Last week-end the Ely Makers team got together to discuss battle strategies and hone our tactical skills for the Pi Noon challenge.
Pi Noon is a challenge event in the Pi Wars competition which will be held in Cambridge on the 1-2 April 2017. For this challenge a balloon is fitted on the robot together with a pin and the team who manages to pop the opponent’s balloon wins.
The robot got some thorough testing without any major mishaps and everybody got to have a few goes.
It is important to put safety first – especially when building robots with destructive weapons. What would happen if the robot runs haywire with a room full of children? In our case we made sure that the tip was only sharp enough to pop a balloon and never protruding enough to cause any damage if there was an accident.
Although fun for the older children, the bursting balloons weren’t very fun for the very youngest. This could be worked around with ear defenders thankfully.
A couple of minor software glitches also made it to the to-do list for ironing out.
After many burst balloons and much practice we were rewarded with cake and drinks. Everybody came away satisfied we were able to compete in at least one of the challenges so far.
Now back to the lab to develop more capabilities needed for the other challenges.