Did you know you can pilot a drone to repel a Robopocalypse, with fruit?
I shall explain…
I’ve just come back from possibly the strangest and most fun couple of days that i can remember. I had the great fortune to be invited as one of the technical mentors for IBM’s technology in the M2M Hackfest in Olympia earlier this week. In our big bag of things, we made available a number of AR Drones, some Sphero’s a few Raspberry Pi’s, some Arduino’s, Makey Makey’s, a MessageSight appliance, NodeRed and of course MQTT as the transport protocol.
Oh and big bags of fruit.
The day started in the Hackathon with an introduction of our brief. We wanted to give the hackers a wide a remit to play with the tech as possible. And we wanted it to be hilarious. So the brief was –
Repel a Robopocalypse with the tech provided.
How you do that is entirely up to you.
Over the couple of days we saw an evolution of something quite wonderful. Check this out.
It is, the idea being formed….
So here we have introduced some of the tech and made it work together – and did you hear mention of the experiment with bananas?
After some serious fruit manipulation, the next evolution of The Internet of Things began….
So in the vid we show how we can use fruit with Makey Makeys to control an application that uses MessageSight and MQTT to repel our Robot overlords. Simple and incredible fun…
Why not try something similar yourself…?
You can grab the software from devWorks blog here
Its been tremendous fun – and there is more to come at the Thingmonk event next week. Stay tuned 🙂
john mcnamara 