Anyone have an idea for a group project?

Question

I encourage anyone to submit ideas and as a group we can chose one to work on. When there are enough ideas we will have a poll for which one we do!!

DAB · Answer

Hi Dale,

Ideas I have aplenty, but being disabled, making things has really slowed me down.

I like the idea of a group project, so I will share some that I have.

Project 1; A RC mobile magnetic ground mapper. The Idea is to take an RC vehicle chassis and mount a metal detector so that the head of the detector can be moved in an semi circle using a constant motion. A MCU would then record the output readings every degree of arc and build up a map of the detections. The RC vehicle would then advance an inch or two and the detector would swing through the arc again, building the next series of readings.

The data could be off loaded for additional processing to make a full area map of the magnetic changes found when you cover an area.

Goal, find buried metal such as land mines, coins, wire, cable, pipes, meteorites and other magnectic material.

I can see a lot of applications for the RC vehicle in combing a large area for objects of interest in war zones and archeological sites.

Thats all for now, but I will bring up other ideas as I have time.

Enjoy,

DAB

e14 Contributor · Answer

Well something i want to try is getting multiple raspberry pi's together and then get the thing where you can have multiple raspberry's running as one to try and combine the power and run a windows machine or a high end linux distro computer. Kyle, It's a nice idea, and several people have tried it, but it doesn't work very well. There's no good way to "combine the power" to run "as one". In particular, you can't combine the memories into one large memory, and you can't speed up a sequential job such as emulating a windows machine. If your job can be split into a number of small jobs that don't need much interaction, (known as embarrassingly parallel) then you might see a speed up compared to a single RPi, but the network speed is only 100 Mb, so that limits the amount of communication you can do between RPi's. You should do the math, comparing the price/performance of a RPi to an x86 PC for some benchmark you are interested in. You will probably find one PC is less expensive than the equivalent number of RPi's (including all the necessary power supplies, cables, SD cards, network hub, etc.) See for example: I hear that hadoop is incredibly slow on pi from various blog posts, and yes pls lower your hope as the speed is really appalling. http://raspberrypicloud.wordpress.com/2013/05/03/running-hadoop-java-and-c-word-count-example-on-raspberry-pi/