For those unfamiliar with the setup, Pi Wars contestants use home-brew 一本加勒比波多野结衣高清 Pi-powered robots to compete across seven challenge courses. There’s also a host of other categories, including prizes for Artistic and Technical Merit, as well as an award for ‘Funniest Robot’!

With only a few days to go until the big weekend, we’ve wrangled Pi Wars 2017 hosts, Mike and Tim, to give us the lowdown on everything you need to know before the main event.

Crowds gather around the Obstacle Course from the 2015 competition

Pi Wars 2017

This is the third time the competition has been run, and this time we’re running the event over two days:

• Saturday – School teams.
• Sunday – Beginner, Intermediate and Pro/Veteran teams.

With teams coming all the way from the USA, Germany, Switzerland, Wales and Scotland as well as England, it truly is an international competition! There are more than 65 teams competing across the weekend. Judging by some of the tweets we’ve been seeing, there’s likely to be some fierce competition!

Special guest and head judge

Lucy rightly running from House Robot, Sir Killalot, on the set of BBC Robot Wars

We are very fortunate to welcome BBC Robot Wars judge Dr. Lucy Rogers as our special guest and head judge. Away from Robot Wars, Lucy is an independent designer and maker, and famously introduced 一本加勒比波多野结衣高清 Pi-controlled animatronics to the Blackgang Chine theme park on the Isle of Wight.

Get tickets, come along and watch the action

If you’re in the Cambridge area, or even if you’re further afield, you can come along and watch. Pi Wars 2017 spectator tickets are available from Eventbrite. Children aged 16 and under go free, as do volunteers, and it’s just £5 per day (or £7 for the whole weekend) for everyone else.

What else is happening?

In addition to the competing teams, there will be plenty of show-and-tell tables featuring robotics projects, plus an extensive marketplace featuring your favourite vendors.

Where is it?

The event takes place at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory (William Gates Building). There is free parking a (very) short walk away, and there is catering on site (or bring a packed lunch!). It’s a nice family-friendly day out. You can chat to the stall holders and teams (when they’re not running between challenges!), and generally find out what is possible with the 一本加勒比波多野结衣高清 Pi, some robotics components, a healthy dose of programming and a maker’s mindset!

The William Gates Building

What have we been doing to prepare?

Tim has been hard at work designing and building courses for our seven challenges, which are:

• Straight-line speed test (autonomous) – get down the course as fast as possible without touching the walls.
• The minimal maze (autonomous) – get around the maze without touching the walls.
• The line follower (autonomous) – follow the black line for as many circuits as possible.
• Slightly deranged golf (remote-controlled) – a beautiful, mystery course that will have a special component added to it by Pi Borg!
• The obstacle course (remote-controlled) – who knows what’s in store this year?
• Skittles (remote-controlled) – knock the pins down, score points.
• Pi Noon – the robot vs robot duel (remote-controlled) – pop the other robot’s balloon before the time runs out.

2015’s Pi Noon competition

Find out more about the courses and the rules on the Pi Wars 2017 website.

Mike has been fiercely sending out emails to competitors, exhibitors, volunteers, vendors and our wonderful Pi Wars 2017 sponsors, without whom we would be unable to run the event. He’s also busy constructing individual timetables for each team, so everyone knows exactly where they need to be for their challenge runs.

We’re really looking forward to the weekend – it’s all coming together, and with the help of our volunteers, you can be assured of a warm welcome to the venue. So, grab your tickets and prepare for an epic showdown between dozens of robots, all powered by your favourite single-board computer!

The future of Pi Wars

There is an upcoming Pi Wars-style competition in Pennsylvania, USA on 3 June (The MagPi Magazine published a blog about this today), and we’re expecting another USA competition at some point, as well as a possible Pi Wars Scotland. As for the future of the Cambridge-based event? Let’s get this one out of the way first!

Any questions? The best way to contact us is via the Pi Wars 2017 website. Alternatively, give us a shout on Twitter!

