 I know you're here to hear about robot dinosaurs but I really want to tell you about what I did in my summer holidays. Now it's about that time of year who actually dreads that phrase, who takes them straight back to school and thinking oh my goodness I have got to fill two pages with what I did in my summer holidays. Anyone else got that dread coming on? I did, my friends would go abroad, they'd go to Disney World, they'd come to Hebden Bridge, they'd be able to fill those two pages. I'd spend my time probably climbing trees and whittling sticks and had a whale of a time over the summer but could only fill two lines until August 1980. I was ten years old and for my summer holidays I went to the Isle of Wight and the Isle of Wight meant Black Gang Chine. Now if you were a child in the 70s you would have known about Black Gang Chine didn't have social media so how did everybody know about Black Gang Chine? Well there was one TV programme that every child watched, it was called Blue Peter. If you'd watched Blue Peter you would have seen fibreglass dinosaurs being made up in Yorkshire being transported down the length of the country with John Nokes and Shep coming down to the Isle of Wight and being installed on the island. Black Gang Chine is between a cliff and the sea. The dinosaurs couldn't walk in, they couldn't be trucked in, they had to be airlifted in. Now if you saw this as a child it really made a memory. This was the excitement we had in the 70s. I'm going to show that again. And if you went to Black Gang Chine you had to get a picture like this. Put your hands up if you've got a photo like this somewhere. Yeah, four or five. I gave this talk in Austria and I asked that question and there was a hand at the back and said yeah I've got that photo. It was the photo to get. Favourite dinosaur, they were ferocious, they were fearsome but this was my favourite. So when I got to school that year I managed to fill my two pages even before break time and I still got to go out and play. Yes, time progressed and the dinosaurs sort of faded from everyone's consciousness but if you still mention the fibreglass dinosaurs at Black Gang Chine it still puts a smile on people's faces. Fast forward 30 years. August 2010 and I wanted a puppy. My friends, my neighbours were having puppies, their dog was having puppies and the midwife was Alexander De Bell. He helped these puppies get born and I'd go up and see them. Alexander De Bell happens to be the great-great-grandson of the Alexander De Bell who set up Black Gang Chine in the early 1800s and the grandson Alexander De Bell is an engineer and so we got talking about all sorts of gadgets and gizmos and I said how I'd gone to see the dinosaurs so I went around and I saw all the dinosaurs. I went back to Black Gang Chine 30 years later and saw the fibreglass dinosaurs, the same ones that were there in the 70s. You can imagine that 30 years of weather didn't do the dinosaurs that much good and obviously I'm a little bit bigger now than I was then. They didn't seem quite so ferocious. They're a little bit more faded and probably on the edge of extinction and to be quite honest tourism in the Isle of Wight was going down as well. In the 70s it got reboosted and the dinosaurs helped save the park because that was when all the cheap flights were starting to foreign countries and people weren't holidaying on the Isle of Wight quite so much so the dinosaurs saved the park in the 70s but 2010 not so much. They were all looking a bit weary but in 2012 Alexander De Bell, the great great grandson took control of the park and he realised that the dinosaurs were still an attraction that people still like dinosaurs whether they're 6 years old, 60 years old that child inside still loves dinosaurs and so he got some animatronic dinosaurs and installed them in area 5 Big Fanfare, this is about Easter 2012 Big Fanfare, people were coming the whole atmosphere was reinvigorated the whole park was reinvigorated everything was getting exciting again Unfortunately the T-Rex the biggest dinosaur that they've got the one there, you stand on a platform and when it roars they've got the whole platform vibrating it went in a sulk it didn't like being woken up from its coma of 30 years and it fried its electronics the dinosaurs had come from China the people at the park had phoned China said we need more control electronics they said the echo will send some over, it will take 6 weeks this was 2 weeks before the busy 6 the summer holidays when 80% of the people come to the park and the Big Fanfare about the T-Rex working well if it wasn't it was going to cause problems so Raspberry Pi came to the rescue Bagengchain is a small park and the staff are multidisciplinary they will sometimes be manning the rides sometimes doing the gardening sometimes doing the fibre glasing sometimes doing the technical stuff and so no one really had responsibility for all the tech stuff but one chap, Mark Butler, he thought right, I've heard of a Raspberry Pi I think the Raspberry Pi can fix the electronics in the T-Rex so