No Pi-Wars 2026

I'm a little late to this - it's not exactly breaking news - but I think it warrants a post.

We could pretty much to a find/replace to update the references to the year from our last post on the status of the competition and leave it at that...

Of course we're a bit disappointed that there won't be a 2025 Pi-Wars. The 2024 event was great and it's a shame to not be able to go again so soon. We fully understand the reasoning behind it though, and after getting past our initial reactions to the news, we're actually now even more excited. A whole 2 years for development of the robot! What more could we ask for?

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't already feeling the time-crunch for 2025 with the scope of the updates we wanted to make. Now, with the revised plan to try and complete the hardware design & build by the date that the 2025 competition would have been, we have a whole year for any slip on the hardware development timelines, and significantly more time for software development than we did last time. With some luck we might not have to bodge anything in the weeks before the competition (or stay up until 3am the night before).

So, here's to 2 years of robotics development. See you at Pi-Wars 2026!
Or whenevever the next one is... either way, the development continues

I'm a little disappointed, but also pretty relieved given the state of actual progress recently. I'm confident we would have made something work in time (and probably a fair bit better than last time) but there would have been a solid amount of bodging on bits and pieces that we'd really like to make rock-solid for next time around.

We absolutely blew past the "hardware freeze by roughly April 2025 plan" - I think we're currently targeting something like April or maybe September 2026 for that goal, so we've pushed that back at least a year now.

Anyway, see you whenever the next Pi-Wars is - we'll be busy developing something until then I'm sure!