Don't Drive The Plants!!

Today, Aémisdaud and Amy did some driving practice using their newly installed grabber to practice the eco-disaster challenge.

However, they had an unexpected visitor...

They are going to attempt this challenge remote-controlled so they felt it was important Amy had some practice using the grabber tool. The green barrels should be picked up and put into the blue section and the red barrels should be put in the yellow section. You can read more about the rules for this challenge here.

However, the had trouble picking fallen-over barrels up due to the grabber being too high. Ameezdhad intended for Amy to be able to do so so this may be a problem. Look forward to a follow-up post sometime later this weekend detailing a redesign of the grabber. :)

Now that both Amy and Mia are more accustomed to the robot, progress should skyrocket! 

Active cooling

With a Pi4 in the middle of Audrey III and 4 heavy-duty motors, things might get a bit hot so we have fitted a fan to the top layer. This will pull hot air out and the holes in the back and side will allow some airflow over the boards.

The Pi was running at around 68 degrees and with the fan about 55 depending on what it's doing so we should not have any overheating, the Pi starts to throttle at 80C so better safe than sorry. This is especially true when you are trying to eek out as many frames per second as you can for the line following.

Here's a couple of pictures with a cutaway of the internals.

You may be wondering about the crudely cut fan hole in the top; The top layer is now being reprinted after testing with the hacked version.