decimus

2010 UK Micromouse Update

Posted Wed, 30/06/2010 - 02:49 by peteh

After a shaky start, Decimus 2 wins the day in Birmingham at the 2010 UK micromouse contest. After all the hours of preparation and lost sleep, the time had come for the new mouse to prove itself.

Decimus 2 sensor geometry

Posted Sun, 08/11/2009 - 23:23 by peteh

Decimus 2 is now nearly ready to go. I don’t have much hope of having it ready for the Japan contest but it is worth a try. The mouse weighs only 2/3 as much as its predecessor at about 115g with batteries. This weight saving is almost entirely due to the use of the new 1717 size motors. It looks like everything is working so today, I set up the sensors. These have a different alignment to those I have used before.

Decimus 2 takes shape

Posted Wed, 28/10/2009 - 04:29 by peteh

Decimus has been running reasonably well and each competition sees the plucky little micromouse improving in some way or another. It is clear though that it is not going to be fast enough to compete in South East Asia with any great chance of success. There are at least two faults on it. One is a damaged motor and another, I think, is a dry-joint somewhere on the PCB. Every so often, it will just do something unexpected like turn through a completely wrong angle. When I made Decimus, I ordered extra boards. This week the new motors came so, with only a short time to the all-Japan contest, I am trying to put another mouse together….

UK Micromouse Competition 2008

Posted Sun, 29/06/2008 - 19:40 by peteh

IMG_2856 The UK micromouse competition for 2008 was run on June 28th at Millennium Point in Birmingham. We had an excellent turnout and a truly International flavour with teams from Iran, India, Singapore and Holland as well as the UK teams. As well as the micromouse contest there was also mini-sumo, ant-weight robot wars, Formula1 and Formula 4 schools competitions, biped robots and a number of other displays.

Micromouse Tuning

Posted Thu, 19/06/2008 - 03:58 by peteh

IMG_2674Here we are with ten days to go before the UK micromouse competition and Decimus is still far from ready. All the basic software is there but there are still issues with the basic motion control. I have all the turns calculated and the parameters have been tuned to a good first approximation. This takes hours of tedious repetitive work as the parameters are altered...