I’ve recently been working with Rochdale Youth service delivering a number of workshops where young people have been building Raspberry Pi powered robots using the CamJam 3 Edukit. At the end of the project we plan to have a sumo competition which means we needed a ring of some sort. We’ve mentioned this a few times at Hack Oldham so I thought it would be worth pushing the boat out.
I started looking at various option for cutting large circles out of wood including a really simple way of making a circle jig for a router before I realised I can probably pick up a cheap table top, so I headed off to Surplus Stock Oldham, a local second hand furniture shop and found an extending dining table top which was ideal. Because it extends it breaks down into 3 parts making it easy to transport and allows for either a circular or oval layout.
Once back at the hackspace a liberal covering of sticky back plastic gave the required smooth white surface and several roles of black insulating tape created the border which (fingers crossed) will be detected by the robots “line following” sensor and prevent them to driving out of the circle.