 Hi, I'm Geeky Tim and this is Ricantha Also known as Mike and Tim, and I'll let you guess which one's which Okay, so we're gonna talk about making of Pi Wars Hopefully if we've got some sound on the laptop, this will work. Hopefully. Do we have sound on the laptop by the way? Yeah, but Oh, press the wrong button Have we got sound on the laptop? Sorry for that early Bear with us Well, then you luck this will work if it doesn't I've talked over it. No, it doesn't I'll make it work because I like the music It's a good job to test this beforehand, isn't it? Yeah, okay We want sound settings. Don't we and if this doesn't work, we'll talk over it Okay, so Mike and I Started fairly near the beginning of when the Raspberry Pi came out. We started Cam Jam, which is the Cambridge Raspberry Jam We're both both IT people are working on performance architect. I work in the forms of computer systems Mike's a web developer and The Raspberry Pi came out and it just loved the idea of it and we wanted to get people Interested in it had young kids at the time and I wanted them to be interested in it or not. But anyway Mike Yes, so we set up Cam Jam and soon afterwards We started getting bigger in terms of the jam we moved to a new venue and we started getting about 180 people each time and Tim said to me Do we need to do we need to do something else? so He said to me do you like robot wars? And I said of course I like robot wars and He said could we do something like that with the Raspberry Pi? However, because people are gonna make we're aiming a lot mainly at children But also adults, but we didn't want them to be destructive. So we had to came up come up with a different format and So we Started thinking about it Getting ourselves some experience in the Raspberry Pi we started doing some workshops at the jams and I Knew absolutely nothing about electronics at the time. So I decided Well, we decided to do some workshops and then we were asked to actually bring out the etiquette So we did came up with etiquette one etiquette two which is for the sensors and Educate three which is our robot We don't actually make any money out of this This is all simply to fund the events we run which is Pi Wars and Cam Jam So Yeah, I mean We put around the idea of of of Pi Wars or we had didn't have a name at the time and people said yeah Yeah, I'd like to do it. So we thought okay. Well put a money where our mouth is and we'd run one So we hit 2014 now our jams at that time were Running at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge and we thought well We're not gonna muck about trying to find a different venue So we'll just stay there and we'll try and do it on a small scale to start with So we came up with the idea of seven challenge courses And then Tim Yes, it was seven and the seven wells because we went around the venue look around and said right make fit one there And there one there when they came out to seven And then we thought oh we've got seven courses. We've actually got to build the things now So Tim through his collection of traditional tools at it Yes, and we came up with the following courses. We started out with a line follower I mean this is line follower is the typical robot event that autonomous event that people start with simply use a Detect for light and dark and follow the dark and we wanted a mixture of autonomous and remote controlled Challenges because we wanted people to be able to create a robot that could do both types of challenges Another one we came up with was called proximity alert where you use the distance sensor And you had to get as close to the wall as possible and we thought okay people will get sort of 10 centimeters and Yeah, and then our judge said okay. I'll bring my digital callipers along and they were needed and we no need it We had another autonomous event by the way. Yeah, we had robot golf which was a remote controlled one And we had the straight line speed test which has stood the test of time. We're still doing it that was either autonomous or Remote controlled you got more points if you did it autonomously. So it's a seven meter track The three-point turn was an autonomous event You had to basically drive up to the lines back up Turn and return to the same square. So if you can see it on the right-hand side There's a little green box. They had to return to so this was to test maneuverability and controllability of the the robot and then we had The only hopefully less destructive robot-on-robot event which was sumo Which was a bit of a miscalculation at the time because the first one was a an enormous playmobile Pirate ship against the smallest robot in the competition by Brian We also wanted to have an obstacle course in there just just to have additional challenges this was remote controlled as well So we just had various Mini-obstacles for people to be able to get over and if anybody who here remembers the first season of Robot Wars the one with Jeremy Clarkson That had the element of an obstacle course at the beginning of it Then we came to our first mistake. Oh Yes, that was horrible. Um, yeah, I mean I've been a performance Engineer I like to things to work well and to look good and to have good quality So I thought yeah, we'll have code quality. I then spent all day. I mean all day On the day missing all the events and actually looking at everybody's code and giving them a mark on various categories And that's big mistake big mistake We also then made our second mistake Which was to leave all the totting up of the scores until the prize giving which ran to about two and a half hours I seem to remember the first one. Yeah, it was all manual then. Yeah Yeah, we managed to pick up some sponsors and we had prizes and that was that was terrific because we we reached out to the The pie business community and said can we have some free stuff and a lot of them said yes So at the end of that event we said Would you want to do another one hoping they'd say no and a big raw went up. Yes. Yes, you've got to have another one. So