Pi Wars 2024 - The Beginning

Hard to believe it is almost 5 years since my last Pi Wars blog entry. Since I last entered as a competitor in 2019, I have mentored school teams each year the competition has run, and so decided not to enter myself after discovering just how much work that was in 2019! This year my plans to run another after school robotics club fell through when the Computer Science teacher I worked with last time left the school. So I thought I should enter again myself. I've built quite a few robots over the years since my last time, so I've been promoted to the 'veterans' category this time around. I just need a name and an idea now!

With the entry deadline fast approaching, I decided the most visually exciting robot I could think of would use 4 RC tracks in the place of wheels on a 4 'wheeled' rocker-bogie suspension. I've had these tracks in the parts box for a while, intending to build a robot out of them.

So that's the idea. In keeping with the theme 'Disaster Zone', I needed a robot name. So I decided on:

Team name: Footleg Robotics

Robot name: Ragnarök Rescue

Just as I had decided to enter, my daughter told me she was going to enter as a young person team with a school friend, and wanted me to be their team mentor. So here I am again, entering myself, and mentoring a young persons team at the same time. Will I never learn?