

Hardware fun: building an email-controlled gun for PyCon 2013 - twakefield
http://blog.mailgun.net/post/45797210278/hardware-fun-building-an-email-controlled-gun-for

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stephengillie
I think the next step is to add a webcam, then some computer vision code. So
you could stand next to it, take a photo of a picture with your phone, attach
and email it to the gun -- then it would scan around until it found the
picture in the attached photo, aim and fire.

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tocomment
I thought this was really cool.

I actually think someone could make this into a sellable product for companies
running trade show booths. The main goal of a trade show booth is to attract
visitors and get their contact information. This system is a creative way to
do both.

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old-gregg
BTW everyone was blown away by Rasberry Pi. It's one thing to read about it
online, but the hands-on experience is something else. BTW every PyCon
attendee this year received a free Rasberry Pi as a "secret gift", that's
cool.

I have my own now, and I'm in a brainstorming mode. Idea #1 so far is to hook
it up to a laser and try to draw something on walls. Unfortunately I am
lacking the hardware skills for that.

Any ideas? Something more practical for a software person to build? :-))

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seagreen
It would be cool to turn one into a private key safe. The Rasberry Pi
interfaces your normal computer over USB, but only encrypts or signs files and
does absolutely nothing else. So even if your computer is compromised the
attacker still can't get your private key.

This might exist already, but so far I've only seen smart USB drives that can
be decrypted for a certain amount of time. Not the same thing.

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tocomment
How does the aiming work? Do you send separate emails to move the gun?

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twakefield
We initially had automatic oscillation that you could turn on an off via
email. We ended up turning that off because it turns out nerf guns by
themselves are so imprecise the degree of difficulty added with the
oscillation made it nearly impossible to hit the target.

The issue with allowing anybody to aim via email or other methods is that
you'd have multiple aiming request over-riding each other. We'd need to have
some queue for aiming as well and didn't get to implementing that.

It was definitely a minimum viable product at PyCon but we look forward to
improving it over time with suggestions like these.

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tocomment
I guess you could have buttons or a joystick for aiming, and then send the
email to fire?

