I vote to have FVEAA sponsor an entry in the Formula Pi racing series

[rich.carroll]

We can easily field an entry for the Formula Pi races at Springfield Raceway in  Cambridge.  Which Cambridge, you ask?  The original, in Emgland, about 50 miles north of London.  Most of you will remember the Raspberry Pi, a series of single board computers.  Some of them run Windows 10, but most run versions of Linux, a full multitasking, multithreaded *NIX compatible operating system.  Raspberry Pi's come is several flavors, with their latest starting at $5. 

Now Geek.com has announced a racing series for Raspberry Pi controlled self driving cars.  Google did it, Tesla has done it, and the Formula Pi racing series takes driverless cars to a new level, and it isn't expensive. http://www.geek.com/news/theres-going-to-be-a-raspberry-pi-driverless-racing-championship-1663363/

Right now, Formula Pi is on Kickstarter, and are about half way to their funding goal. PiBorg provides the robotic cars, and they have complete code, but we can modify it.  Suffice it to say, the robotic cars are fixed but the parameters used for following colors, dealing with collisions, conservation of energy are all modifyable.  To participate in the Winter Series, we would need to commit to $46   (ish depending on what the Pound Sterling does in the next month or so) and that allows us to race in a minimum of 5 races between October 2016 to January 2017.  Another $46 will get you an entry into the summer series, April - July 2017.  In both cases, the car is completely provided, we do get to fine tune the code and YetiBorg lid (also called a YetiBorg Top and a YetiLid) (a paintable, decalable fiberglass lid to customize our YetiBorg) http://www.geek.com/news/theres-going-to-be-a-raspberry-pi-driverless-racing-championship-1663363/

Obviously, the most serious teams will pop for their own YetiBorg so they can fine tune the parameters used in racing on their colored surfaces.  But one YetiBorg could be shared among several teams.  See the Kickstarted page also, for more info:  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/frobotics/formula-pi-self-driving-robot-racing-with-the-rasp

The track lanes and lengths vary considerably, but the shorter inside lanes require slowing more for turns. Fortunately things are well documented.  http://formulapi.com/track-1/lanes

Notice, nothing has required any on-site participation.  As a club, we could do our testing on this side of the Atlantic, and send code to them Via FTP and our lid by mail or delivery service.    Who's in?

[bruce.jones]

Rich, if you're leading up the team and are available to do this I'm in.  And I'm good with the inexpensive entry fees to be paid by the club. Have not had time to dig into the links, so what is the due date for registration, and when is the competition?  Sounds cool

[rich.carroll]

It is on Kickstarter, so there are no real hard deadlines.  Basically the costs are:
$46  Entry into either the Winter or Summer series.  Gets us a fiberglass cover for our car to decorate as we desire.

about $240 ($218 plus Pi, Camera, cable, Micro sD card) gets a real car so we can tune the existing software, and entry into either the Winter or Summer series.  The Kickstarter campaign is already is successful; they are considerably over their GBP 2500 goal.

I would hope we can enlist some schools teams or scout STEM groups who can BORROW the YetiBorg from FVEAA and enter themselves.  This way, we could partner with one or more schools with limited budgets to do more than put their name on a Race Bot, they can fine tune their own software and ftp it to the organizers, who will load it into their bot. I'd be happy to call Lou Harnisch at Argonne to see if they want to add it to their newsletter that goes out to Middle Schools and High Schools.  This way if the school commits to $46 and borrows our car for development they get all the parts of the program except the big expense that is more difficult for Science teachers to justify.  We'll have some logistics to work out, but it would be a partnership between the School District and FVEAA.

[rich.carroll]

BTW, I did start with a blog entry on the FormulaPi Website looking for interest in sharing a Development Bot.   http://formulapi.com/node/13  (Curiously, I must have asked right after they started the blog, I was assigned post #1 !!