SumoRobot

Finished building 4 new sumorobots for testing and using them in workshops. During the soldering and assembly, quite some ideas came up for improvements. Also later while testing the robots some cons came out that could be improved. Check out the list of thought written here. Also worked a bit on the programming interface, making it now possible to connect to 5 robots from one browser makes testing easier and is also useful for the workshops. The hope is to use the same interface for the end user. Happy programming!

All the parts for the new design of the robot arrived. The idea of the new design is to use the mainboard as a chassis for the robot. In front on the plow we have the white area so the children can name the robot. The new robot uses the WEMOS LOLIN32. There is still a lot of testing todo, the goal is to use MicroPython on the ESP32. For power it uses the 18650 Li-Po cell, commonly found in laptop batteries. So in case you have an old laptop battery, don't throw it out yet, you can recycle it for your sumorobot!

While testing the WEMOS D1 pro mini with WebSocket and the web server Google Blockly was quite slow to load and also the Websocket got disconnected at times. This might be because of some delays in the code as the ESP8266 has a single core and all the WiFi protocol is running on that. So in case of delays the connection might drop.

Using the PlatformIO it’s easy to program any ESP8266 based platform and upload files to it’s on board SPI flash memory. When your platform has 4MB SPI flash memory you can also use over the air programming, which is very nice. Without configuring anything Google Blockly fits without all the media files on the WEMOS D1 mini pro SPI flash memory and can be served from it. When using no compression while compiling Google Blockly, the essential files will be around 800KB. Check out the WEMOS code and the Google Blockly for sumorobots.

It’s really easy to program the WEMOS D1 mini pro using the Arduino IDE or PlatformIO. Just install the USB to UART driver for it and it is ready to go. For the sumorobot purpose it’s interesting to try the over the air programming (OTA) and loading Google Blockly to it’s on board SPI flash memory, so it can be served from the sumorobot.