No sleep(), no Thread, no worries
March 10, 2018
This post is aimed at relatively new programmers grappling with how to manage multiple simultaneous things on their PiWars robots (for example, reading from a game controller without any lag while also managing a distance sensor that can only be read once a second!) I’ve had a few questions on Discord and Twitter about how […]
Dissecting the rainbow
March 5, 2018
If you’re entering this year’s PiWars competition you might have encountered some example code, originally from PiBorg, intended to get you going with the ‘Over the Rainbow’ challenge. If you’re not familiar with OpenCV, however, you might find this code a bit baffling. So, in this post I’m going to go line-by-line through the image […]
Power to the Robots
October 11, 2017
It’s well known that robots crave power. In this case, however, we’re talking about electricity rather than world domination (whether your robot craves world domination is between you and the robot, but in any case it’ll need electricity to get anywhere). This post is a quick overview of how I’ve powered my PiWars robots – […]
PiWars Discord Server
September 23, 2017
We’re using Discord to chat about the up-coming PiWars, anyone is very welcome to join us!
Control your Python!
July 30, 2017
If you’re building a robot for PiWars, or similar competitions, you’ll probably want to have some way to drive it manually – the most popular way to do this is to connect a game controller (hardware originally intended for game consoles such as the PlayStation or XBox). The approxeng.input library, available through Pip and compatible […]
Running Python as a Linux Service
April 28, 2017
This is a rather long post going into the detail of making a Linux service with Python. It’s long, but hopefully because it contains enough detail to be helpful! Let me know on Twitter in the usual place if it’s helped… Aims This post is going to cover how to get a Linux computer to […]
Isolating your Python with VirtualEnv
April 16, 2017
You may have seen references to ‘virtualenv’ in documentation, in fact, I refer to it frequently in the docs for my input library. A few people have asked me what it is and why they should use it. The simple explanation is that a virtual environment is a complete Python installation (interpreter, libraries, tools) which […]
Hello Blog!
April 13, 2017
So, after people prodded me at PiWars and on Twitter to actually talk a bit about various things I do I’ve finally got around to setting up a blog, courtesy of the lovely people at Mythic Beasts. I’m planning to cover a few things in the near future, so check back here or follow me […]
PiWars 2017
April 13, 2017
PiWars2017 was a blast, although my entry this year, Viridia, was plagued with electrical issues she still won the award for technical merit, and the camera based line following actually worked. I also got to help out with the fantastic school teams on the Saturday and meet up with everyone I’ve known from previous events. […]