El Plan

 EL PLAN  : THE BEGINNING

So now basically I was alone , left with 3 week ends to prepare the car for the qualifier and the final , knowing that I'm currently an full time intern at TDK .

What I had was the newly provided kit and NO TRACK 😂   so let's start with that.

EL PLAN  WEEK END N°1 : MAKING THE TRACK

The track that I had where old tracks from 2016 when the NXP CUP took place in Grenoble , but since then no new track were available ,  I had to create the SVG from the tracks and use a laser cutter to CUT the race track.

Big shoutout to the FABMSTIC lab and Germain  for allowing me to use their laser cutter
Go check their website : https://fabmastic.imag.fr/pages/le-fablab-mastic.html

Afterwards I had to do some painting and then I was done with this  I had to do some painting and then VOILA I was done  !

EL PLAN  WEEK END N°2 : IT IS LIGHTS OUT AND THE WAY WE GO !

Now before assembling the car and making all the necessary wiring , I noticed that something was wrong with the kit provided.

In fact the turning radius of the car wouldn't allow U turns and 270 turns around a regular track  :
Now according my calculation and my really HIGH level in maths we have the following :

To find the turning radius, we can use the formula:

Turning radius = Wheelbase / sin(Turning angle)

Plugging in the values we have:

Turning radius = 23 cm / sin(30 degrees) Turning radius = 46cm / 1 (since sin(30 degrees) = 0.5)

Therefore, the turning radius is 46 cm

The track is 55 cm wide with the two outter lines , wich leaves us with 51cm. 

So basically there's no room for error , and you have to get the perfect timing . Hence I decided to move to another plaftorm with the Wltoys 144001 with a wheelbase of 19cm !

• SETUP

The setup of the car wasn't hard overall and the gitbook made it very easy and straightforward expect for the arming method where we should use a RC remote that is prohibited during the competition.
But after few minutes I found a way to fix everything up ... and by fixing it I mean deleting some parts of the actual code until it worked 😎

• CODING

Well for this part there's not much to say , I knew before receiving the kit that the car would most likely use a PID controller. Honestly there's no better video than this one bellow to explain what a PID means for beginners .

• GOING FOR A FIRST RIDE

      Here we go with the first try  , not too bad , the PID is well adjusted and I got a new support for the camera : 
    
    https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cxgE-BhiALA

The problem was that I had no tire grip and the brakes were not strong enough to get the car to desired speed  after one whole day  I was like this :

... so I lowered the car and found out that the car had a remote to add some brake power   !!!

AND NOW WOWY TAKE A LOOK AT THE CAR :

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hvdaVV6hA6s

https://youtube.com/shorts/8uuD2FLrms0?feature=share

It's handling well the intersection but I have some problem with the ZigZags ...

Conclusion

Honestly there's much to say but at this point I'm just suuuuuuuupper lazy to write all that down , I will make a video to explain everything in the details but from now on my goal with MEA team from France also  is  :