After a long(er) winter break, and somewhat continuous shopping spree – for components and especially for small robots or chassis able to compete in PiWars 2020, we are back blogging – eager to show you some of our [past] contenders, and especially their pro’s and con’s.

While it would have been really nice for us/me[?] to 3D design and print our robot’s body or chassis – as we’re qualified in the Beginner branch of PiWars – we are under no pressure to out-compete other beginners. We’re going there for the fun of it, plus as a team/family experience.

As you may imagine, over the past 3 months, our envisioned or possible robot designs, off-the-shelf options, plus their initial testing has made us change our minds about the perfect PiWars 2020 competition robot many times over.

Here’s a very short summary of (y)our options from 2019, as 2020 has just started.

From the cheapest, to the fastest, to the more extensible, to the most expensive.

• CamJam EduKit #3 robot at £18 (hard carton chassis, requires some drilling)
• STS-Pi roving robot at £22.50 (its caster ball’s arm looks really soft)
• Coretec 4WD robot at £54.90, plus fastest motors at £24 (fast as a 🚀)
• Pi2Go Mk2 4WD robot at £83.40 (yellow TT motors capped at 240 RPM)
• PiCar-S robot at €90 (also based on yellow TT motors; max RPM ~240 as well)
• Sphero RVR robot at $249 (expensive, but most promising, hackable, and speedy)
• DJI RoboMaster S1 robot at €549 (despite its price, has an immature Python SDK)

P.S. DJI’s RoboMaster S1 is just FYI as it exceeds the PiWars competition max. chassis dimensions by 25mm (in length)

Go RO bots!