I’ve always found Piwars points allocation confusing. Every year I’ve been surprised by how many points my team has got in the competition, despite our best efforts to needlessly try to work it out before the closing ceremony. I think the confusion stems from the apparently simple “formula” points system referred to in the rules (where faster finishes get more points, like in F1). That’s simple, right? But if there’s only ~5 challenges, and first place gets 50 points, how do some team’s scores total more than 6000?

who doesn’t love Pi Wars Bot?

#piwars #piwarsprogress Managed to make some solid progress on the Up The Garden Path challenge this weekend. I think we now have a workable plan pic.twitter.com/OePzT2hods — Mark Mellors (@MarkMellors) December 14, 2020

#piwars #piwarsprogress We've got the line following working! Though its very slow/rough at the moment, and I've not marked out some of the forks to make it easier for tuning. pic.twitter.com/LpTnc7lo7E — Mark Mellors (@MarkMellors) December 20, 2020

#piwars #piwarsupdate Not much progress, this week, so a shorter thread. I've printed the new IMU tower with camera mount. Fits ok pic.twitter.com/1jUWgYa5Z5 — Mark Mellors (@MarkMellors) December 7, 2020

#piwars #piwarsupdate I've refitted the vortex downforce fan, wired it in and got basic remote control of its speed. The first test.... Didn't go well pic.twitter.com/oO27ymiulR — Mark Mellors (@MarkMellors) November 29, 2020

#piwars #piwarsprogress Finished wiring up the ball flinger, wrote a tiny bit of code for auto firing, and tuned the solenoid energise time to get the range right. Next: auto-aiming pic.twitter.com/Ny0CbtUuUV — Mark Mellors (@MarkMellors) November 22, 2020

#piwars #piwarsprogress The ball flinger attachment has been 3D printed, fitted & tested. We found 12V wasn't enough, ~30V was needed for a good launch. The easiest way to get that on board was to add the spare packs. So we now have a crazy 36V (58Wh) of batteries on Tauradigm pic.twitter.com/GLcPiKXKcn — Mark Mellors (@MarkMellors) November 16, 2020

#piwarsupdate First course marked out properly and a demo run "completed". Despite what it appears, this is using the dead reckoning code from before, there's no line following going on here. We'll be able to use this to capture images and tune the algorithm.#piwars pic.twitter.com/hvI3m4oaj6 — Mark Mellors (@MarkMellors) November 8, 2020

#piwars #piwarsprogress As well as the massive code refactoring being completed, we've made great progress on the autonomous code this week. We can now navigate to a coordinate based on odometry. It doesn't look impressive when the point's directly in front: pic.twitter.com/nicoJkEgOV — Mark Mellors (@MarkMellors) November 1, 2020