HackNotts 2016
HackNotts is a hackathon (24 hour programming and hardware event) hosted by the Computer Science department's student society at the University of Nottingham. In 2016, my team and I, with no real project idea but hoping to continue our previous success at HacknNotts, turned up carrying a budweiser box full of batteries and simple electrical components and breadboards. We also brought a raspberry pi matchbox linux computer and some arduino microcontroller boards of various sizes.
With these components, and the knowledge that there was a prize for best hardware and best Amazon Web Services/ Amazon Alexa implementation, we decided to make a remote control cardboard box which we covered in christmas decorations and attached wheels to. We made an Alexa service which would respond to certain vocal commands to communicate with the raspberry pi, which in turn controlled the motors, LED grid and LCD screen through an arduino.
The raspberry Pi, running a python script, was capable of controlling the rover by detecting a face and following it when asked. The original idea was to have it search for a certain named person and to then approach them, but the face detection was a lot easier to run in real time than face recognition (and we ran out of time). As development went on, we realised that this rover was becoming more and more like a pet so we decided to make it more appealing. I was tasked with animating an 8x8 LED grid to serve as a cute face. There was also a screen which displayed the status and various LEDs and lights for decoration.
In the end, we had several vocal commands in various forms. Our favourites were "follow me", "Go forward for < n > seconds" and "roll over", the last of which caused the cute LED grid face to rotate 360 degree over a second or so. Our demonstration had some hickups but our "project showed great promise". This, and the fact that people made some seriously profitable banking services for Alexa, meant that we did not win the "Best Alexa Implementation" but we did win the best hardware hack, getting electronics kits as a prize.