Ever heard about Pi Wars? Pi Wars is a non-destructive, Raspberry Pi-based robotics competition with both autonomous and remote-controlled challenges. It takes place in-person over a single weekend and features teams of school students, families and hobbyists as well as solo roboteers. The event open to anyone on planet Earth!
I joint a small group in The Netherlands, which is a great way learning more about robotics. Our team-blog: Dutch Rescue Team.
Our teams consists of some experienced people, so the base robot is basically a newer versions of lessons learned, using RobotLib.
Challenge: The Zombie Apocalypse
“Shoot all the zombies in the Tower and save the inhabitants. The targets will be at a number of different levels and you must use projectiles as your “anti-zombie device” to knock them over.”
The zombie apocalypse seems to be a great challenge! We quickly decided to use a nerf gun, shooting these zombies from a distance.
Since I’m the mechanical guy in the team, my orders: build nerf guns, which is able to shoot zoombies. And since we don’t live close to each other, we will build 3 robots and especially for this challenge also 3 nerf guns.
Summary: Nurf gun
For the full story, read our team-blog.
Basically started with a prototype, which was shooting quite nicely. It contains the main units:
- 2 spinner wheels, shooting the nerf darts
- Barrel
- Cartridges, containing 5 nerf darts
- Quick release for the cartridges.
Production version
Followed up with a ‘production’ version (V1 & V2), including extra needed functionality:
- Pan & Tilt mechanism,
- Cross-laser pointer on the barrel,
- Quick release mechanism, attaching this module to the robot,
- Small camera on barrel.




Manual shooting
The main robot was not yet ready for this module, so created a small ’turret’ solution, for doing more tests on shooting performances.
Autonomous shooting
Till very late, the zombie pictures were unknown. So that made it hard to programming any reconition software, which is already hard on it’s own, without any experiences. Also the background was unknown, which makes it even more difficult. So I just tried to find ‘zombies’, based on download pictures and a very rough algorithm.
The algorithm does not reconized zombies at all, but it was able to distinguishes between pictures with a lot of lines, versus a plain background.
Conclusions:
This was definately a fun robotics encounter.
A challenge like this, also requires a lot of ‘hobby’ time, which I was lacking a bit. Besides that, it was a very nice experience, to learn from my team mates, Pi Wars forum etc. Although the autonomous shooting was not used during the match in 2024, it does somewhat works anyways. 😉
This real inspires me, to build my own (small) robot platform and maybe, maybe someday I could participate to another Pi Wars event…
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