Yeah, okay. So that was December 2014. We decided to the next one in December 2015 and by that time Mike and I had run the third birthday party for the Raspberry Pi Foundation and We'd used the William Gates building got to know the people there and it's a much better building much bigger for what we needed And they said yes, we can run pie balls there By this time Tim had acquired a 3d printer Which meant that we could do a lot more intricate stuff with the courses and We also realized that the courses look pretty dull the first year. So we just added a lot of paint a lot of paint We change we changed some challenges. We kept others We kept the chat the obstacle course, but painted it and changed the challenges We had skittles Now that was pretty much how we expected skittles to go until this robot came along That was spinning something like 70 miles an hour apparently they had to put Kevlar string around the tires of the the spinny thing because they kept flying apart and that actually got us Gave us our first glimpse of how And Imaginative and how much engineering goes into these tiny robots for this event Just exactly what we were were hoping Then we had our line follower course and we thought this would be fantastic. We're gonna print it on vinyl Doesn't work it sort of worked until you had a wide array of line followers, and then it picked up all the green on the side This is one of our competitors Dave pride trying to get his robot just to follow a line We kept the three-point term because as you work quite well This is metabot showing off the cheers went on for some time We also changed our robot versus robots challenge to something called pine noon Well, you may have seen about That was obnoxious music And out of that has come micro pine noon, which is run by Brian here and a few other make spaces and jams The reason for pine noon is that the sumo big robot little robot don't fight well together So we wanted something less destructive and a little more even so they have a basically have a balloon on them And a pin and they're gonna put it and an emf camp this year Brian's brought along his mega pie known, which is Significantly bigger and at the end Brian just wants to say something right at the end of the talk because there's competition going on In 2007. Oh, yes We skipped a year because we suddenly realized that December was just about the worst time you could possibly pick for schools Yeah, because we wanted and one of the main reasons for doing it and one of the main reasons for their archery pie is for schools for education and We weren't getting as many schools in as we wanted. We had one or two not brilliant. So we Looked at the dates and said we're actually from September to December not enough time. It's not enough time for most people. So Yeah, we changed it to to to April. So hence why 2016 wasn't there 2017 and We had so many applications we were actually able to split it into two days Saturday was the schools and Sunday was beginners intermediate and advanced robots Previous years the first year we had done it on cost Split the robots on cost. So you've got those below 70 pounds 75 pounds and above 75 pounds that was hard to judge a bit hard to judge second year was on size and Yeah, it was okay, but looking at the Robots and the competitors it was clear that a different system was needed and we came up with this By this time Tim had acquired his shed. Now when I say shed It's not quite accurate. It's a heart. It's a log cabin and it also acquired just snuck into the corner a laser cutter Yeah, yeah, well I bought the late had by the hot eight as I call it Because of the laser cutter it was so big couldn't fit anywhere else. So that's where I do a lot of my work. So 2017 we did a lot of laser cutting But you still kept going on the traditional tools. Yep. This is my substitute We decided just to change the challenges again, and we count the minimal maze which was autonomous Now that is one of the only ones that got round complete. It is actually much harder than you expect To do that because you don't know the surface when you you start off. Yes, we've got the colors, but yeah It was hard. We also added a challenge called slightly deranged golf Which we actually got some astroturf for which was which was quite fun Yes, and that's also the course that I broke my ribs on by falling over on it So you can see all it was was a horseshoe But you've got penalties for going in the sand and in the water and you had to get it past this windmill at the end We kept the line follower based on a fairly reasonable design we thought Yeah, we got it specially printed and we thought well, okay, we'll go for Matt see whether that works and No, it didn't again Because we changed venues we were able to have a obstacle course that was much larger So we doubled the size and Change and changed all the obstacles We inherited a well not inherited We had made for us a turntable by a pie borg and mod my pie, which is fantastic many thanks to them And we also acquired a wonderful head judge Dr. Lucy Rogers This was actually She had started robot wars by then and she kindly Said yes to when we asked her to judge for us So we've got to know her in the meantime because we were doing some other events and got to know her So it was wonderful to get her along as they had to judge We managed to pick up even more sponsors And we needed them because we had the two days to cover for prizes and that sort of thing And we had trophies made 3d printed by Tim and they were they were terribly cute in person They're most mind-bogglingly cute and Then we came to last no not last year this year this year this year 2018 so that's the fourth year. We've been doing it We changed out the challenges again just a few of them And we included the duck shoot and we thought okay We'll provide balls for people to roll towards the targets But what if they could add a tax and an attachment to better shoot the targets And that's what some people did and nerf guns were really popular I'd very