This weekend I am hoping to break the back of the PiWars robot, and identify any key areas of concern going forward into the last 2 weeks, I don't want any surprises!!
Last night, I got the camera feed working. I had lots of issues running the new (-ish) camera library for Raspberry Pi. Tried doing the libcamera-hello commands and kept hitting issues. Turns out most of these were potentially due to me VNC-ing into the Pi, apparently it doesn't like sharing camera streams this way! Had more luck with a HDMI connection but it still returned some weird responses, such as camera detected = 0. But I ran the code I'd used before for a basic video stream, and it worked first time! I'm still confused, but not wanting to count chickens I moved swiftly on!
Setting up a laser diode for the weapon sight was remarkably easy, I just connected that to one of my PWM outputs on my servo HAT. Initially I used the GND and Live pin to supply it with 5V. This worked but it ran a little hot, so now I'm running off GND and SIG, with a 0.5 duty cycle, i.e. approx 2.5V.
Motor control is also working nicely. After popping my new motor controller I'm back running the Thunderborgs, and as always they are perfect! I did a full 360 tonight after soldering up a harness, testing it (I'd connected it the wrong way round!), blamed the harness for the wheels rotating the wrong way, disassembled the harness, resoldered it in a mirror image, THEN noticed I just had it the wrong way round, so desoldered it again, and put it back to how it was to begin with.
Ooops
Anyway, now I can drive, see, aim, shoot, and ping distances. Tomorrow I need to start the autonomy coding now I have a platform to test on
