Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Raspberry Pi MAKE Off: Results Show”.
Okay good afternoon, everyone uh and welcome to engadget expand. My name is matt richardson, i’m a contributing editor for make magazine, i’m also the co-author of getting started with raspberry pi and i’m a huge, huge, raspberry, pi fan, which is why i’m so excited to be here and see the incredible work that everyone has been doing Here so since 11am, yesterday we’ve had two teams of three people working to create raspberry pi projects. Here on the floor of engadget expand, it may sound like an easy task, but it’s actually extremely extremely difficult. We gave them materials that they could use and they could use any kind of materials on the floor as well.
Anything they could grab from any other booth av equipment or extension cords, uh sd cards, whatever whatever they could get their hands on in the maker shed in our little kitchen back here. We also gave them getting started with raspberry pi kits, which includes the raspberry pi. The power supply some reference information, the book uh and some extra – you know, electronics components to help them build their project out um. We had two teams and they were given each the. The objective was just to create a raspberry pi project over the course of the of the two days uh, we were going to be judging them on a few different uh uh, you know, criteria uh among them was the concept the execution it was.
The uh use of materials and the ambitiousness of the project, and we had a judges, make editors came through and uh took a look at what they had made and scored them, and we’ve already tallied the scores and we’re going to be making the announcement. But before we do that, i want to introduce each team i’m going to start off with the sea slugs. This is eric, john and carlin. Come on up guys, they’re going to tell us a little bit about the project that they made over the course of the past day or two.
This is carlin and eric and john okay. So who’s going to talk for the team to to to explain the project. Carlin, okay, i’ll hold the mic for you and you guys go ahead. Oh so um we created a project pretty much a tracking device. It has two parts um. You have the collar part where it has the lights and sounds, and you have the control unit, part with the raspberry, pi and um. Essentially, you can remote control the light so that you can find your belongings if you lose them, and the advantage of the raspberry pi is that it can create a network so that you can have essentially unlimited range to find your devices and then also it’s controllable. By any web browser phone computer, anything like that, and so you you have your phone up here eric and you you actually have the phone working and it actually triggers everything um.
Well, you don’t have to you, don’t have to live demo it, but like yeah, we’re not connected to the internet up here, um and actually this isn’t even running off there, because it’s not you know the server isn’t connected up here, but um, but you had it Working before on on the floor right, we we did yeah, we can activate it, we do have to activate it manually um, we weren’t able to finish getting the the javascript code and so john, what’s been the biggest challenge over the course of this thing. I know you you uh, both you and your son. Are you do first robotics and you usually have a little bit more resources to work with and probably a little bit more of a definite challenge? Can you talk a little bit about how this competition is different than first robotics? I’M going to squeeze in here well in the beginning was identifying a problem. The idea, well, that was very, very difficult, took us good.
Two three hours just come up with them, trying to find the problem that we can. We can successfully solve within the period that we were given and then after that was tools tools. You didn’t have the tools, you needed, the tools, we had the parts, but we didn’t have the tools, so we had to have to limit the scope to something that we decided that we can bite off in terms of this project. If you had more time and more resources, how would you improve it? The transmitter definitely goes smaller.
Then the receiver, the receiver transmitter paper goes smaller, would probably get it to work with existing bluetooth tracking devices, because raspberry pi being as powerful as it is. It’S one of the very few devices that has two usb ports and it runs almost a giga gigahertz. So that means one port could be wi-fi, the other one could be bluetooth, so the bluetooth will track any devices out there. The wi-fi running the node, the sub node software, will create the mesh network.
So actually it’s possible to happen. That’S great! Now i noticed when we you guys were working out there at the table. You had a lot of people coming up and talking to you, uh, just people on the show floor is probably a little bit harder than you’re used to working in your own workshop, because you had a lot of people asking questions. Do you think that was part of the challenge here for you? Oh yes, but it’s also part of the challenge, though, to explain the visitors, though, how cool the raspberry pi is. Well, we appreciate you doing that. Thank you guys very much for coming up and showing it to us i’m going to. Oh, you don’t want to step on your keyboard. There sorry um we’re going to also we’re going to talk to the other team. Here you guys come on up. This is team astronaut mike dexter. We have danny andrew and say all right guys, uh first of all tell us who wants to explain what the project is danny, yeah, sure uh. So this is supposed to be a steampunk themed photo booth. We came up with the idea, based on some of the things that we had laying around and pretty much once i saw the camera.
It was just kind of what we wanted to do. Um, it takes your picture, you pull the knob, and then you have a couple effects that you can choose from. We had a little bit of trouble getting all of them to react. The way we wanted to because the gpio pins on the raspberry pi were bouncing all over the place, so it looked like every button was being pressed at the same time. Basically right, yeah we’re actually having uh emi issues.
What does that mean exactly it’s a um throughout the walls, it’s about 60 hertz running through you know everywhere, and we actually are like like little receivers for that, and so, if you walk anywhere near it, you’re gon na, like start interfering with the magnetic wave and Start coupling into the wires and it’s enough to trigger the uh sensitivity on the gpio pins. So so, if you had more time, what would you do to solve that problem here, um? Actually we did. I just have to plug it in okay, i had to plug the rest of the buttons in but uh. I think we got.
