micromouse reflective sensors use Infra Red LEDs as the emitter component. That is all very well and suits many, or most, phototransistors. the thing is, you cannot easily see where they are pointing and what kind of illumination they are providing. Here is a sample of 13 different emitters…
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