This gallery contains 6 photos.
After two-and-a-bit days of dashing around London, I managed to visit all 50+ statues of Paddington Bear on the Paddington Trail in London. Good fun, in aid of a great children’s charity (text BEAR to 70744 to donate £4 to … Continue reading
Claudia our Space Apps Lego robot
The NASA Space Apps Challenge took place around the world on 20-21 April 2013. Suitably inspired by this global hackathon, I entered the challenge with a team of work mates. We decided to take on the Lego Rover challenge and set about creating a Lego robot with a difference – gesture control. We assembled a Lego Mindstorms NXT robot kit and hooked it up to a laptop PC with a Microsoft Kinect sensor. In a handful of hours we created “Claudia”, the gesture-controlled robot that can use her claw to collect garbage (in this case soft drink cans) – somewhat inspired by and resemblant of WALL-E.
It was great fun and we were delighted (and relieved) that our live on-stage demo worked. Thanks to Steve for his successful arm-waving!
First handheld attempt at light painting with Raspberry Pi
Inspired by the amazing images and brilliant write-up by Phillip Burgess at Adafruit, I decided to give my Raspberry Pi something interesting and colourful to do – light painting. A happy day of geeking saw my brother and I pull together a wireless remote-controlled, battery-powered, Raspberry Pi light painting robot. It’s not perfect, but we think the initial results are pretty good for a day’s work and I thought I’d share some notes and photos in case anyone else is interested.
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Create a "cheat sheet" like this to let friends access your Wi-Fi easily
When friends come to visit, it’s increasingly handy to let them connect their smartphones and tablets to your Wi-Fi network. Whether they want to share amusing YouTube clips, download the latest and greatest apps/games you’ve been discussing or just access web and email, Wi-Fi usually makes it quicker than relying on the mobile phone network. There’s another benefit if they’ve got an iPhone/iPad and your house has an Apple TV as part of your audio/video setup. By connecting their Apple gadget to your network, they can beam their choice of music, videos or photos to your TV/hifi wirelessly using AirPlay. It’s really simple and makes media sharing much more immersive than passing someone’s iPhone or iPad around.
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Recently did a ScrumMaster course at work. Best bit was building a LEGO city to practise agile development. Check out the photo of the city we built. 20 people, 4 self-organising teams of 5 people, 4 sprints of 11 minutes each. Great fun. And educational too!
