One of the PiWars challenges is to "feed the fish" by launching "fish food" into a 200mm x 200mm bowl.
I looked at a solenoid I had in the shed but it's way too weedy to launch anything, so I wondered about a pneumatic potato cannon style launcher.
I ordered a CO2 bike tyre inflator which uses threaded 16g CO2 canisters... and planned to connect this to a 12v valve and then the launcher. Unfortunately all my pneumatic fittings are 1/4" BSP and I think the "regulator" that screws on to the cylinder is 1/16" BSP... so I'm waiting on fittings.
I the mean time I designed a rotary chamber in tinkercad to hold 5 rounds.
Originally I'd looked at the plastic balls out of Draft Guiness cans, but have ordered a batch of NERF rival balls as the Guiness balls were't uniformly round.
As well as this I've been looking at making sure the thing doesn't bash into the walls of the arena.
We need sensors, so I mocked up positions for a set of SR04 ultrasonics which give a fair idea of how far away stuff is. They are a bit primitive, so I2C here, so might rig them up to an arduino with the sole function of passing a stream of proximity data back to the pi. In fact it may be sensible to use something like ROS to manage all the ancillary sensors and outputs... although I really don't like it.
Comments
Post a Comment