Pi Wars Conference 2021 – Virtual Edition

The 2021 Pi Wars at Home Conference took place on Saturday, 23rd & Sunday, 24th January 2021.

The Conference was a celebration of all things robotics, Raspberry Pi, electronics and Pi Wars. It brought together veterans and newcomers and was aimed at both competitors and non-competitors.

Thanks to the pre-recording of talks for the Conference, and also the additional recording of the live parts by Hopin.to, we can now present a Virtual Edition of the Conference. Each Talk, Q&A and Session has been uploaded to YouTube. The programme below gives a list of the material in the order in which it was presented at the Conference.

If anyone finds that any of the links go to the wrong video (!), please let us know!

Day 1

The Main Stage (Talks)

  • Paul “Dr Footleg” Fretwell – Help, I’ve been accepted into Pi Wars! – Talk | Q&A
  • Matt “The Raspberry Pi Guy” Timmons-Brown – Robotics at University and beyond – a student’s perspective – Talk | Q&A
  • Clint Davies-Taylor (Dassault Systemes) – 3D CAD Technology for Life – Talk | Q&A
  • Amy – The Art of Pi Wars (but like the COOL, REBOOTED version!) – Talk | Q&A
  • Blayze Millward – Seeing Everything at Once with 360-degree Visual SLAM – Talk | Q&A
  • David Whale – Building a wireless robot controller with a micro:bit – Talk | Q&A
  • Alessandro Bolloni – ULISSE and the High Performance Computing framework – Talk | Q&A
  • Leon Anavi – How to Add an EEPROM with Device Tree Overlay to Your Raspberry Pi HAT – Talk | Q&A
  • Andrew & Victor – The £1 motor controller – Talk | Q&A

Sessions (longer talks and panels)

  • Martin O’Hanlon – BlueDot 2.0. Controlling your robot with Bluetooth – Session
  • Makers panel featuring 8 Bits and a Byte, Dan Aldred, Dr Christopher Parrott, Matt Timmons-Brown and Dr Footleg – Session
  • Art panel featuring Amy, Rachel Konichiwakitty and Brian Starkey – Session

Day 2

The Main Stage (Talks)

  • Phil Hall – PiDrogen & Tackling the Pi Wars @ Home Challenges – Talk | Q&A
  • Neil Stevenson – Voice Recognition for Robot Control – Talk | Q&A
  • David Hannaford – My best 10 robots in 50 years of robot building – Talk | Q&A
  • Garry Bulmer – The UKMARSBOT encoder project – Talk and Q&A
  • Pal Denes and Daniel Sendula – Software and Simulation – Talk | Q&A
  • Ece Tabag, Can Aydin, Elif Kozanoglu and Sedat Yalcin – Pi Wars Turkey: What We Learned – Talk | Q&A
  • Lightning Talks
    • Harry Brenton – How to Make a Mini Boston Dynamics handlbot – MABEL – Talk
    • James – Robots in Agriculture – Talk
    • Ciprian Manea – PiGlass – Talk
    • Chris Scott – Extreme(ish) Robotics – Talk
    • Phil Willis – Competing show-reel – Talk
    • Bill Harvey – Mars Explorer and the mini school-based Pi Wars competition – Talk

Sessions (longer talks and panels)

  • Neil Lambeth – Displays and menu systems for PiWars Robots – Session
  • Keegan Neave – Robot Operating System: How not to do it, and what to do instead! – Unfortunately, this session failed to record. Which is a bummer, because it was really good!
  • UKMARSBOT panel featuring David Hannaford, Garry Bulmer and Peter Harrison – Session
  • Paul “Dr Footleg” Fretwell – Designing your own robotics electronics – Circuit and PCB design for Raspberry Pi Add-ons – COMING SOON – The quality of the recording was poor, so Paul will re-master the session. Session (remastered)
  • Rishan Sharma – Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning with the Raspberry Pi – Session