Week 4 weekend (continued): Raspberry Pi Hackathon

Wow today a few classmates and I got together and decided to make a product that we can use on the Raspberry Pi. If you don't know a Raspberry Pi is a computer that can work as a standalone computer. It has two USB ports, video output, HDMI port, SD card reader and additional ports where you can plug in sensors.

Here a pic of one of my classmates (a Linux master) setting up the Raspberry Pi, you'll notice that it boots up a desktop. The Operating System it runs is a light-weight version of Linux Debian, called Raspbian.

Before the hacking started, we first had to decide on what we wanted to do. One of the classmates is very experience in Agile development and was leading us through the steps. Below is a list of features that we'd want as a user.

We decided on building a rear view camera that will have a realtime stream that will be viewable directly onto the browser or a native app.

This posed a series of tasks that we needed to accomplish.

1. How do we get video from a camera attachment to the Raspberry Pi.

2. How do we get the Raspberry Pi to emit information via Wifi?

3. How do we get the video trasmitted over Wifi?

4. How do we render the video onto the browser/Native App?


Over the course of 13 hours we were able to answer 3 out of the 4 questions before we burned out and decided to tackle this another day.

Doing this type of project required knowledge of node.js as it is the best solution for a Real-time stream. However since I lack a lot of knowledge of that I focused my contributions mostly on developing a landing page where prospective users can get information about the product.

My Twitter Bootstrap skills are become more and more refined. We plan on putting this website live within a week. The website is a one-page site that has many parallax scrolling features and animated page moment that make it a fun user experience. Furthermore prospective users can fill out a form to be part of the Beta and the form is sent via Ajax. I'll definitely be posting a link to the webpage once it goes live.

All-in-all, today fueled my entrepreneurial spirit and I definitely hope to participate in a Startup Weekend or a similar hackathon once this is all done. I did feel like I didn't contribute as much as the others due to my lack of experience with node and real-time server but I focused on my strengths and contributed heavily on the front-end.


In summary this is one of the great parts about Coding Dojo. I'm not only learning from Michael Choi and the school staff but I'm also learning from my fellow students. I have a lot of respect for the knowledge that they have and what they bring to the table. There is no replacement for the community that the Dojo provides. I am extremely ecstatic about what my future holds with the skills I'm learning.