Dave Snowdon

On 9th February I took part in the February Hack The Tower event organised by John Stevenson (@jr0cket). John runs this event as a sort of one-day hackathon for the London Java, Scala, Clojure & Salesforce developer communities and one of its compelling features is the diverse mix of developers who attend.

Not long after Mum died I noticed that she'd written on the base of a Robin (the bird) figurine "My Ruby wedding present to Jim 8/8/2004" At the time I thought it was typically Mum writing such notes on things. When we started going through her keepsakes in her "muniment chest" (that Dad made for her) we noticed many things had little labels pinned to them, for example her wedding dress a pair of trousers that Mum and Dad had bought for me on holiday in Scotland when I was about the same age as my son is now.

The aim of this project is to entertain both myself and my children by converting a radio-controlled K9 toy into an autonomous robot under the control of a RaspberryPi. I chose the RaspberryPi because of it's low power requirements, low cost and small form factor (there is very little space inside the toy).

I have the following loosely defined set of goals

• Anything that the toy could do via radio control, it should be able to do under the control of the 'Pi