Classroom HackSpaceChallenge/Report/4

Brief

Is everything going to plan? Perhaps provide footage of a visit to an educational institution you’re working with.

Draft

Unfortunately we have to announce that we were unable to complete the Great Global Hackspace Challenge before the deadline. Whilst this is sad news we did make a lot of progress over the course of the competition.

Overall, we have some half-finished hardware and electronics prototypes, and a proof-of-concept codebase.

The handsets, hubs and teachers dongle have all been designed, laser cut from MDF and ready to accept electronics.

The software is somewhat complete, we have the back-end of a multiple choice quiz system (using Python and Twisted), it is not pretty and lots of work needs to be done on presentation. It also has a web based buzzer simulator so we could test the software using web-enabled smart phones, rather than wait for the hardware and electronics.

Electronics Status

We learnt a lot about how to manage our time, and realised how complicated and involved even the smallest of tasks can be. Over the course of the challenge we had to re-design various components as our ambitions became more realistic, but also to attempt to meet the time constraints. We also realised that you really have to dedicate a lot of time to developing, thinking, and testing various ideas before you even get close to a finished design.

Best Wishes

There are a few team members who are going to continue developing the buzzer system and hopefully without the looming deadline boogy-man they will produce something that will be useful to schools in the future.

The Great Global Hackerspace Challenge has essentially planted a seed and given a kick up the arse to this project. Without the GGHC this idea would never have been thought of, let alone implemented.

Bank holidays have conspired against us working with an educational establishment, I had hoped to demo it to a school, but the Royal Wedding means there won't be time before the dead line.

Unfortunately our electronics guy had an unexpectedly busy period with work and his other projects, so progress hasn't been as quick as it could have been.

We do have a some progress, a pcb for an arduino shield that houses an rfm12 and an LED driver for the handset hubs. We also are working on the design of the PCB for the handset. These are very simple, just a voltage divider so we can tell what button was pressed and a RGB LED. Once these are done, it will just be a matter of soldering up some PCBs and coding up the simple software to control the arduinos.

Things have got busy at the last moment, hopefully we will get it finished, but it will be down to the last day.