good We wanted to eat each year. We do try and change the challenges But we saw the that the robots were getting much better. So we wanted to challenge people even more So we came up the idea with somewhere over the rainbow basically you have four colored balls sitting in the corner of a black course and The robots have to identify the balls approach them Stop and then go to the next one in the right order We some had more success than others. It's fair to say There's one got very very lucky this is one of the best runs of the day slightly sped up and Yeah, I mean they yes That's open CV most of them using a lot of them not all of them But it yeah an extra challenge and we hope to go can continue that way Re-designing the obstacle course. No, we didn't actually put those lines around there. There was one competitor last year Who decided that he wanted to do everything autonomously? Not just the autonomous events. So he followed that line. I think he did pretty well, didn't he? Yeah, I can't remember how she how well he did on this But it was quite interesting watching them put the line down and getting closer and closer to the time when they actually had to go We had some help with this one this year We had a block-moving puzzle challenge that Brian Cortiles kindly did for us I think this is Billy doing this one. It's the one that's running on the floor here Brian's son Billy piloting the robot around the course and you notice that rock paper scissors there We added it a lot the year before and thinking I can't think of what to put in there Let's put something simple. Yeah, it wasn't a lot of robots got stuck on the paper Surprisingly for pine moon. We added a pyramid in the center with some pins It's just to make it extra difficult and we also thought with pins We really ought to put walls on it. We didn't the first year and then we suddenly thought Yes, and also because we had this Autonomous robot that was doing everything autonomously. We thought the chances are it's just going to go Set up in the distance and also it helped him not get confused by the color. So I We put that on for him. This was the final We added three balloons this time just to make it slightly more difficult for everybody And now we come to next year next year. Yes, we've Crazily said we'll do another one. Um, it was about two months after the last one and we thought no, no never again never again, but Yeah, yeah, we're doing it again. So 2019 next year is the anniversary of the first landing on the moon and So we're going to celebrate that with a theme this year. So it's Space theme basically we've got the Hubble telescope nebula challenge over the rainbow asteroid field which is a maze totally different from last year's Blast of which is the straight each line speed course Very ish. Yes. I'm pine on again Space invaders That's are we saying what that was? Yeah, I think we are okay That's basically duck shoot, but it's not ducks this time because you don't have ducks in space not often anyway Spirit of curiosity that is going to be where you drive from one side of the course pickups Samples and drive it back to the base so that you can deliver them back to the earth over a variety of terrain Which we've yet to build so that could be yes And the final one is the Apollo 13 obstacle course Which will again feature complete some new obstacles some existing ones and we've got ideas on that. Yeah Haven't built them yet. So 2019 Will be the 30th and 31st of March in Cambridge the closing date for applications because everybody has to apply in order to get into the competition and then we Look at how many we've got and try and figure out which ones have got the best chance of succeeding and actually getting to the competition now last year we had about 150 applications for 76 places Which meant we did have to actually Disappoint a lot of teams Disappoint even some teams that have competed previously. It's just a shame, but we have to bring in continue to bring in new teams at the bottom doing the beginners and new schools Simply because we we want to spread it. We don't want to just keep it to the same people every time so We do need you to apply need you to a think think about applying You've got until as you can see there until the end of March to actually No, no, no not to fly but to actually compete so you've got a while to make a bit of play before that You don't have to come have your design now You just have to say right what you thinking of doing how you're gonna do it your team make up that sort of thing Whether you're a beginner intermediate advanced or a school And we've committed to reading absolutely everything on your application form every single one no matter how long it is and Yeah, the more information the better there may be beer involved on that night just a little So that's it for the presentation really If you want to find out more come and speak to us afterwards We've got some leaflets to give you just to remind you or go to the website, which is pywars.org Have we got time for any questions? Has anybody got any questions? No No in that case. Oh, we have got one Hi, um, I got a lot of questions. I normally mentor kids to learn about robotics and stuff So what about I mean the kids gonna enter five words for example. What about mentoring? Yes, we have on the application form. There's a tick box for yes I need some mentoring and yes I can be a mentor and then it's a case of matching up trying to match up geographically where you can Whereabouts are you from? Cambridge. Oh, it's excellent in that case. It shouldn't be a problem because we have quite a few from Cambridge Anymore was there one over here? No, just waving. Okay Okay, then I think Brian wanted to say something. He's running the mega pine moon today with some very large robots that he's built so Mega pine known is over by the where the blacksmith this It's free to play and we'd be starting at about 3 30 Welcome to come along and have a go at some driving some large robots. So, thank you Thank you very much