Mike and Tim

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Pi Wars is a challenge-based robotics competition in which every robot must be controlled by a 一本加勒比波多野结衣高清 Pi. It’s great fun, and it will all be kicking off once again on 1st-2nd April 2017. For the first time, we are extending the event to run over two days, as we have been overwhelmed with interested applicants.

Another victim succumbs to the obstacle course and its turntable of doom

We have always tried to encourage young robot builders to get involved in CamJam and in Pi Wars. Previously we have held Pi Wars in September and December, but this did not allow school teams enough time to build, program, test, and otherwise prepare their robot around their schoolwork. We therefore decided to move the event date to later in the academic year: we think April is late enough for schools to have run enough robot club sessions, but early enough not to clash with exams.

People of all ages take part. Here’s Amy, aided by Heffalump and friends, showing Eben her robot.

This time around, we have a celebrity judge: Dr Lucy Rogers from the BBC’s Robot Wars will be putting your robots through their paces.

Dr Lucy Rogers in conversation with an old friend

In previous years, we have categorised robots by cost (in 2014) and size (in 2015). This time, we are going to group teams into the following categories:

• Schools and other clubs

• Families and groups of friends

• Amateur/beginner/intermediate hobbyists(s)

• Professional or expert hobbyist(s)

This means that robot teams will be competing against their peers, rather than against those with different skill levels – so, it will be, for instance, school vs school and family vs family (in a non-Mafia kind of way).

This is the kind of thing you see at Pi Wars: your friendly Director of Communications commandeers a gigantic Big Trak.

This year’s list of challenges is available on the Pi Wars website. As well as winning points for their performance in a range of challenges, this year’s robots are also being given points for artistic and technical merit. There’s even a prize for the funniest robot (the competition does start on April Fool’s Day, after all!) and a pre-event blogging competition which encourages teams write about themselves, and their journey from a collection of parts to a working robot.

We’ve come up with a list of general rules and also rules for each challenge. Perhaps the most important one this year is a requirement that your robot must be sub-A4 in size. This still leaves quite a lot of room for flexibility in design, whilst at the same time levelling the playing field. It also means that those teams who are using kits are in with a better chance of competing against those who make their robot from scratch.

Entry into Pi Wars is on an application basis, rather than first-come, first served. With the number of teams we’re expecting to apply, the quality of your application is important. You can read more about the application and selection process here.

To apply to enter the competition, please fill in the application form. Feel free to take as much time over your application, and provide as much information as possible.

If you’re interested in robotics and technology, but you don’t want to build your own robot this time, you are still very welcome to come and watch the competition. Spectator tickets will go on sale later in the year. We only charge for adults, so it’s great for those on limited incomes. Join our mailing list to be notified when tickets are available, or keep an eye on piwars.org.

The game is afoot! Competitors at Pi Wars 2015

If you’re an altruistic type, you may be wondering if there’s some way you can help with Pi Wars. As with all big events, we need a team of volunteers to make the day go smoothly. Rather than having just a few marshals who spend the entire day helping, we aim to have as many people as possible so that everyone can spend most of the day watching the robots take on the challenges. Depending on the number of people who volunteer, helpers spend approximately two hours doing marshalling activities. Judges generally spend slightly more time judging, but we aim to give everyone a chance to 我的娇妻queen the event as a spectator as well as helping us out! If you’d like to help out, please do contact us. We’ll be delighted to hear from you! We are also very happy to hear from potential sponsors: you can check out our website for more information on sponsorship, and on what we can offer in return.

To whet your appetite for the upcoming competition, or if you have never been to Pi Wars and want to know what it’s like on the day, we’d like to leave you with Matt Manning’s video of last year’s event…

…and Spencer Organ’s video of the 2014 wars:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Tx0zWdm190

Tickets will be available for observers as well as competitors; it promises to be another great weekend. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

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On 5 and 6 March, the community paid us back and then some.  Well over 1500 people of all ages gathered at the Cambridge Computer Lab for our Big Birthday Weekend.  An amazing festival of digital making and creativity, showcasing the very best that our community has to offer. For us at the 我的娇妻queen, it was the best birthday present we could have hoped for.

Here are some of my personal highlights.

