MARCH:

We spent march outfitting the combat mode to our mouse. We decided very quickly that the IR sensors didn’t have a long enough range for this mode so we added two ultrasonic sensors to the front of the mouse. Other than that, the mouse had all the rest of the necessary equipment, so just the programming was left. The ultrasonics were easy to add to the mouse as we had spare analogue inputs on the PiPico board, but because they work by measuring a reflected sound pulse, and we had two of them going at once, it took a while to position and calibrate them so they wouldn’t interfere with each other. 

Coding the mouse to patrol the arena was the hardest part, as the sensors (once fixed) worked extremely accurately until the opponent was less than 2cm away. To cover this, we programmed the touchbars to be direction-sensitive, so that the mouse could still follow the enemy when it was close up by tracking which angle it was attacking from.

We also managed to design and print the golf-ball shell for the mouse, and finally finished with all the hardware.