Raspberry Pi workshop.

[RichardR]

Overall a great evening, we had quite a lot going on from the workshop itself, people coming in and asking questions then AR Drone flying at the end!

There are a few issues here though.

The first is that EIGHT of our regulars did not pay, guests did though meaning that we managed to just about cover the hall costs.

We usually get one or two non-payers every now and again but this was not a nice surprise after counting the sign-in book, my head count about half way though and what was in the cash box.

It's okay if one or two people don't pay one week then double next week but when about 1/3rd of the people who turned up didn't pay, that's where we begin to have an issue.

I don't mean to complain and I don't want to have to bug people for payments but if this continues we might have to, remember that eight times the £2.50 is £20, once we cover weekly hall costs, that £20 can be put towards materials and tools.

The second is another one I don't want to have to keep reminding people about and that's games, if you're working on a game then fine but we had Facebook Tetris and GTA being played right in front of the person from the council!

Lastly, we managed to use ~500MB of data AGAIN, I know Alex downloaded the Arduino software but 600MB is still excessive for a night where we were demoing non-connected things.

The good news here is that we may be offered Fibre wifi cheap to the Scout hut, until then though, I might have to restrict 3G usage.

Only other thing that was an issue is wifi going down due to all the connected clients, a fix for that is being worked on though, we're probably going to build a self-contained box from just makerspace owned things to handle networking so that doesn't require setup every week and the first person there of either me or Ben can just bring it out and plug it in.

Enough of the problems, it's video time!

Footage from the event recorded with an AR Drone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R6VNb6SL5s

AR Drone flying after: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esHthB9WqFk

Photos will be uploaded at some point later tonight.

If anyone else has any photos, please get them to me so I can add them to an archive of all makerspace events, you can email them to Ric...@chelmsfordmakerspace.co.uk

[James Hyland]

I see the second video was cut just before the crash..... XD

[Ross]

I'm trying to keep up my payments now, I paid a tenner to cover like 4 weeks I forgot to pay and also paid for the Pi workshop night.

As far as bandwidth usage goes, as I already said, try to block any sort of BitTorrent client, maybe compress pages? Some browsers have built in compression utilities that work quite well. I know that GiffGaff sometimes also use compression protocals for certain types of data. It means longer loading times, but less bandwidth usage.

A login system or something that tracks how much data people are using, and warns them when they're using a lot of data would be useful. Think of BT Openzone, when you login, so you can't immediately access the internet. Maybe on that splash page it prompts people to turn off all other bandwidth consuming programs.

Maybe a bandwidth control client could be distributed via USB stick to everyone at the space, or only a certain web client that is conservative over data could also be used.

These are just some random ideas I had that could resolve the problem.