SoutHACKton aims to bring together liked minded people who are fascinated in taking things apart and learning how they work. Then of course exploiting their dismantled object for a completely different purpose.

This was the first event I had attended and I had no idea what to expect. It happened on the afternoon of Saturday the 29th of August.

Informal Arduino 101

The event was focused on arduinos. There was an opportunity for an informal 101 as well as lots of projects people were working on.

Hacking Lou Lou the Furby to become a notification device

There were a huge variety of projects from Furby hacking, robots that followed lines drawn on paper, zigbee interaction and my own power metering work (more to follow when/if it gets finished). All the projects were based around arduinos some by people who had been doing this for and some like me who had only started recently.

It was a great event that really showed off the talent around the Solent area.

My only comment, how did the time go so fast?

The next event is a Hack Day, on the 4th of October. Click here for details.

For more information about SoutHACKton please visit http://www.southackton.org.uk/

Bar Camp Brighton 4

Arriving at my second barcamp though I knew the format I was a little unsure about how it would all pan out.

During the introduce we each had to say a secret, these varied from “I have a pointy head” to “Last night I was caught stealing some fluffy grass from a garden”. My secret was “I was paid to call my self Earl for the day during TweetCamp”. A different way to lighten the mood and start the day.

The first session I attended was Tom M talking about the philosophy behind URIs. This took place in the Ninja Turtles Sewer. An interesting look at the philosophy of having perminint links to data online.

The second session in Honk Kong Fooey’s Filing Cabinet on Blogging Tips and Tricks. Miss Geeky (http://www.missgeeky.com) giving an interesting outlook on how she drives her blog. Two posts a day is but one example. Also the opportunities that have arisen through blogging are pretty amazing. Blogs are usually just for a small niche but to be popular blog about everything.

Lunch consisted of sarnies, various odd combinations including Turkey with Avocado and Ham with Egg.

After lunch there was an introduce to Android and the application development. IT gave a veyr braod over view of android and a basic hello world During this session I attempted to flash the latest google code drop on. This bricked my phone.

I spent the following session un bricking my phone.

After the coffee break it was my time to talk about Android. I started a discussion if Android was really open source. This continued into the android interface on a HTC Hero Android Source veruss traditional, and why Google is really not all that different from Apple in the terms of Phone OS Owner.

/Dev/Fort
What we did on holiday, a discuss a dev-fort. An interest take on barcamps. The idea of 5-20 people attending a camp in a fort with NO internet access. A brave thought for many people. More information can be foundhere http://devfort.com/

The final session before dinner covered hacking tweetie to work with groups. This appears to be by hacking tweetie binary in hex editor changing the urls used to request the twitter updates from a local server. The local server modifies the calls being sent to twitter and caches the tweets. Then tweets are sent to tweetie as required.

This pretty much sums up the talks I attended during the day. The evening continued with 152 pizzas to feed us and a hell of a lot of beer available. I crashed out quite early, possibly the first

For a while now people have been talking about ambient orbs to help monitor their power usage. There are one or two very good guides for producing these on the interent. I decided to go from scratch with an Arduino. Yesterday I finally bought an RGB Full Colour LED for £2.99 from Maplin. I am fairly sure it would have been cheaper at RS but they were closed. This was to be paired with my arduino I have had since Xmas.

This evening I prototyped some code on my Arduino(See at the end) and wired up the Red and Green pins. Blue wasnt required for my intended range. Pin 9  is green and pin 10 is red.

I have linked this into my own RSMB and it reads the live feed from my currentcost device. The number is then echoed down the serial connection with the colour of the light being determin with the following formula.

Red:           Current Power Usage /1500 * 255

Green:      255- (Current Power Usage/1500*255)

Though this doesnt change in nice clear cut stages I liked the idea of a constant natural progression.

I still am fine tunning this so watch this space.

Code for the arduino

float value = 400; //initial value
float maxBoundary = 1500; //Value at which PURE red is shown
char incomingByte;
int count = 0;
char genValue[5] = “”;
void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600);           // set up Serial library at 9600 bps
Serial.println(“Starting Orb”);
analogWrite(11, 0); //Blue is always 0
}
void loop() {
// send data only when you receive data:
if (Serial.available() > 0) {
// read the incoming byte:
incomingByte = Serial.read();
//  if ((incomingByte >=0)&&(incomingByte <10)) {
genValue[count] = incomingByte;
count++;
if (count == 5){
count =0;
Serial.println(genValue);
value = atof(genValue)-100; //take off a 100 because realistically at the moment it wont go below 350
if (value<0) value=0;
}
}
}
float displayValue = value/maxBoundary;
float displayValue255 = displayValue*255;
if (displayValue255 > 254 ) displayValue255 = 255;
analogWrite(10, displayValue255); //red //This is a Analgoue output from a digital pin on the arduino
analogWrite(9,255-displayValue255); //green
delay(500);
}