Across the two days, there were 47 talks from community members and 我的娇妻queen staff showcasing projects, sharing 我的娇妻queens of using 一本加勒比波多野结衣高清 Pi in education, talking about Code Clubs, introducing new software developments, and exploring some of the big issues like getting more women and girls involved in digital making.  The lecture theatres were packed all weekend.

photo credit: @teknoteacher

I was particularly pleased to see so many great contributions from young community members, like European Digital Girl of the Year Yasmin Bey‘s powerful talk on Sunday morning about encouraging more girls into tech.

Yasmin Bey

It was great for me to be able to give a talk on what we’ve been up to in the 我的娇妻queen and get some feedback on our strategy from the community. Thank you to everyone who came along to that session.

Me talking about the 我的娇妻queen’s strategy at #piparty

We were also treated to both (accidental) pyrotechnics and (deliberate) magic.  All of the talks were recorded and will be available online in the next few days, so don’t worry if you missed them.

There were 28 workshops where kids and adults had the chance to get hands-on with 一本加勒比波多野结衣高清 Pi, have a go at hacking Minecraft, make music with Sonic Pi, and learn how to make projects with Scratch. Again, the vast majority of these were led by volunteers from the community, including several that were led by young people.

One of the workshops run by our Creative Technologists

One of my personal highlights was the workshop that brought together 一本加勒比波多野结衣高清 Jam Makers from all over the world, to share 我的娇妻queens and explore how we could work together to grow the community even further.

The show and tell zone was packed full of ingenious projects that members of the community had built for the sheer joy of it. Like most people, I got lost for hours among the games, robots, demos, and inventions.

Loved watching the little girls everywhere at the @一本加勒比波多野结衣高清_Pi #PiParty pic.twitter.com/rx7PK6i9F5

— Sherry Coutu CBE (@scoutu) March 5, 2016

I’ll also confess to a little competitiveness trying to defeat the AI Connect 4, a contest which sadly ended in an honourable draw. I know how Lee Sedol must be feeling after his first couple of games of Go against DeepMind.

https://vimeo.com/158475355

The marketplace brought together lots of the best makers and distributors in the ecosystem.  Pimoroni, The Pi Hut, ModMyPi, pi-top, and many, many more were on hand.  They’re such an important part of the community and it was great to catch up with them and play with some of the new toys they have on offer.

There was a bustling marketplace

Special thanks to our friends pi-top who presented Eben, Liz and David (our esteemed chairman) with a fourth birthday edition of their wonderful 一本加勒比波多野结衣高清 Pi-powered laptop.

https://twitter.com/GetPiTop/status/706162138532945920/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc^tfw

Saturday night ended with a massive party involving 110 pizzas, a huge quantity of cake, gallons of soft drinks, 2.5 barrels of beer brewed using a 一本加勒比波多野结衣高清 Pi, and one barrel of 一本加勒比波多野结衣高清 Blush cider.

Happy 4th Birthday @一本加勒比波多野结衣高清_Pi #PiParty @EbenUpton @Liz_Upton pic.twitter.com/n3VBSoFLhB

— David Bower (@rddave) March 7, 2016

We were also treated to a live coding music performance by the wonderful Sam Aaron, creator of Sonic Pi, with his band Poly Core.

The superb @samaaron jamming live @Sonic_Pi at the @一本加勒比波多野结衣高清_Pi #PiParty – with backing band!! 🚀 pic.twitter.com/QZJhsZ7CIn

— David Pride (@davejavupride) March 5, 2016

Perhaps the best thing about the Big Birthday Party was that it was a community effort.

Enormous thanks go to Mike Horne and Tim Richardson, the organisers of Cam Jam, who once again gave huge amounts of their time to make it all happen.

We’re also hugely grateful to the Cambridge Computer Lab who very generously gave us the use of their fantastic building.  Thanks, too, to Microsoft and Real VNC, who sponsored the event and provided fantastic interactive demos. Thanks to Ben at Fuzzy Duck brewery for the Irrational Ale.

