The Team
The guys (Greg, Martin, John, Colin and John from left to right) put together a quick summary of what they did and how they found the event.
Greg
About Me
** Oh hi there, that’s me on the left in the jaunty hat. I’m an engineer in a renewable energy company in Ireland. I’m one half of the bedroom laboratory (www.thebedroomlaboratory.com) which is a new site which is all about design and electronic design for the open source world.
What I Did
** I mostly worked on the arduino sensor side, I got the light and temperature sensor up and running and hold the record for most things broken over the weekend (Xbee and 3310 screen to say the least). As has been mentioned previously I took the “de” in deconstruction a little too seriously.
How did I find the Event
** I just want to say personally I think the deconstruction.org carried out an excellent idea perfectly and I’ll be first in line to take part in the competition this time next year! For me this was all about learning, it was my first time working on most elements of this projects and what more could you want really??? I also got to chat to the presenters about what we’re doing, which was great fun (4G is for 4 Guinness in Ireland, I’ve totally stolen that joke!)
Martin
About Me
** I’m Martin and I’m a Ph.D. student in Dublin City University (DCU). My areas of interest are in energy-aware mobile device optimization, wireless multimedia streaming and embedded device electronic projects. Outside of the work arena, I love music and play a couple of instruments. In order to get more involved in hobby electronics, Greg and I set up the Bedroom Laboratory in the last couple of weeks and we were immediately hooked on the idea of competing in this event.
What I Did
I worked on a variety of different aspects of the project. I mucked in with some of the other lads to set up the Raspberry Pi boards as web and database servers. I also set up the Github directory for our project, which is online and downloadable at http://github.com/thebedroomlaboratory/thedeconstruction. I then moved on to trying to figure out the ZigBee communication between an Arduino and the Raspberry Pi but unfortunately, just when Greg and I got it sorted out, one of the XBee chips decided to fry. I then concentrated on getting data into the RPi from the Arduino, and wrote the code for reading sensor data from the Arduino over a USB connection. I also helped John Maguire with setting up the GPIO circuitry for reading a button press and lighting an LED whenever we “turned on the heating”. I then wrote all the control logic for the thermostat, database management and for handling the input of a manual override switch and a manual override toggle from the web interface.
How did I find the Event
This event was absolutely brilliant because it was loads of fun (in a majorly geeky way) and gave me a chance to work on stuff I’ve never tried before. Also, it was great working with these lads and seeing my bits of work slotting in with the things the others did. The sense of satisfaction in seeing the whole project working together was amazing!
John 1
About me
** I’m John, there in the middle. I’m a software Engineer who works mainly with web development and Java, and (Unfortunately ) Oracle. I know the lads through college (started in Mechatronics with Greg and changed to Digital Media Engineering with Martin and Colin), as for John, he just followed me home one day
What I did
** I worked Colin and Martin on setting up the environments, apache, php and python
I also got interaction between the pi gpios and and led and switch to show basic input and output.
I worked with martin on the main python script by creating functions which communicated with the database tables and the GPIOs
How did I find the event
** The deconstruction is the most productive I have ever been in my life (outside of work and college which don’t count). I had loads of fun and finally learned to do more then install xbmc on my Raspberry Pi. I definitely intend to continue this with the lads and hope to make it a regular thing.
Colin
About Me
** My name is Colin, I am currently working as a computer programmer for a International Insurance Company in Ireland. I met the lads in college many moons ago, even though we have taken varying paths in life we all still share a big interest in technology and all things related.
What I did
** - Was involved in setting up Apache, MySQL and PHP running on all the Pis.
Worked with Martin for a bit to try get the ZigBee’s talking to each other.
Created a database, using phpmyadmin, and also created two new tables in it.
Coded the server side logic that communicated with the database to pull in data.
Coded the php that displayed the updated temp,humidity,light and occupancy.
How did I find the event
** Really enjoyed the event, I have found it difficult to set aside time at home to do things I promised myself I would do. This was a way to force myself into the promises I kept breaking. It was much more fun to do this project in a group as it provided some great banter throughout the weekend which kept it fun. I am going home to sleep Greg stop making me do this you Tyrant !!
John 2
About me
** Hi, My name is John. I am a multimedia designer. Greg and Martin told me about The Deconconstruction event and invited me to take part. It sounded interesting so here I am! I was not familiar with many of the areas our team worked on over the weekend, which was great because I learned a shit load!
What I did
** I worked with Greg on the Arduino. This is an area that I am hoping to get more into and I tried to use this project to learn as much as I could. I also worked on getting the web interface to display the data from the web server. I’ve also put a lot of time into planning the group video and put a lot of time into the planning of the event!
How did I find the event
** Overall, I found The Deconstruction event a great way to learn. I think the time constraint worked very well as it made us more productive and kept us on our toes.
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So we all learned, had fun and hopefully people think we created something useful!
Thanks Deconstuction!!!