I think we got it licked. I think the negative. The negative button should be hooked up for the demonstration, so we’re going to try and do that today, okay, great well, why don’t one of you uh you wan na? If you wan na start plugging in and getting it going, i wan na talk to say actually uh about you. You worked a lot on the aesthetics of the piece. Now yeah, let’s go over here you guys um, you talked about it being steampunk and you lucked out, because you found that that what is that it’s armature brass armature or something can you talk about the rest of what you had doing here? I noticed at the end you were adding a lot of extra stuff here. Well, um.
Initially, we just thought like steampunk would be a good way to go just because all the touch um, all the photo booths now that you see are usually touch screen. So we wanted to bring back a little more of a tactile feedback to it, so we went with that whole knob, that’s kind of reminiscent of um the pimple machines. So we added that we saw those copper wires that we thought was awesome. We can just kind of make something: that’s you know steam punky, but then we realized, we didn’t have pain or other things.
So the whole steampunks thing we didn’t have what a resource is to actually make it pretty. So we just added random stuff odds and ends. Just to pretty high now, when i talk to you when we started this whole thing you you said you had a lot to learn when it comes to raspberry pi right over the course of the over the course of the whole competition. Did you get a chance to figure a little bit out a little bit, um left most of the technical work up to the boys, but yeah every few minutes i was kind of like. So what are you doing now and why do you you know? Why are you doing that or when we ran into the issues like i was, you know, putting up the whole casing around the monitor and everything so as they were like? Oh no, we ran into these issues. I was trying to ask them like why, and if you know we can get anything to solve the issue, so yeah definitely learned a bunch, great okay cool.
You guys, ready to show us a little something here, all right, they’re figuring out what buttons actually work right. Now, uh, based on the the current negative, the negative button, we’re going to try the negative button here as and what uh i see some code up on screen here: uh uh, what uh coding language are you using bash wow? It’S a a scripting language usually used on the command line, but i do a lot of stuff at work with it and i’m most comfortable using this. So i ended up just going with what i’m what i’m solving right now, i’m actually just switching the logic, because it’s backwards, so all the switches are reversed and now, let’s see if it will do what we want talk about all right, we’ll give it a go. It’S taking the picture now, that’s your picture and we’re going to try and make it negative. How long is it takes about 10 seconds? It works.
It works, i’m as surprised as you are great. Thank you guys, all right so give it up for both the teams. They did some amazing work over the course of two days, and i think the judges had a really really tough job here to figure out which team was who’s going to be the winner here um i want to bring up one of our judges mark fraunfelder, the Editor-In-Chief to talk a little bit about uh what what they were looking for and what they thought of the projects sure. So so thanks a lot, matt um yeah! Well, we had a number of criteria to look at the the originality of the concept. The execution of the concept, how resourceful they were, there were a number of factors and we had to judge each project based on those those criteria, and it was a difficult decision, like matt, said just doing something in this kind of hectic environment with a limited limited Time and limited resources to get anything that even comes close to working is a major achievement, so both teams really need to be recognized for doing that.
I’Ve been involved in a couple of hacker spaces: let’s, let’s give them a hand, so it’s really impressive. They actually made things that did something and and uh for that, it’s incredible so um. What i what i liked about both of them is just the resourcefulness like look at how they actually took the project bench and that’s part of it. You know they took what they had at hand and they just like bolted the plywood into the project bench.
That’S great. I love doing that kind of thing. It’S like stretching the rules to the breaking point, it’s perfect and then on the other team, with the tracking thing they needed to activate a switch, and instead of using a relay, they didn’t have relays. I don’t think they did, but what they did instead was.
They took servos from the remote control toy that they had and used the actual servo to press a physical switch, and that kind of resourcefulness is like what you need to have to to survive in a hack day. Competition and both of them did a great job, and i just want to say it was really tough to pick a winner, and i wish they both could have won. Thank you mark so uh for all the contestants they’re each gon na go home with a raspberry pi starter kit from the maker shed um they’re. Also, all gon na go home with these uh wonderful make shirts, but only one team is going to get the prize which is being featured in make magazine and a presentation on the stage at maker faire to maker faire new york 2014.. So the winner of the inaugural raspberry, pi, makeoff, adding gadget expand, is the sea slugs. Congratulations guys come on up. Congratulations. We get pictures and everything pictures being taken come on, looks like we’ve got a bunch of coin cells, all duct taped together there.
Oh yes, and then um you’ve got these are being printed right now and we have one more. Oh is that is that the uh? Oh, there are two more coming okay, so one of you can wear it now before you leave you’ll get the other. So uh! Congratulations to the sea slugs. Thank you guys for being a part of this.
Thank you guys. Also, it’s been a wonderful experience. I hope you guys had a great time and thank you for coming and have a great day bye. Everybody .