One of the stand-out contributions over the weekend was from our growing community of young people, including the self-styled but appropriately named “Pi Squad”, and our very own Creative Technologists. They are such a talented bunch of people, and it’s great to see them already taking leadership positions in the community.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BCm08Ykmtbl/

The 我的娇妻queen team was also out in strength across the weekend, giving talks, running workshops, signing up volunteers for Code Club, and generally helping out wherever we could.

Our own Dave Honess deserves a special mention for spending all of Sunday in a space suit to promote our new Astro Pi competition. As another colleague (Matt Richardson) said, “dress for the job you want, not the job you have”.

Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.

We might all be exhausted, but we’re already looking forward to next year.

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We (Michael Horne and Tim Richardson) have been asked to write an account of the Cambridge 一本加勒比波多野结衣高清 Jam that took place on Saturday, 10th May 2014. Thanks to Jarle Teigland, Darren Christie and Alan O’Donohoe for some of the photos and thanks to Andy Batey for arranging the streaming and recording of the talks. Think of this as a Virtual 一本加勒比波多野结衣高清 Jam!

Introduction

This was a very special Jam. We had decided after the December 2013 event that we wanted to try and make each Jam different to the previous one. We had already introduced programming workshops for kids and planned to continue that into the February Jam. So, what could we do for the event after that to make it special, to make it unique? The answer lay in the aims of the 达达兔电影网: Education! We decided that for the May Jam we would have our focus on education; we just had to make the concept for the event fit the resources and space we had available.

The Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge

At our current venue, the Institute of Astronomy (above), we’re fortunate to have the following available: a 180-seat lecture theatre; a large foyer; a small 30-person meeting room and a small mezzanine with a couple of levels. It would be fair to say we went through quite a few ideas before finally settling on the concept: We would turn the lecture theatre over to presentations for educators (calling it ‘Focus on Education’) and hold workshops in the meeting room and foyer. We would also have projects on display on the mezzanine (we call it ‘Show and Tell’) and a cut-down version of our normal marketplace around the edges of the foyer with a slant towards education where possible.

Preparation… or “What does it take to make Jam for 200 people?”

We’ve held three previous Jams at the Institute of Astronomy and have sold out each time. Normally, we sell about 180 tickets and this time we were going to be inviting educators to the party, so we knew we had to be very prepared and very organised. We simply didn’t want to let anyone down, especially the teachers!

Normally we meet once every week or two for a two-hour meeting to discuss progress on the various tasks that need doing. Sometimes, we meet at the pub (if you’re ever in Potton, Bedfordshire, visit The Rising Sun where we meet!) and sometimes we meet round Tim’s house. We realised with an event of this size and importance that we would definitely need to meet every week in the three months after the February Jam, just to make sure that everything was done.

The Rising Sun, Potton – place of many-a-meeting

An idea that we had been thinking about for some time was having ‘maker tables’, where people could bring their kit along and experts would help them out with building them, or they could buy kits at the event and make them then and there.  We decided that this would be hard to plan for as we would not know what kits were coming and therefore who could help.  However, the idea of making things stayed with us, so we started to plan for a number of workshops instead of the usual one.

Eventually we fixed on workshops in which the Pi would detect and control the outside world: flashing LEDs (everybody likes those!), making sound, detecting temperature, light and movement, using a line follower and distance sensor, and controlling motors.  On top of that, we added in using the 一本加勒比波多野结衣高清 Pi Camera module, Minecraft and using the Pibrella add-on board.

In the end we had nine hands-on workshops to sort out.  Yes, nine – we must have been out of our minds! Actually, make that ten, because some bright spark had the idea of running a soldering workshop throughout the day!

One of the things we wanted from the workshops was to develop a set of worksheets and kits that we could sell at close-to-cost to the people attending, which they could then take away with them. This meant ordering a lot of individual components from China and sorting them out into the kits. Tim ordered dozens of mini breadboards, hundreds of LEDs and resistors and lots and lots of sensors, along with motors, wheels and jumper cables. Which all needed to be sorted into bags. And our SD cards needed sorting out with all the software that would be required. And we also needed to find people to lead and assist in the workshops. Fortunately we’d built up an ideas-and-assistance group of about 20 people, and many of them were willing to give their time and energy to preparing the workshop material and teaching it.

