CCHS GGHC: CCHS element14 group
Team moment of the week
We had a great evening last night rounding out the project, with most of the team members able to join in on the last tasks to complete the project. There were many highlights during the evening, including getting the final product working in its nice shiny enclosure:
however the highlight of the night was team member Rob's unveiling of the secret experiment: a Ruben's Tube:
we've designed OpenLab's hardware so that it will be able to drive a Ruben's Tube from the available outputs:
Key Thoughts and Observations
We considered a number of times whether our ambitions had gotten the better of us, and perhaps they had. But in the end, we've gotten to a first alpha prototype product, with lots of potential to expand it. This is by far the most feature rich and complex project we have undertaken together as a hackerspace. It stretched our skills as a group and as individuals. We found that our core team members were severely taxed, and it took the efforts of the entire team to get us to a final working product. A stellar effort from all the crew: congratulations everyone, but particular thanks go out to our friends at Freetronics for their support and assistance, and to the team: Andy, Luke, Marc, Stuart, Antoinette, Bernd, George, Rob and Clifford for your hard work and commitment.
We're very excited by what we've built, and the potential to improve it going forward. We're already looking at presenting this to the local Science Teachers association.
Next Steps and post-project activities
There are various activities we intend to investigate, including:
- Organise further school trials.
- Establish a way for schools to purchase the project in various forms, including as a partially built kitset, or as a complete finished product ready to use.
- Present to the local Science Teachers Association conference
- Improve the hardware in second version update
Spotlight: The OpenLab
Our finished product is a general science and physics project platform, usable by schools to more easily conduct and monitor various experiments. Our working title during the competition was ArduinoLab, but as you can see in the pictures we've now settled on the name OpenLab.
The OpenLab platform provides a number of things:
- A damage proof, protected, experimentation environment where the circuits are designed to protect the inputs and outputs from damage.
- An onboard Lithium Ion battery, providing mobility and portability of the lab around the classroom.
- Charging of the portable power source over USB, enabling the OpenLab to be powered and charged from a computers USB port, from a multi-port USB hub, or from mains power using an adaptor wall plug with USB socket.
- Graphics LCD display, enabling waveforms to be displayed.
- Intuitive navigation using buttons and control knobs, using a soft-label menu system.
- A built-in Arduino: an Atmega 28p, lowering the cost of purchasing the microprocessor separately.
- A Xbee header, enabling the addition of communications features using any of the "bee" form factors modules: Xbee, GPSBee, RFbee, BluetoothBee, etc.
- A multi-tasking screen/ application handling framework.
- The ability to monitor multiple sensor inputs and to generate multiple outputs simultaneously.
- based on a design using easy to source and well known components, enabling the project to be replicated internationally.
Documentation
We'v used this blog pretty much exclusively for our updates and information on our project.
We've also uploaded some video to the agentsilverfox FTP server, so keep an eye out for that footage appearing at some stage.
In a few weeks we'll have a project entry updated on the Hack Melbourne Project Page
If you'd like to follow our progress on the software, have a look at the software repository here on github.
And github also provides a walkthrough of the software structure, use, etc.
And if you want to review the hardware work, or see where version two goes next, see the previously mentioned hardware design repository here on github.
And and walkthrough of the hardware structure was in a previous blog post.
Closing comments
Well, it's been tiring but it's been a real blast! Congratulations to all the other Hackerspace teams who have joined in the challenge: we've enjoyed reading about your projects and your progress. We hope you've enjoyed hearing about ours just as much.
And if you're ever in Melbourne, come and look us up. And if you can't make it in person, drop by the website from time-to-time to see what we're up to, or look us up on IRC.
Happy Hacking from the Connected Community HackerSpace (Melbourne)