Starting to put stuff together for CNRG

Starting to put my new minisumo and firefighter designs together.

I put together a small flame sensor using IR phototransistors. I’ll need to either print or CNC a lid for it. The idea is that the 11 sensors give a nice location of where the flame is, so it will be fast. The Chinese team at the Hartford firefighting competition use something similar. The sensor will be standalone and readable via I2C.

The minisumo design is one that I started for the 2010 CNRG Robot games in Toronto but didn’t get the chassis design ready in time last year. It is similar to my 4 wheel buttercup design but with only 2 wheels. It will be a little taller but should be as fast and strong. The idea is quickly detecting the enemy and hitting them as hard and fast as possible.

My new firefighter brain board had a major pinout error on the new h-bridge so I had to reorder it from Seeedstudio. Whoops! I had new linefollower and sumoORE pcbs to run at the same time so it wasn’t too bad, aside from losing a few weeks of coding time. Hopefully I will see those new week!