Potteries Hackspace

Raspberry Pi Competition – The Results

Oct 30, 2013 | Comments

Last night at Potteries Hackspace was the Raspberry Pi Competition.

The judges were:

Carl Plant (bITjAM)
Richard Smedley (Founder & Programme Manager at Cuprium c.i.c.)
Paul Simmons (Curriculum Leader for Level 1 and 2 Vocational Computing at Newcastle-under-Lyme College)

The scoring system was (similar to Robot Wars):

INNOVATION. (Weight of 4) 1-5 points x 4 = Score for Innovation.
FUN. (Weight of 2) 1-5 points x 2 = Score for Fun.
PRACTICALITY. (Weight of 2) 1-5 points x 2 = Score for Practicality.
STYLE. (Weight of 1) 1-5 points x 1 = Score for Style.

The deadline was:

Tuesday 29th October
9PM

All entries will be displayed and demonstrated at the Newcastle-under-Lyme Raspberry Jam event on November 7th. (PS. If you’ve not already signed up, sign up now).

We all had Pizza and soft drinks.

Thanks for everyone who attended and made it a fantastic evening!

The Projects

In 4th place, we had Dave’s greenhouse system. Dave wasn’t able to attend and we struggled to get it working initially.

The idea was to automate a greenhouse, turning on or off various switches for water, light, opening vents and such depending on the input of temperature and water saturation sensors.

Unfortunately the screen wouldn’t turn on and we struggled to get the relay to switch on or off until after the demo.

In third place was the “MusicBox”. A system that booted up to load the Music Player Daemon (MPD), stream the playlist over Icecast and download new tracks released under the Creative Commons License, for commercial use from ccmixter using a scraper written in Python. The MPD allows you to remotely control it from your mobile phone or PC too.

The idea of the project is to circumvent license fees charged by companies such as PRS or PPL, which could potentially save a business thousands of pounds each year.

Given more time the project would have a voting system allowing you to easily drop the tracks you don’t like and replay the tracks you do more often. Giving you more control over what is played.

In second place, John had decommissioned his ferret web server to replace it with something a little more entertaining.

A Raspberry Pi based Arcade machine, running MAME and a Wii arcade controller with a USB converter.

It was hooked up over HDMI to a neat little display he’d managed to acquire for next to nothing which displayed the games beautifully.

All in all, it was lots of fun and probably because it was overclocked slightly more than is recommended, it ran the games very smoothly.

Impressive.

In first place was “The Beast”.

As it’s almost Halloween, this was definitely the most seasonal of the projects.

It comprises of a coffin, a former robot project, a Raspberry Pi and a speaker.

Once booted, you can SSH into the Raspberry Pi to control direction using the “old skool” W,A,S,D configuration and for the piece de la resistance, certain digits will play our various Halloween related sounds or tracks.

For effort alone, this thing wins hands down, but the fun factor really gave it the edge.

Well done guys!

Thanks again!

Thanks again to everyone that came down, especially the judges who took the time out of their business schedules and called in favours to make it down to our first ever competition.

Before the evening was over, we even managed to get Dave’s relay system up and running.

Next time: Robots

Oh and don’t forget we’ll be displaying and demonstrating all of these projects at the Newcastle-under-Lyme Raspberry Jam event on November 7th, so get signed up!

Hack Man

Oct 23, 2013 | Comments

A few weeks ago we started on a new project after acquiring an old 28″ CRT monitor with VGA inputs.

The Hackspace arcade machine.

The model was designed Sketchup based on an original CAPCOM arcade cabinet.

Then the cabinet was milled out on a router and assembled on a Saturday.

Here you can see the control panel going in, similar to the X-arcade. There’s room for a joystick and 6 buttons per player. We later modified this to accommodate extra buttons for coin drops and player buttons.

Finally got the HUGE tube TV in place and a system connected… And of course an arcade decal.

The next task was to get the system up and running with Ubuntu and MAME…

John further configures the arcade machine…

All systems go!

PS. Sorry for the delayed post.

Raspberry Jam Competition

Oct 17, 2013 | Comments

Are you ready?

Just a quick update to let you know that the competition is less than 2

weeks away (29th October).

The judges and prizes are now secured so now it’s just down to you.

We’ll be opening up this Saturday (19th) from around 10am until about

1pm which should give some extra time to make headway.

However, don’t worry, your project doesn’t need to be complete, it just

needs to be able to demonstrate how a Raspberry Pi can be used.

The winner will be decided on a points based system by independent

adjudicators.

The best projects will be demonstrated at the NULC Raspberry Jam on the

7th November.

Good luck!

Raspberry Pi Competition

Sep 25, 2013 | Comments

In conjunction with the upcoming “Raspberry Jam” at Newcastle-under-Lyme Collage we’re running a Raspberry Pi competition.

Si wrote:

Hello!

So after an idea from Steve, and some further discussions, we’ve come up with an idea.

We are thinking about setting friendly competitions based around a common theme, with a display night and some prizes at the end of each. Hopefully each competition should run for a few months, giving people chance to get something really cool built.

There are a few reasons we want to do this:

Lately we’ve been involved in getting larger projects off the ground, in particular the 3d printer. Because these large projects require more expertise and a learning curve, it seems to be more difficult for newcomers and people with less experience to get involved.

If we set themes, everyone can work on similar ideas, sharing expertise and knowledge, hopefully learning a few things as well.

It will be great to see some cool ideas come together, and should help everyone in the group participate together.

We will also have some nifty toys to show off, this will help to promote us and mean we can go along to events such as the Maker Faires and Raspberry Jams.

Tying in with the Newcastle Raspberry Jam in November, we are hopefully going to have a display there and James has volunteered to do a short talk.

Because of this, we are setting the first competition theme as Raspberry Pi based. Closing date for entries is the 29th of October, when they will be judged at the Hackspace.

Entries can be anything as long as its a) not too killy, b) Pi-based.

If you’re allergic to Raspberries, we will also be starting a line-following robot competition, with a face-off sometime around Christmas!

Its the chance to build something cool, win prizes and earn the undying envy/admiration of your peers..

As always, let us know what you think!

Cheers

Si