[Bradford] Raspberry Pi Hackday

[Tomas Holderness]

The event made slashdot this morning (
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/11/22/0342241/entries-open-for-first-ever-24-hour-raspberry-pi-hackathon)
- cool, but slightly daunting! I'm still up for it, but think we need to go
in with an agreed idea. Will there be opportunity to discuss on Wednesday
(or after meeting)?

The Open Web Apps idea sounds interesting and I'd be interested in hearing
more, though I've only just started experimenting with web stuff
(Javascript). Generally, some mix of Python, C and SQL is where I'm
happiest when coding,

The ideas I had for the hack event revolve around using the RPi as a low
cost sensor platform to collect data (e.g. temperature), store it locally
in a database and then serve it to the web. I thought of this as
sensors/motes and the like are a big thing in the engineering world right
now (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensor_node).

Specifically for the hack event, I had thought about connecting an air
temperature sensor to the Pi, writing the software to read and store this
is SQLite/CouchDB, and then writing a web front-end either using a simple
python server or lighttpd/similar to serve this from the Pi. The web page
with the data could contain a map showing the sensor location and a tasty
visualisation of time-series air temperature (probably using something from
here: http://selection.datavisualization.ch/). Optionally, I had mulled
over adding batteries/solar panels to power the Pi, although power
consumption of wi-fi dongle would probably mean LAN cable only. This
wouldn't be a true sensor network set-up, but could be a nice use of the Pi
in the time available. What do you think?

Cheers,

Tom


On 21 November 2012 21:14, Alice Kaerast <alice at kaerast.info> wrote:

> On 21 November 2012 20:56, Robert Burrell Donkin
> <robertburrelldonkin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 9:18 PM, Tomas Holderness
> > <tomasholderness at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> I'm a Linux geek recently returned to Bradford from working up north
> (Dave's
> >> a family friend) and I was hoping to pop along to the next meeting.
> However,
> >> I'd also seen the pi bake-off hack event and would be well up for going
> as
> >> part of team if you're interested. I've got a pi already, and a couple
> of
> >> ideas of things we could build.
> >
> > Are we going for it...?
>
> I think that probably depends on the ideas and the fit of skills.
> Most recently my language of choice is bash and my skills are in
> devops, though I can also do Ruby, Javascript, PHP and a little Python
> and Io.
>
> I've been considering building a minimal OS capable of running Open
> Web Apps for the Pi as one great project to look at.  Not sure we'd
> get very far in a  day though.
>
> I'm certainly up for it if others are.
>
> Regards
> Alice
>
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