Kit Woes

[Andrew Barrett-Sprot]

Hello everyone,

TL;DR: We're going to try and cobble together our own kit with arduinos and raspberry pi's.

For those unaware, the SR trustees have decided not to lend us kit for smallpeice this year. This puts us in a very sticky situation

A few of us had a meeting to assess the options of what kit we can use; we believe that despite the old (v3) kit being available to us, we think there are several problems with going down this route:

- The inventory says we have 38 working motor boards, but we're pretty sure we didn't update this after the last 2 competitions of using the kit (SR 2013, smallpeice 2014) these motor boards are known for being very unrelible, so it's likely we have fewer than 30 working units, which is the minimum we'd be comfortable running a competition on (2 per kit plus a spare per team). This might be mitigated by:

- Potentially manufacturing more kit ourselves, but they'd be useless after the event.

- Repairing broken boards, but that would require lots of knowledgeable man-hours.

- The number of man hours needed to revitalise the kit is very high

Assuming we aren't going to go with V3 kit, we could potentially use V4 kit. We could either:

- manufacture our own, but its very expensive, takes time, and in general high risk.

- Convince SR to give us their kit (maybe at a price), this would be the best option if we manage it

Another alternative is creating our own homebrew kit with off the shelf hardware. Giorgos can order a prototype on Monday to see how plausible it is, the kit we're thinking of maybe using is:

Dual motor controller Arduino shield (very similar to SRv4 motor boards)

http://www.robotshop.com/uk/pololu-dual-vnh5019-motor-driver-shield-arduino.html

Raspberry Pi with 16-channel Servo shield 

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/adafruit-16-channel-pwm-servo-hat-for-raspberry-pi-mini-kit

5V regulator for powering all the logic stuff from the LiPo

http://www.robotshop.com/uk/cpt-c5-5v-power-converter.html

We'll also probably need to manufacture some cases, and some thoughts on how the boards connect together.

Overall there are things we don't have no matter what we do:

- Batteries (we have 6, will need at least 20)

- Battery Chargers (we have none, we need 10)

- Webcams (we'll need about 12-15)

- LiPo Bags (a couple)

Thanks,

Andy B-S et al.

[Jon Bartlett]

I have a mostly working mildly hacked version of libkoki that works
with the pi camera if that's any use to you. Haven't tried using a
webcam on Pi though.