October Blog
Starting around the middle of October we have been working on the micromouse project, designing and building a little robot capable of completing a number of different tasks such as; line following, obstacle avoidance and combat. We were assigned to our teams by our lecturers based off our different skill sets, I have been assigned to team India. We started by discussing our strengths and weakness and assigning roles to each other on our skills matrix. My main job this month has been to work on the overall structure of the website and make sure its all in working order.
November Blog
Throughout November my job has been to continue working on the website and preparing it for the initial assessment of it near the end of the month. I have been looking at the assessment criteria making sure everything that needs to be added is there and working, such as blog post from each member for October and November, and a little introduction of all of the team. Other members of the team have been working on the pcb design of the ir circuit and have submitted the design for marking.
December Blog
This month, we assembled the full Micromouse, including the wheels, Raspberry Pi Pico, and our custom PCB. After soldering the components and uploading the obstacle avoidance code, initial tests showed the robot could detect and react to obstacles. However, performance was unreliable due to soldering faults causing poor connections. We’re now focused on improving both hardware stability and code performance.
February Blog
February brought major progress. We repaired PCB connections, which made obstacle avoidance far more stable. We also soldered and mounted LDR sensors and LEDs for line following, though initial issues like oversized LEDs and wheel clearance slowed us down. After calibrating the front sensors to detect a white line, the robot could track it, though inconsistently, partly due to unbalanced wheel speeds. We spent the rest of the month refining the code and sensor thresholds to improve accuracy.
March Blog
In March, we completed the line-following feature and began developing combat mode. Two new buttons were added to the Pico board for switching between modes, and an OLED screen was introduced to display the active mode. For combat, all four line sensors were calibrated to help the robot stay within a white rectangle. We started coding object interaction using the front impact sensor and initially explored ultrasonic sensing, but later switched to IR sensors due to time limits. Final tweaks were made as we prepared for the Gregynog trip.
April Blog
In the final month, we focused on refining all modes and making final adjustments to ensure everything was ready for assessment. A key update was improving the combat mode with a last minute code change that helped us reach the quarter finals. We used IR sensors for tracking, as there wasn’t enough time to implement the ultrasonic system. The project wrapped up with a group presentation at Gregynog Hall, where we showcased our work and completed all evaluations successfully.