Since my last post about creating the SocialUproar 2.0, a Raspberry Pi 2 gadget running Windows 10 IoT Core, a few things happened:
- I packed all the components neatly into a cardboard and cellophane box that originally housed an RC car.
- I got the programmatic control of the three LEDs working. The code is on GitHub.
- I realized that I want to show this to kids too, not just adults. Young kids don’t have twitter accounts. I decided that a better approach to collecting the tweets or clicks to determine which LED to light up would be to build a simple Azure website that had two buttons (Red and Blue) and a webservice or two (to get the winning button and reset the counter). In the short term, just to test Pi control of the motors (see below) I would just generate two random numbers to represent the red and blue counts.
- In the case, the LEDs were not all that impressive, so I took components including motors and battery holders from an electronics kit I bought at Lakeshore Learning. These let me put a yellow plastic flappy robo-bird on one side and a red fan on the other. Each side has a motor to drive those things. Both motors need to be powered by batteries but controlled by the Pi, so I need to get appropriate transistors and wire everything up correctly. I’ll post wiring diagrams when I have them finalized.