Taking Launch Sight on the road

Just before Hackmanchester the NASA Space Apps Challenge team from earlier in the year was contacted by the University of York's computer science department and asked if we would like to take part in an open weekend at the University, where the astronaut Tim Peake would be speaking as part of the continuing work done for the ESA Principia mission.

Although the format took a little while to confirm, we would essentially be working a trade stand, talking about, space, technology and our award winning project with children and parents attending the event.

Time to prepare was thin on the ground.  We didn't have much in the way of collateral for the stand and with a partial revision of the code base half way though and the hardware disassembled and in the case of the hastily repaired and very unsafe subwoofer gone to the great reclamation centre in the sky we didn't have much of a demo either.

As soon as I was back from the hackathon it was straight into rebuilding the Launch Sight demo. One of the key things I wanted to achieve was shrinking the loosely wired breadboard in the rumble pack down onto a firmly soldered strip board.

As you can see below I was pretty successful. I actually put together three of these before I got to the code revision. I should not get too smug though. I sketched out my circuit changes and what I thought was a workable shortcut, but ended up throwing my first board away as a short in a mess of soldering made it useless. My second iteration was larger, but reliably worked and still only slightly larger than a postage stamp.

The code itself was in a pretty bad state as I had hacked it up to fit it into objects and it contained last minute changes and technical issues that we resolved on the day and missed committing, or overwrote in the last rush to demo. I worked through a component at a time, pulling the lighting changes from the main code to free up header pins on the Raspberry Pi for a control circuit for a fan we were going to borrow.

I was slowly getting everything working, but running out of time and getting pretty run down from working 16 - 20 hours a day over the last 2 weeks completing all the projects.

In my office the revised code ran the sound, connected to the rumble pack and worked a stepper motor from the Pi (I had no idea what the fan control would need, only that it could run off a 5v circuit), but no plan survives contact with the enemy and after transporting it all to York found that much of it was not working.

With no time to do anything else with it I hacked the rumble pack Arduino code to run continually, but on a ticking interval and left the Pi as a set of blinky lights, while I made the most of showing off the VR component of the hack to anyone standing nearby.

For some VR had already become passe, but for many this was their first experience of it and we manage to delight children and engage adults. A Makey Makey kit hooked up to a space game and a BB-8 model droid rolling around made us a pretty popular stand, doing better than the neighbouring Lockheed Martin and their pots of jelly beans and keeping us talking and demoing until doors closed.

With the day a success and the valuable experience under our belts of pitching and re-pitching our idea time and time again there is the possibility of participating in more demos early next year as the University of York works to promote its astrophysics department.  

For now it is back to my desk to try and iron out a few more bugs and back to the workbench to try and harden the hardware up to more continual use.