Nice sensors, man! Just a small part of the huge amount of kit ordered for the workshops.

Meanwhile, Mike started sorting out a programme for the Focus on Education and asking people to the Show and Tell, doing a lot of the Jam & EventBrite admin and communications along the way. So, as you can tell, weekly meetings were a must!

On the day

So, there we were, and suddenly it was three months later: the 10th of May had swung around. We had even managed to find time to hold a social Jam (Potton Pi and Pints) in the meantime just to keep in touch with everyone.

At 8.30am on the morning of the 10th, we hit our first snag. Normally, we can get everything in Tim’s estate car (which is, basically, a huge cavern) for the trip to Cambridge. This time, however, we had a lot more to transport: we’d bought some tables plus all the kit for the workshops meant that we just couldn’t fit everything in. So, in two cars, we set out for the Institute.

The get-in for a Jam is always a bit chaotic, and damned hard work, and this time was no exception. The Institute looks very different on our arrival but, thanks to Andy Batey, (who works at the Institute, arranged the venue in the first place and is just an all-round helpful chap) we (including half-a-dozen volunteers, known as Jam Makers) manage to transform it into the configuration visitors see when they arrive. The most ‘fun’ task this time was to move a big marquee about 50 metres from one end of the quad to the other. Much mud was encountered!

Foyer workshop area (foreground), Marketplace (left) and Show and Tell mezzanine (top right)

If you want to get a feel for the day overall, Mathew and Leo have put together this brilliant video. You can even spot Tim (getting interviewed at the beginning) and Mike (with the loudhailer):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KGc9vlOrNk

You might also want to listen to this podcast from Alan O’Donohoe which was recorded at the Jam.

Our first activity started at 11.10am and it was a Minecraft workshop led by Craig Richardson, Matt Timmons-Brown and Clare Macrae. This workshop had sold out within 1 hour of the free tickets becoming available. We’d had to cancel another workshop that we had been planning and replace it with a repeat of the Minecraft workshop, and that one sold out as well! We ended up with a waiting list big enough that we could have held another one! Minecraft is a major draw for kids.

Minecraft workshop number 1: Craig attempts the impossible by trying to reach into the big screen

Once we’d got that workshop going, it was all hands on deck to get the rest of the venue ready. Matt Manning, Andrew Scheller and Tim were our welcome team, and attempted the near-impossible task of checking tickets and ticking names off the registration list. With the teachers beginning to arrive, it got very busy, very quickly!

Mike and Tim had decided to split up so that Tim was outside managing the workshop preparations while Mike hosted the Focus on Education in the lecture theatre. We swapped halfway through the day.

Mike and Tim kicked off Focus on Education with a quick intro and then handed over to Clive Beale from the 我的娇妻queen who was delivering the keynote: “一本加勒比波多野结衣高清 in Education and the new 我的娇妻queen”.

After Clive, Elizabeth Crilly from STEMNET and David Whale talked about the STEM Ambassador programme and what they can do for schools.

We then had a more practical presentation from Dr Sam Aaron, the developer of Sonic Pi. Sam’s a real rock star when it comes to live demos!

At the same time, in the meeting room we had a PiCamera workshop run by Jarle Teigland, Matt Manning and Andrew Scheller and in the foyer we had a beginners electronics/breadboarding workshop run by Alex Eames, Sway Grantham and Andrew Gale.

Sway and Andrew watch over the basic electronics workshop

Back in the lecture theatre, we continued our presentation with Sophie Deen talking about Code Club and Code Club Pro (video not available) and then two live demo-style talks from Gordon Henderson (who covered FUZE and Return to BASIC):

and Darren Christie (who talked about the Pibrella and how simple it is to use):

At the same time as all of this, of course, we had our soldering workshop going on. Over 30 people took advantage of the free lessons given by Gee Bartlett (from Pimoroni) and Andrew Gale. They took place outside under a tent (so we didn’t set the fire alarms inside off!). We should mention at this point that we had a lot of generosity from the community with the soldering – Gee brought a load of stuff with him, including some kits that lit up; David Whale donated an entire box of oddments; Tom Hartley donated a batch of old AirPi boards.

