I’ve been a little busy and have not had much of a chance to spend writing which I am sure you can tell by the lack of posts for the last few weeks. I did want to share my experiences at hackday. I know many people have already written great reviews. I hope that at the next Hackday not only are there more Flashers but also more designers, illustrators and generally more creative people.

The week end started off really slow with an early trek up to Alexandra Palace in North London. We started early by creating a Mac only table – that little apple looks so good when it glows. I was on the stickerless side Some even some jumped straight into the hacking. The plan was to have presentation till about 2:00pm and then we all start on our 24 hours of hacking.

That was the plan…

Then we got struck by lightning…

It was not actually apparent that that was what had happened at the time and I thought they were playing with the sound system. Then the roof vents opened up allowing in light. Having heard that they would “turn up the lights later” I thought nothing of it – till I started to get wet! There was quite the scrabbling to get computers away and out the rain. I accidentally packed away the wrong Mac… but thankfully mine did not get too wet. It was only after a little while that I found out that it was lightning and not intentional.

So the side effect of the lighting was that there was damage done to the system and they were not going to be able to close of the vents. So off we all trek – laptops, beanbags, whiteboards and pens in tow – to the the covered courtyard. Some of us managed to find power and have other means of connection (like data cards), some played games and unfortunately some gave up and left. I think the organisers did a great job of keeping us happy, watered and feed with spirits high.

I was well entertained to see how many people pulled out their umbrellas continued as thought nothing had happened. Some even went on to comment on the British Dunkirk spirit. A concept that I had only heard of before… Josh Russell got a great video of the drama after the vents had opened and if you look closely you can see a very annoyed me wondering around (before I realised that they were having technical issues and it was not on purpose).

After all that fun my team managed to recruit a couple of people and we jumped in the hack with all our energy. The plan changed due to the creative brainstorm session and then later due to technical difficulties. We ended up with a blimp that we could control through a voting system. The most votes on a direction is the route the blimp would take. We were going to take pictures and send them up to Flickr but the weight of the pda was a bit much for the blimp so we had to cancel that idea in the end. It was great fun and it actually worked! Although we ended up having to make a few changes along the way.

One of our issues was with Bluetooth – over 100 devices in the room and our little gadget just could not make the connection. This meant that we had to be plugged in for the demo. So it was a serial connection over usb to the blimp that saved the day.

A few min before we presented our idea we were asked to not let the blimp go too high or our of our control due to health and safety! Even if we had had it all working wirelessly we could not have let it fly free:(

As a result I am not sure if people actually believed that it was working as we had a cable and had to hold onto it… But it was definitely being controlled by the votes.

We worked through most of the night and had a few entertaining challenges, included loosing the blimp to the roof and running out of helium. Thom had thought of a solution for the run away blimp before the event so was well prepared for the rescue. Running out of helium was a more interesting challenge! We were lucky to have the help of Andy Mace and Anil Patel in filling up the second blimp a few hours before we had to present! No comment on the 2am helium bribery that had taken place…

None of that would have happened without our great team.

Thom Shannon

Father of the plan.
Wrote some software for the pda that took photos from the onboard camera and took control commands from a web server, and built some electronics to control the motors from the pda. This was not used due to the weight of the pda.

Alistair MacDonald

Wrote a http server in delphi that took the votes and calculated results.

Stephen Deasey

Wrote a script in python that uploaded images to flickr – sadly also not used due to the pda weight issue. He also did the great blimp artwork :)

Shawn Bonkowski

Programmed the micro-controller on the adruino board to take commands over usb and control the motors. This was what we used in the end and were so grateful that it all worked as well as it did.

I did the Flash controls for the blimp. Originally I built the Flash to connect over a socket server but we then changed it to be http server.

The bli.mp site is still in its “24hours of dev time” state but Thom and myself will be making a few updates so that the blimp can continue its journey in a virtual world.

If you have time check out the long list of submitted hacks and view the list of winners.