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DASH FREE 99We found out about Techno Games 2000 by Creag and Steve being invited to participate in the micromouse event. This looked straightforward until we realised that it was Formula 1 (no problem) and Ratrace (no mouse!).
United Simpletons!
Creag and Steve have a successful Formula 1 mouse in HorsePower but their efforts this year have concentrated on the "flat" courses with a mouse called Intelligent Thing. The hardware for IT was just about finished but the software was barely started when they found out about the Games. IT has plenty of sensor resources and processing power so it should have been easy to make it do the Ratrace.
In a couple of weeks they were ready to put it on a course for the first time and this coincided with TV21 sending out a crew to film us at home. In consequence, TV21 have film of IT turning a wheel for the very first time. This was only a metre and quite slow but it did run.
Intelligent Thing
Very soon they found that a 7.5 metre straight is very different to the straights in Formula 3. IT was nowhere near fast enough but the acceleration was very good. A few hours machining later and they had large enough wheels to make it reasonable. Times came down to under 6 seconds and it looked as though it would not be too embarrassing.
So, for the Dome they had 2 mice but, unfortunately, filming was scheduled for the day that Creag went to France for 10 days on a school exchange trip. Steve would be on his own for the filming and he would not be able to go for the practice day due to GCSE technology commitments.
On practice day, there I was with my high-jumper for filming and two mice to test. That's when I found that the Ratrace course provided had bumps in it of over 1 centimetre! Given the course, IT had to be retuned for slower elapsed times to keep it on line. IT had to come home for this that evening.
On the filming day Steve and I turned up with James' gymnastics display. The morning was mostly spent watching the filming of the adult demonstration. Dave Woodfield is as impressive as ever.
HorsePower
Once they got onto the Formula 1 filming, it became obvious that there were a wide range of mice. HorsePower represented a well-developed wall-follower against a rather good maze-solver, a brand-new simple wall-follower and some others that were nearly working. The maze-solver had some problems with TV lights but it is a much more sophisticated machine than HorsePower. I hope to see it competing against adults in the full maze in due course.
The brand-new mouse used microswitches for sensing and, after a few tweaks managed to run the maze. There is lots of development potential in this machine.
The competition seemed chaotic as the film crew didn't seem to understand what we were trying to achieve. HorsePower did about 5 laps from start to finish and back without anyone but us realising that it had successfully finished!
We still don't know who won, but Steve's time was some 47 seconds.
The maze micromice had taken a long time for filming etc. As a result the Ratrace was cancelled. This didn't worry Steve too much as he had run well in the maze but it was unfortunate for one team who had been there all of the practice day and all the filming day and didn't get a run.
Duncan Louttit