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 code base.

The handsets for the pupils, hubs that broadcast pupils responses and a teachers laptop reciever 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 making it pretty and user friendly. It also has a web based handset simulator so we could test the software using web-enabled smart phones, rather than wait for the hardware and electronics to be finished.

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.

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. Many team members had unexpected work commitments that meant less time spent on the Challenge.

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. We still hope to demo our buzzers in a school and hopefully provide something that is cheaper, better and more versatile that that currently offered by over-priced suppliers.

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. We are glad to have taken part