And the winner was...
Craig Terris. Here is is receiving his Arduino starter kit from Zac Colley, very kindly supplied by Element14! We drew the name from a hat, an actual hat; a room full of computer nerds and we fell back on good old tradition! Thanks odion
We had a brilliant day; we had a mum and her son who had the Ardunio for Christmas and had not got much further than blink, he had a go at a few of the projects in the starter kit book and had a good time. One of the strangest projects was "Party Face"; no pics unfortunately. This was an Uno with ethernet shield, (for the SD card capability), hooked up to a speaker and mounted in a cardboard mask. The guys worked extremely hard in getting the Uno to play a wav file stored on the sd card. The point? Well, as we all know, students like to party; when the partying gets too much, pop on the mask and have a sleep. The Uno then plays the messages stored on the SD card. We heard a lot of crackling to start then suddenly "Thanks for coming!" could be heard clearly. If there was more time I think the idea was to use ultra sonic detector to tell when someone approaches and the message plays to say, well whatever is programmed.
Roll over Apple, we have the coolest smart watch prototype here, Arduino style.
As you can see, work in progress although we have working bluetooth connection and working displays. I am all for keeping it this size and having it strapped to the users forearm rather than making it smaller and watch-like but I am not sure how this will go. There is talk of making a custom PCB next although discussions were made about a 3d printed wrist mount.
We have python on Linux talking to and receiving from the serial output of the Mega, SMS powered RGB led with incoming messages changing the colour of the output and then sending back a text letting the sender know it had worked. But mostly people played and had fun; this was the whole point of the day. We will be setting up something else, hopefully on a regular basis, looking at names at the moment, Pompey Proto People seems likely!
So, that was it.
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