Challenge someone with your web popularity,
and let's see and show other people how high you're ranking.
The higher you're ranked on google, the higher your platform elevates.
with:
The iKWiN project was developed by Simon Claessen, Axel Roest and Mathias Forbach, in one week at the Mediamatic RFID Hackerscamp 08, before the PICNIC08 Conference. You have a desk where you put your ikTag and your challenger does the same. You go onto the lift, press the red buttons and then the elevators go up. The higher you are ranked on google, the higher you go. At the end, if the result is not clear, the arrow shows who wins,
Technical
The project uses a MacBook Pro as master controller, with three Arduino's for connecting to the outside world. Two SonMicro USB RFID readers are connected to the Mac to read the ik tags.
Because of bad experience with serial drivers and ruby, and an ephemeral time frame, a design decision was made to write the Mac control program in perl. Proven technology. It calls various sub-programs in other languages, part of Mediamatic's RFID and OSC tools, to connect to the readers and anymeta db.
Thanks to Erik Borra for the PHP screen scraping of Google, easier than using the API.
More links
Team
Axel Roest, Simon Claessen and Mathias Forbach, with help from Bas Pijls.
The two rotary encoders for the height sensors are made from two old vacuum cleaner cable winders. Because they are taken from two different cleaners, we had to calibrate them and used a pin on the Arduino to tell it if we have the right or left winder, and calibrate the height accordingly. The encoders were giving erratic signals, until we painted the enclosing boxes black against the sunlight.
The optical interuptors were taken from a VHS recorder. the white squares are made from gaffer tape on a clear polycarbonate circle.
Two solenoids, running on 24volt push the up and down buttons. because the solenoids came without a spring, a homebrew spring is provided in the form of bended tieraps. the silver gaffer tape provides some rudimentary protection against rain (not available for testing) The solenoids are held on spot with some Lubic profiles. All wiring was done with flexible cat-5 cable, soldered to DIN-6 or DB9 connectors. The three arduino's were housed in old scsi drive casings. they provided 5volt and 12volt to drive the Arduino, solenoids, lights, bel and servo.
ikWiN project is a great success -
IkWin by Mathias Forbach, Axel Roest en Simon Claessen.
Here's a movie clip of Marleen Stikker and Bas Verhart competing @ IkWin
vimeo.com/1820752
PICNIC 08 - Ik Win: Marleen Stikker vs. Bas Verhart from Sneaker Peet on Vimeo.