Somewhere Over The Rainbow

This is blog post about making the 'arena' for the Something Over The Rainbow challenge.

The Bill:

9mm MDF 2440mm x 1220mm board - £16.80

Corner Brace 40mm - £7.74

3.5 x 12mm screws - £2.88

Blackboard paint - £5.90 (£11.60 as second coat was needed for removing grey quarter circles)

Art Attach PVA glue - kids had grown up sufficiently not to notice half is missing

Total: £33.32 (£39.32 - with second coat of paint)

Start of the build: [gallery ids="1215,1216" type="rectangular"]

Ready for carrying it around:

Checking the size of the arena vs rover:

Sketching corners:

First, live test...

... has successfully passed - with a hamster!

Priming equipment:

Painting:

[gallery ids="1206,1205" type="rectangular"]

Putting it all together:

Question: Grey corners or not?

First test of software coloured balls detection (happy path - almost no cheating):

(don't get confused - camera is mounted at 90º CCW)

Update: Patience is a virtue... So mere couple of hours all was done:

So, here we go again - second coat of paint:

Grey quarter circles: now you see them - now you don't!

And - over the weekend we discovered that screws on the bottom of the arena have bad habit of damaging furniture (i.e. dinning tables). So, here are finishing touches to address it:

[gallery ids="1223,1222,1221" type="rectangular"]

Next step: coding!