Botting the way - 3Pi Intro (1)

Hey there! In a perhaps more definitive revival of our blog, I'm presenting my current project - or, more accuratelly, parts of it.

A simple 3pi, with no addons.

Having been working with a little robot "3pi", by pololu, I've decided to use one for a game. The idea is to create a somewhat sentient bot that can respond to a player's input. However, let us not get ahead of ourselves! First, the basics: programming a simple 3pi to perform a series of very simple tasks. First, we're looking at following a track consisting of black lines in a white space.

A 3pi with no extensions has 5 light sensors: They detect the amount of light being reflected. We're not yet able to sense anything like location (WHERE on a track am I? North, south?), accept our player's input (No wifi/bluetooth communication), or read images or sound (we lack cameras or sound input). We can, however, do the most important thing to start with: Moving!

With that in mind, our goal is to make a 3PI follow a black line in a white field. This is easier to avoid sensor errors, since those are poar opposites in terms of reflected light. The idea is simple: to guide our little friend through his journey!

We'll check how next time.

What's with the nickname?

It's an old nickname from the times when I was in mid school, it was created from my real 1st name and a game character, because I didn't have a clue of what nickname I should use, for sites, blogs, web browser games, etc, and since then, I still pretty much use this one.

The Pedro part is a common name in my portuguese language, which it relates to other languages names such as Peter, Pierre or Pietro. As for the Firzen part it's the name of a character which I loved in a game called LittleFighter 2, he was a fusion character which controled ice and fire,it is one of the end bosses of the stage mode of the game. If you don't know the game, it's a beat'em up type of fighting game, with a good number of different type of characters with special abilities and spells. If you like fighting games give it a try it's a nice free game to pass some of your time and even play with your friends.



One of the best parts of the game is the massive number of fan created characters and modified games throughout the web, some of them are overpowered or badly done, others are wonderfully well done and original. The main reason for this, is because it's an easily modifiable game, even if you don't have advance programming skills, you can easily open up the game files with the right editor and you can change the information of each character or spell (making good sprites is another story).

Blog's First Post

Hi there, just started my new blog today. This blog will be used to talk about games, programming or other computer related stuff, some internet stuff too and maybe more things in the future (who knows?).

Enjoy.