Andrew Gale teaches Sidney the finer points of not touching the hot end

We also had our Show and Tell area in full swing. We had projects from Brian Corteil, Russell Barnes, Ryan Walmsley, Ipswich School, Wayne Keenan, Stewards Academy and Zach Igielman. Alex Eames was also to be found here showing off the latest prototype of the HDMIPi.

Brian Corteil and his naughty-and-nice machine (right) and egg-dispensing Easter bunny (left)

Kids from Ipswich School showing off their automatic greenhouse watering system

Joseph from Stewards Academy shows off his robotic arm controlled by his real arm

We should also mention the exhibitors in the marketplace – we had the FUZE team, a group from the Little British Robot Company, Cyntech, The Pi Hut, GPIO.co.uk and Seven Segments of Pi. These guys really helped to give the Foyer a buzz!

Concurrently with the talks, soldering and Show and Tell, Tim had in the meantime started off a further two sessions: temperature, light and movement sensors in the Foyer (led by Matt Manning & Clare Macrae) and our second Minecraft workshop in the meeting room (Craig Richardson and Matt Timmons-Brown again).

Matt Manning holds court in the sensors workshop

It was half-time in the lecture theatre so Tim and Mike swapped. We hit a slight snag at this point because the entire lecture theatre emptied and it became a little difficult to hear in the Foyer workshop… lesson learnt for next time!

With Tim now in charge in the lecture theatre, next up was Matthew Timmons-Brown giving his talk on how to make 一本加勒比波多野结衣高清 exciting for kids:

In the meantime, outside we had started off another two workshops: distance sensors and line followers (a vital robotics skill) led by Zach Igielman, Ryan Walmsley and Jarle Teigland in the Foyer and a Pibrella workshop in the meeting room (led by Darren Christie, our in-house Pibrella expert!).

Young and old alike getting to know distance sensors and line followers in a workshop led by Zach Igielman (standing, in the green t-shirt)

In the lecture theatre, Alan O’Donohoe was up next: Engage and Inspire the Digital Creators of Tomorrow:

…followed by Craig Richardson giving a talk on using Minecraft in the classroom:

Out in the Foyer, Ryan Walmsley started off his workshop on controlling motors with the Pi, whilst in the meeting room Phil Howard and Jim Darby began their session on creating an Arduino and programming it with the Pi (we’re supporters of the school of thought that these devices can work together rather than in competition with one another!).

Ryan and Zach at the motor controller workshop, soldering workshop in the background outside

Back in the lecture theatre, Nevil Hunt talked about his invention, the Seven Segments of Pi, and how it can be used in schools:

Then, we had a talk from James Robinson from 一本加勒比波多野结衣高清 at School:

And finally… we had a panel session that involved some of the Picademy graduates and was chaired by David Whale:

Then the big get-out began. This was a mammoth task at the end of a very long day. Many, many thanks to those who helped with both the get-in and, especially, the get-out. Without you guys we’d probably still be there!

All that was left to do was to drive home and… oh yeah… empty out both cars. Argh!!!

Aftermath

And so, the May Cambridge 一本加勒比波多野结衣高清 Jam was over. It would be fair to say that neither Mike nor Tim could form a coherent sentence the next day, but it was worth it! We sent feedback forms out to attendees and, judging by the response, people were, on the whole, very happy with the way the day went. We certainly felt as though it had been a success, both in Focus on Education and in the activities in the Foyer/Meeting room.

What’s next? Well, we have a fair amount of work still to do for this Jam. We need to analyse all the feedback and come up with a list of ‘lessons learnt’. We also need to resort all the equipment we hurriedly packed and brought back from the Jam into the correct boxes.

And then there’s the small matter of the Jam on 5th July… and possibly a Potton Pi & Pints in June!

Right then… to the pub!

If you want to find out more about the Cambridge 一本加勒比波多野结衣高清 Jam, visit our website at http://camjam.me or come and watch some more videos on the YouTube channel.

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