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Previously on The Raspberry Pi Challenge…
Just a quick update on the “Milwaukee Makerspace Traveling Mascot” project as I caught Eric doing a bit of Raspberry Pi + GPS hacking last night.
I’m excited to see how this project progresses. I’ve not had a chance to get hands-on with the Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout yet, but there’s a great tutorial on using it with a Raspberry Pi and one that covers Arduino usage as well.
Google Streetview’s “Pegman” travels the world posting pics of cities and their streets, but never of himself… these are the albums of his personal vacation pics.
I finally completed building the wood version of this little guy (~11″). The wood I used was just some scraps around the shop and, unfortunately, is out of some pretty soft stuff at that. Poor guy is already suffering from some dents and is only a week or two old. Since we added a Aluminum Casting Night at the space, the next build will be slightly smaller and much tougher. End goal is to make a tough portable version to pack away on trips to rival the overdone Amelie traveling Gnome.
Our mapping data, from OpenPaths, during our Zurich vacation laser cut into plastic and made into a necklace.
Inspired from Meshu – meshu.io
I thought I would jump in and blog on my current progress at the Makerspace with a lamp called OOMA, or The Object Of My Affection. It’s a lamp that is shaped like a GPS Navigation pin that rotates to always points toward the one you love… as long as they allow you access to their Google Latitude account :). I am finalizing hardware designs and now moving into writing the software and how it talks to the Internet.
Initially I would have waived it off as using WiFi, or Ethernet, but work on another project (Marco) has illuminated several obstacles over multiple use cases (configuring Wi-Fi, closed networks, IP addresses); instead I think the approach will be to opt over USB (via Arduino Leonardo). I figure, if people will load up a coffee cup heater or foam missile launcher to USB, than there is no issue with port scarcity.
It’s not a lamp without light, and at some point OOMA will light up in either Android Blue, or iPhone Purple. Lighting the lamp will, however, have to relegated to a v.2 build, due to some complexity in the diffusion of light in such a cramped space. Additionally, I’d like to investigate EL panels to light it up.
Finally, I am coming up on the decision to be a DIY offering, or to design it to be marketable – do I build as a one off and just offer the blueprints to others or build an end-to-end consumer solution complete with potentially an NFC tag to tap and pair a user and their lamp.
I ordered a bag of some NFC tags to play around with allowing objects to tell more of a story. I placed one behind a wedding gift from close friends on our wedding day in Copenhagen. I programmed the NFC tag to invoke Google Street view and thru the device the user is able to see exactly what we saw, in the exact location where the photo was taken. It definitely added a new layer of depth to the photo and allowed others to share in our experience.
Here is a quick video of this NFC tag works with an NFC enabled smart phone (Google Nexus S)