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So we've had a Raspberry Pi sitting around the office for a while, and we finally sat down as a team to decide what to do with it.

After a rigid time limited, idea gathering browsing session for ideas, we came up with a plan to have it do something interactive, controlled through our website, with a webcam, that users "played" with to get a score, which we would then have a league table of.

The type of game ultimately depends on our roboteering skills, but we would like it to retrieve a ball or object, and throw or shoot it at a target which would then register a hit or miss.

We settled on a kit, as with no experience between any of us, apart from some model aeroplane experience, we thought this would be the best idea.

The kit we chose was a 4Tronix Initio kit. Came with a web cam as an extra, wireless usb network, servos, sensors, and a PiRoCon controller board.


It took us about 30 minutes a day for a week to finally get everything built and running. The instructions are a little sketchy online, and start very basic before being very vague when it gets to the difficult part. So we plan to offer some instructions once we figure out what we are doing.

We’ve currently got it running, and moving, but getting it wireless and remote desktop’in to it is proving difficult. Our starting soon apprentice, Bradley, managed to prove it worked better when it was attached to the network with an RJ45 cable, so we may have to replace the wireless adaptor for one that didn’t cost £4. Bradley also managed to get the Web Cam working, just need to be able to stream it somehow.

We will keep you up to date on our current progress, and our plans. Also this’ll be the place where we make demo’s available for testing before we actually make it live. Hopefully you’ll hear some updates within the next month.