Smackathon Honorable Mention: Autofinger
Smackathon Honorable Mention: Autofinger
For my Smackathon project, I wanted to create something physical.
We ended up creating a robotic finger that looms over our software engineers, pointing at whomever submitted code to a project most recently. Its name is AutoFinger.
The entire office finds it quite unsettling. Here’s a video of it running in “demo mode” to show off how it moves:
Autofinger is an Arduino robot which uses two servos and an RGB LED to achieve the movement and coloring. The Arduino is plugged in to a Raspberry Pi which does the work of checking our internal git repositories for new commits.
I went in to the Smule Smackathon having never used an Arduino before. My team and I spent the first half of the project going through the lessons in the SparkFun Inventor’s Kit, which provided a fantastic introduction to all of the basics of how to use an Arduino. We then spent spent the rest of the time cobbling together the pieces necessary to make AutoFinger and got it up and running just before the deadline.
If you like, you can check out all of the code created for this project at GitHub. It’s a mess, but it works!
– Greg Laabs, Product Marketing Manager
