Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Climate Change and Fashion Hackathon

On September 21st and 22nd 2013 a group of scientists, artists, and designers spent the weekend in the V&A Museum in London imagining future fashions in a world adapting to changing climates.

A design by Professor Helen Storey.
And another from Exeter College fashion students.
Ross tells a story, with his Peltier wrist band at the ready.

Some of the amazing items created by the teams.







 Listen to the judges thoughts on this event.

On other blogs -
Hacking in front of an audience
Fashion Meets Climate Change at the V&A

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Geohack at FOSS4G Mappingham

A week ago I was at Nottingham University with other from the Met Office hackathon team setting up tables, chairs, and the rest, ready for the two day Geohack geospatial hackathon.  Of course the preparation for the event started months earlier as part of the even bigger effort of preparing for the FOSS4G conference.  FOSS4G is an international gathering of open source geospatial developers, and although I wasn't able to stay for the whole conference several of my colleagues did and it seems like it was a really well organised and interesting event.  There were certainly some great folks there judging from those who turned up a couple of days early to join the hackathon.
The hackathon was open to delegates and others who registered on the Geohack website. It was free to attended and you even got the traditional hackathon pizza and beer.

 It was an international gathering, so I got to meet and hack with folks I wouldn't normally get to meet back home in Devon.   Here I am with Willow Brugh and Steve Citron-Pousty doing that thing where everyone stares at their gadgets rather than have a conversation.
Seriously though, we had a good chat and hopefully we'll find more chances to work together if only for a couple of days.  Once Steve got over his jet-lag, or more likely just learnt to live with it he got stuck in and managed to "sell" OpenShift as the solution most of the teams needed.   He even found time to write a great blog post.

All the teams produced excellent work, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see at least one or two turned into real services over the next few months.

So why didn't I stay for the whole of the excellent FOSS4G conference?  Well I had another hackathon to go to - of course.  More on that in the next blog post.

Sunday, September 08, 2013

Fashionably late - the Raspberry Pi bat phone

A few weeks ago I posted some early pictures of this project and promised I'd blog about  it. Although the hardware is done it still needs some software tweaks but I've decided to post some more pictures because I'm going to be really busy for the next few weeks and won't get much time for this project.

[ The reason I'll be busy is I'm doing two hackathons for my work, a geospatial hack  - http://2013.foss4g.org/geohack/ and a fashion hack - https://climate.makes.org/thimble/climate-change-and-fashion-hackathon ]

Hardware list -
Bakelite telephone. The earpiece is the original one but the microphone was a carbon type so I replaced this with an electret capsule.
USB audio adaptor. These can be imported from China via ebay.
Toggle switch and microswitches.  I've put a "sound/silent" toggle on the front, plus and LED with chrome bezel - all from the junk box.  The "sound/silent" plate for the toggle switch is from an old cine projector.
MCP23008 port expander. To interface the switches and LED to the Raspberry Pi using I2C (SMBUS).
WiPi - wifi adapter.
5V PSU.
Other than a few bits of wire, stripboard and the odd connector and nuts and bolts that's about it.

More pictures -