Hackday London: The Story of Beagle 3, pt 2

…continuing from part one…

Dawn, and people are either groggy from being up all night, groggy from getting a few hours kip on some beanbags or sofas that were too small, or groggy because it’s the sort of condition you’re in at an event like this after 24 hours no matter what you’ve been up to. It was also time for Gervase and myself to take stock of the Beagle 3 project (Greg, due to circumstances, couldn’t make it back to Alexandra Palace for Sunday).

While we had the plans to make something that we think could work, with the materials we had it just wasn’t going to happen. So it was time to work on something else. We decided to switch from a three stage to a two stage rocket – an initial stage powered by a mix of high pressure air and water, delivering an upper stage payload of ‘something interesting.’

After a rather quietly attended test launch late on the Saturday night, the team (now christened Blue Steel – see here) was confident that this would take to the air, so we put together a test for the separation mechanism for the upper stage. The test? A container full of cherry tomatoes.

By this time, word on the Beagle 3 had been going around Hackday, so this launch was very well attended. Which meant lots of cameras, lots of Flickr pics, and lots of attention. Here’s some of the best…

…and with a single launch, we had a success in the eyes of the attendees. What we needed now was to sort out two things. The presentation of the hack, and the qualification flight.

One of the keys to Hackday is the usage of the programming API’s from either Yahoo! or BBC Backstage. While everyone can use whatever they like, to be eligible for ‘the competition’ you need to (and let’s pretty much quote here) “use the Yahoo! or Backstage BBC api’s inside your hack.” Which leaves a rather interesting loophole that the Beagle 3 could use. By lofting up a printed copy of Yahoo! Maps! api, and enclosing the rest of the API’s on a 1 gb USB memory stick, we would have the api’s inside our hack while it was in use. Our last flight of the day was ‘the qualifying flight,’ which took up the printouts and memory in the parachute recovery capsule. That flight was the one that made the numerous sunday flights before that eligible for the competition.

Before that, there was the matter of getting together enough material for the presentation – each hack had 90 seconds on stage to present their efforts. With such a physical and visual hack, I suggested the idea of a video presentation of Beagle 3 to the crowds – partly because setting images to music would be a nice relief from the screens and screens of code and Flickr monged pages I expected, but also because it could be edited and edited and fill the time with as much excitement as possible.

So the main payload for Sunday morning was the camera pod. This was an empty 500ml bottle, with a side facing camera that would take pictures on a timer. Nothing fancy, just a basic £10 QVGA stills camera from Tesco that shows up as a USB drive on a computer. Place the parachute on the capsule unit, prime everything, start the timer, wait a few seconds, launch the rocket. Repeat until you get some good pictures. Okay a bit hit-n-miss, but here are the results from the six flights…

And on to the presentation. Now I’m not one for having done a huge amount of video work before, so I was in uncharted waters here – which I suppose is the point of a Hackday. And not having any decent editing software on my laptop, I decided to do the editing of the video on my recently acquired Nokia N95. From all the pictures and videos, to the sound editing, conversion, and upload to YouTube, it was all going to happen on a Smartphone. I’m going to write up the technical bits on this seperatly, but one thing to note is I cheated slightly at the end, and had Pain Shop Pro do the last few slides of the ariel pictures to give the ‘thrown down’ look at the end. As to the ‘Scrapheap Challenge’ style details of the plan, these were written up on a flipchart with some paper and blue-tac, and then a picture taken of each slide.

We were showing our hack at slot number 50 (of around 80) and watching the audience (in darkness0 sitting through a number of concept heavy, code heavy talks (with a lot of music and image integration I have to say), I was glad the editorial decisions on the presentation meant that we were going to be tapping into a different part of people’s brains. From the light and fluffy “I Dream of Jeannie” to introduce the plan, to The A-Team as we were building our rocket, Ride of the Valkyries for the launches, ending with The Gallery music from Take Hart/Vision On, the musical cues helped everybody get what each section was about, with the visuals re-inforcing the good time we had. Watching the reaction to the crowd, hearing laughter, and the eagerness of the voting sticks being held up, I was proud of what Greg, Gervase and I had pulled together in the space of 26 hours.

And so to the awards and presentations at the end of the day. By this point Gervase had left, so it was just me from Team Blue Steel, and I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect. I was pretty sure we’d get a mention, after all, this was a programmers get together, but hackers are hackers, no matter the medium. So I was happy with our mention and acknowledgment in the opening talk, and the subsequent second place in the ‘Make’ Physical Hacks category (the blimp that had it’s direction determined by people voting on a website every two minutes took that). In my mind, two Mentioned in Despatches (and associated notoriety) was a good weekend’s work.

But one final surprise was in stock, as Yahoo! took to the stage, and started to talk about the team that had kept them amused all night, who had provided fun and laughter, and kept them on the edge of their seats as to just how we would use the API’s. Yes, Blue Steel was going to get an actual reward – The Best Hack Of The Rules Award! Just my luck that thanks to a gammy foot and a strained thigh this was one of the very few occasions I was out in public 2.0 without my kilt. Ah well, time to make a little speech… can someone tell em what I said, I only vaguley remember talking about how great hackers were?