Robot Car Racing - SMOOTH OPERATOR edition

Our Second Meetup went well!!! The battery powered wireless router allowed us to operate the vehicle without major glitches, and we could easily drive the vehicle out of sight and explore without the connection dropping.

The failure learned from this event is that driving over gravel makes for a nauseating experience for the driver. The vehicle performs surprisingly well, but it's a bit stop and go just so you can keep your bearings while the vehicle drives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQDjteez0xA

So with this lesson we'll be doing this Meetup at New Belgian Brewery. They have a huge area with large paved sections. They also have a lot of grass yard that is short cut, and compressed down so the vehicles might do well there.

For this event we'll try our first races and put down some obstacles for the vehicles to drive around.

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Do you think you have the skilz to race a small kinda slow robotic car around a brewery? Whether or not you do we'd love to show you the Dojo Derby vehicles and let you race them around to understand why I think these things are so cool.

These cars are built with commodity parts from Amazon and run using a full "compute stack" provided by a Raspberry Pi 4. So basically you have a DIY "toy" that happens to run using real technology (Linux, Python, PHP, OpenCV and even things like serverlesss architecture).

If you're a tech professional I can show you the code and how the platform works, and explain the higher level functions.

If you're new to tech I'll give you the overview so you can try to understand how to get started.

I'll set up a little race course and people can test how fast they are individually, and also try to race each other. The best racer will be a GOLD STAR STICKER!!!

Check out the website: www.SiliconDerby.com

Everyone is welcome, all ages are welcome.