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Playing Chess on a Real Board with the Arduino UNO Q

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Use an Arduino UNO Q and a USB webcam to play chess on a real board. It reads your moves, plays back with Stockfish and gives you coaching tips.

  4 Oct 26

 Kevin McAleer

arduino uno q arduino app lab chess stockfish opencv computer vision python python-chess 3d printing webcam

My Robot Dodges Obstacles, and I Never Coded It

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Can you build a real robot — one that senses the world and reacts to it — without writing a single line of code? A Raspberry Pi Pico, an MX1508 motor driver, a 3.3V ultrasonic rangefinder and four AA batteries, with every bit of the logic snapped together as blocks in Snakie. Here's the full build, the wiring detail that catches most people out, the failure that stopped it dead, and what the generated MicroPython actually looks like underneath.

 20 Sep 26

 Kevin McAleer

snakie block coding micropython raspberry pi pico mx1508 hc-sr04p ultrasonic sensor obstacle avoidance 2wd robot beginner robot

MicroPython's .mpy Format Explained — and How to Use It With One Right-Click

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Every MicroPython project ships as plain .py source by default, but there's a smaller, faster, more portable alternative already built into every install: the .mpy bytecode format. Here's what it actually is, why it's worth using, and how Snakie turns it into a single right-click.

  6 Sep 26

 Kevin McAleer

micropython mpy mpy-cross snakie raspberry pi pico esp32 optimization file formats

They All Gave Up on ROS and MicroPython — I Didn't

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Every past attempt at running ROS 2 on MicroPython hit the same handful of walls — a recompile per message type, a custom Python fork, an agent bridge instead of a real node — and every one of them is now archived. Here's SnakeROS, a pure-Python client that speaks DDS-XRCE straight to a stock micro-ROS Agent, and the QwiicBot-to-VENTUNO-Q build (plus the firmware mistake that nearly sank it) that proves it out.

  5 Sep 26

 Kevin McAleer

snakeros ros2 micropython esp32 adafruit feather esp32 v2 arduino ventuno q qwiicbot arduino modulino xrce-dds teleop robot robot software