Sci Fi Your Pi Design Challenge Wrap-Up

RE: Sci Fi Your Pi Design Challenge Wrap-Up

taodude — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 21:14:03 GMT

Thanks, Charles, and thanks Element 14 for the opportunity to enter, and the other contributors for some excellent entries that I have enjoyed reading about.

The I Ching project should have had a head start because the compute engine and display code had been written in OPL (Organizer Programming Language) to run on my Psion Organiser LZ64, which has a similar size display to the PiFaceCAD, but porting the code to an interpreted language like Python was far more of a challenge than I anticipated. I also went from looking like having loads of free time when the challenge was announced to being really busy at work and losing several weekends at short notice.

My project suffered because I tried to keep true to the original design concept of using the PiFaceCAD, which has some great features, but was not best suited to the solution, and I wasted a lot of time creating mechanisms to pass control reliably between interrupt driven code and background code, which are probably handled much better by standard Python constructs if i had spent a bit more time learning the language. Python is good: it's just not intuitive to somebody who cut their teeth on Z80, 6502 and 8051 Assembly Language where you have to use self discipline and a well-designed memory map rather than rely on the language and interpreter to catch your errors for you.

I tried to Blog regularly, but there is not much to write about or show when the software is flaky and is not driving the display properly. Dropping Python code into the Blog window caused all sorts of interesting effects, none of which made the code readable :).

I should have realised earlier that it would have been better to use the touch-screen display from 4D systems that I had already bought and offered a more appropriate presentation of the Hexagrams. The main reasons that i didn't change horses are that the display has its own processor and the Challenge was called Sci Fi your Pi and using a dedicated display processor seemed like cheating and I didn't want to be learning the display processor Language and Python at the same time.

All that said, it's easy to be negative when things are stacking up against you, and I did manage to write several hundred lines of new code, which I will share on Github once I have most of the kinks out of it. I will leave the debugging code in, but commented out, so that anyone wanting to change the code for their own uses can switch messages back on when things go awry to find out where the code has become misdirected. For those who did not catch my earlier blog post, the repository can be found at the link below.

https://github.com/TaoDude/Shared_I_Ching.git

Good luck to those in the running for the prize.

Regards,

Trevor Clarke

RE: Sci Fi Your Pi Design Challenge Wrap-Up

Workshopshed — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 08:31:35 GMT

Great results for everyone who participated and as usual a top report from Charles.

RE: Sci Fi Your Pi Design Challenge Wrap-Up

dougw — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 12:16:34 GMT

Congratulations Charles,

Great job of covering the challenge.

I found it useful and interesting.

Doug

RE: Sci Fi Your Pi Design Challenge Wrap-Up

saturnv — Wed, 02 Sep 2015 00:07:32 GMT

Thank you Charles very much for the mention. I chuckled when I saw 'old school and new school' in you comments. I hope to continue with the refinement of the Picorder and produce a more "Star Trek style Tricorder" more in line with the look and feel of the toy that I currently possess. It may even include investing in a 3D printer and print my own case next time complete with SD slots for reading back pre-recorded data "discs" (SD cards) into the device. As I've commented before; its been fun to participate in the challenge an build the Picorder to a functional state. Thanks again for the weekly updates an the mention. "Warp factor 7"... or maybe"14?"

RE: Sci Fi Your Pi Design Challenge Wrap-Up

screamingtiger — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 19:18:00 GMT

I had a gap in my posts, and I tried not to bore with mundane details. I found that super technical things, such as my source code and software flow chart here:

http://www.element14.com/community/community/design-challenges/sci-fi-your-pi/blog/2015/08/28/quadcop-source-code-and-flow-diagrams

No one even responded or liked it.

But if I had something more tangible to show, that's when I posted. I tried to keep mine to major updates that I could actually demonstrate. Otherwise I was just saying "I wrote some code, here it is" or I fixed this issue, without anything to really demonstrate. Or in most cases it would be "I got another problem".

I also thought the main point of the contest is to expand the knowledge of the RPi 2. So I got very technical and used I2c. repeated starts. block protocols, threading, and worked out the ChipKit Pi as a realistic real time component to compliment the Pi. That is really what I was going after.

Lesson learned, just post it!

RE: Sci Fi Your Pi Design Challenge Wrap-Up

DAB — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 17:05:25 GMT

It is unfortunate that some failed to post their projects as there were a lot of ideas that we wanted to see develop.

Luckily we did have several very successful projects to follow and we saw many very cool ideas brought to reality.

DAB

RE: Sci Fi Your Pi Design Challenge Wrap-Up

sebathorus — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 15:43:07 GMT

I can confirm blogging about the project was not easy, myself being quite slow at this process [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-9d78d778-2e2f-441c-a9d7-bf46ee31fe77/contentimage_5F00_734.png:16:16]

Definitely for a challenge like this one, the building AND blogging process needs to be planned ahead or else one can end up with sparse information for blog followers.

Although I plan the building part, I thought the writing part will follow by itself. Well, that wasn't the case, at least not for me. Because frequent changes in code/wiring/building required to match the parts I have to use, things looked most of the time half done to be shown to others. Each time seemed like one or two days will be required to bring the whole thing to the point to be show up to others but very often something had happened and that moment was pushed further.

For me this challenge had many challenges. Besides the obvious main technical challenge for what I enrolled, I faced a few other I did not expected, but I suppose this is how experience is earned [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-9d78d778-2e2f-441c-a9d7-bf46ee31fe77/1854.contentimage_5F00_1.png:16:16]

I believe this was a positive experience for me, I learned a lot from people like Enrico and Frederick, to name only a couple, I saw how a complex project can be split in a way to be built and in the same time shown and explained to others. I also learned from my own experiences, technical, social, time management, etc.

I'm glad I had the opportunity to participate to this challenge, for me it was an pleasant(most of the time) and full of learning journey which opened my eyes about things and ways of doing things I never thought before.

All the best

-=Seba=-

RE: Sci Fi Your Pi Design Challenge Wrap-Up

fvan — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 06:22:59 GMT

I was a bit bummed by the lack of weekly project updates over the course of the challenge, but was pleasantly surprised to see so many final posts in the last week. Blogging about your project on a regular basis is not an easy thing, but that's what you sign up for when participating in such challenges.

Thank you for your summaries Charles, and thanks for the mention and feedback on the project! [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-9d78d778-2e2f-441c-a9d7-bf46ee31fe77/contentimage_5F00_1.png:16:16]

RE: Sci Fi Your Pi Design Challenge Wrap-Up

balearicdynamics — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 05:31:51 GMT

Hi [mention:b9a2161df40e46249934044770b656a6:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05]

thanks for the mention and the great job keeping the constant high level of attention over the entire challenge process. You continue to be my reference to the challenges projects status. This is the very nice weekly tech news page of the community [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-9d78d778-2e2f-441c-a9d7-bf46ee31fe77/2514.contentimage_5F00_1.png:16:16]

Enrico