RoboTIC 2008
Our winter event is RoboTIC, hed at the Technology Innovation Centre in Birmingham. This year we gathered on Saturday 29th November and held the usual semi-formal set of competitions…
Winmaze – Another Maze Editor
This program is no longer available. Instead, you might like to use:
https://github.com/micromouseonline/pyqt-maze-editor
It seems that all micromouse builders get around to writing their own software for displaying and editing mazes in the end. This is mine. It is a Windows only application but should run on pretty well any version of Windows. I have not tested it on Vista. It can open maze files of several types including the ‘standard’ binary mazes and some types of text maze. Changes to a maze will always be saved as a binary maze file. (note: revision now will not ask for libraries)
Head to Head micromouse video
Derek Hall has just put up a new video on YouTube from the UK 2008 micromouse competition. It show his mouse, MouseX2, pitted against my mouse (Decimus). A bit of split-screen trickery shows the two mice running the same course. Vary handy that as I can now see exactly where…
Half size micromouse details published
A Japanese blog now has pretty complete details of a half size, stepper-driven micromouse. Over a period of only a few weeks, there have been posts covering the mechanical design, software and circuit details of a complete mouse and several videos of it performing in a test maze. (more…)
Cheap micromouse skid pads
Sometimes the simplest things can be tricky to achieve. Of the several mice I have build, one of the hardest things to find can be a suitable skid for the front and back of the mouse. On the latest micromouse test-bed, the base is several millimeters off the floor. Too…
UK Micromouse Competition 2008
The UK micromouse competition for 2008 was run on June 28th at Millennium Point in Birmingham. We had an excellent turnout and a truly International flavour with teams from Iran, India, Singapore and Holland as well as the UK teams. As well as the micromouse contest there was also mini-sumo, ant-weight robot wars, Formula1 and Formula 4 schools competitions, biped robots and a number of other displays.
Pre-competition testing of Decimus
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…
Micromouse Tuning
Here we are with ten days to go before the UK micromouse competition and Decimus is still far from ready. All the basic software is there but there are still issues with the basic motion control. I have all the turns calculated and the parameters have been tuned to a good first approximation. This takes hours of tedious repetitive work as the parameters are altered…
Adachi micromouse maze solving algorithms
Going through some old notes, I came across reference to the micromouse maze solving methods described some time ago by Adachi in Japan. While these are apparently quite well known in Japan, they are, as far as I can tell, almost completely unknown in the West. At least, I can’t find any description of them in English anywhere on the web. After a lot of hard work with the Google translator and some assistance from Lem Fugitt, I think I have them pieced together…
Minos 2008 maze
The MINOS 2008 conference ended, as usual, with a couple of semi-formal competitions. The maze solver final is always interesting as we get to see some of the potential for the summer competition. So far it seems I will still be holding firmly on to a runner-up place. The image…