Introducing the PiBot, a pretty poor alternative to looking up the value of Pi on the internet. He leaves all the competition in his wake as he calculates Pi slower than his old friend Colossus of Bletchley Park fame, that rubbish robot from Battlestar Galactica and any modern calculator.
PiBot has arrived to celebrate Pi day in true PiBot fashion, he is going to calculate Pi to a shameful degree of accuracy. I realise he is a bit late to Pi day, he is only running at 16MHz so please give him a break.
If you would like to own your own PiBot! Or even to create one that doesn't look mildly rubbish, please follow along.
So to craft this masterpiece of engineering you are going to need some electronics parts, materials and some tools.
Tools:
If you are using just the breadboard then all you will need is a computer with the Aduino IDE installed, otherwise you will want a soldering iron to make a little button breakout. But we won't cover that here.
Materials and Parts
You don't need all the parts listed, in fact your Arduino can just print out Pi to your serial monitor, but if you want it to be the coolest 'not really a robot' robot on the street, read on.
Now you could go all out and make your creation look amazing. Or, and I must remind you that there could be beer in the fridge or Xbox to play, you could create a poorly fitting box out of cardboard to ram all of your parts into.
If you go the beer and Xbox route then follow me.
You should now have a rough-round-the-edges bit of cardboard and inside you will be wishing someone would create a cheap home 3d printer that is actually cheap and not just a bit cheaper than a car.
Score and fold along the right edges, use the ruler or your fingers will not be up to Xbox and beer later on.
Carefully and I mean carefully, place your components into your crude box, otherwise your majestic creation might fall to pieces. Sellotape comes in very handy here if you are ham fisted like me.
First you will need to grab the code - davidjwatts.com/youtube/calculate_pi.zip and the libraries that are linked in the file. Don't worry, there are only two libraries and Arduino.cc has a great tutorial on how to use libraries - http://arduino.cc/en/Guide/Libraries#toc2
I am sure you, like me, can spend hours and hours having your robot calculate Pi, dismissing friends, the opportunity to drink beer and roaming the expanding wastes of civilisation. It truly is a sight to behold, the pinnacle of human achievement neatly packaged in a rough-edged plain box, desperately trying to achieve the impossible.
Or.....
It is a really cool little toy, that is pretty cute really. All the while demonstrating a method of estimating the value of a really important mathematical constant, Pi.
Take a look at the video here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzUSn_gO8tI
Have fun everyone, happy Pi day.