he took the Pi, never had one before took it, locked himself in a dark room for 2 weeks taught himself enough python to get the T-Rex to struggle through the summer holidays and work all the way through amazing feat that he did there and all that was just from using the community asking people, talking to people and finding out what he could on the internet so after the busy 6 when everyone could breathe a sigh of relief and have a bit more time Alexander Debell gave me a call and he said we need a longer term solution I had to come up with a rescue formula to how to make sure that not just the T-Rex but all the dinosaurs, if there was a problem how we could fix them all and to make sure that the coding and what Mark had done with the Raspberry Pi was actually a sustainable solution so my equation was happy dinosaurs get some makers together and the staff, they wanted not to call expensive consultants in every time the dinosaurs were not working unfortunate for me but they wanted the staff to actually be trained in how to programme them and do the things and fix them so makers and the staff all gathering with over coffee and cake and time meant that we could do this so I put together a hack session I called the makers and the hackers that I knew and we got together with the staff and Black Gang Chine provided coffee and cake and dinosaurs and we had a bit of a hack session the electronics experts in the group went through all the electronics the control panel that had actually blown up or fried was 1980s electronics we couldn't get to the parts anymore to refix the boards so there was not a question of just getting more from China it was a question of we're going to have to redesign what we're doing and so the controller actually could be a Raspberry Pi that wasn't the problem and it could have sound from it we couldn't then control the motors we still had to use the Chinese motor board because the 16 amp motors on the dinosaurs were a bit too big just for the pie to run off so we had to develop some more electronics for that and to code it well the staff don't necessarily have a technical coding background they don't particularly want to be coders but they want to be able to control these dinosaurs and so I started teaching them how to use the Raspberry Pi how to get an LED to flash and using Node Red so I would just go through with you how simple Node Red is has anyone here let's go on to the live stuff anyone here used Node Red before ok quite a few bear with me when I go wrong anyone here not heard of Node Red before ok Node Red is a visual drag and drop programming language it was developed by some people at IBM who were finding that they were using the same libraries time and time again and didn't really want to just call the library grab the text they'd rather just drag a block that was already they knew what it would do and put that in so they developed it for their own use put it out, it's open source and now if you've got a Raspberry Pi and you've got the most up to date Jesse operating system Node Red already comes as part of that system so it's on, if you look on a Raspberry Pi under programming there's Node Red it's already there so it's available, it's free the park won't have to buy anything so I'm just going to demonstrate what I've got here I've got an inject node from this side I move it over there and it turns to the word time stamp I take a debug node put it there if I click over here I can see the debug I join them together I deploy and there on the left hand side is the time stamp I can easily change that time stamp to a string deploy it press the inject node and there's my first hello world so it's very very simple to get your first hello world programming up going on from that I've put on the Raspberry Pi some traffic lights so down at the front there some traffic lights and I'm scrolling down for a Raspberry Pi GPIO pin I'm going to put that down there and I know that the red pin is pin 35 I'm going to give it a name so now I've just said I've labelled one of my GPIO general purpose input output pins on the Raspberry Pi and I've labelled that pin 35 there I go back up to my inject node now the GPIOs need a one or a naught so I'm going to change that back to a string and put a one connect the two together connect the two together and hopefully down on the table my red LED has come on oops, I'll put another one so I want to be able to turn it off connect that so on and off so this was the first bit of coding that many of the staff had done and the first bit of hardware use that actually some of the programmers had done so they were getting quite excited about this but we wanted to move on from the LEDs this is an open collector driver it's effectively a relay a switch and it allows the low voltage on the Raspberry Pi to switch something of a higher voltage so I can use this to turn motors on and off which you couldn't do you can't put even a 1.5 volt motor you can't put straight onto the GPIO pins because there's too much current going through and it would fry it so you need some other kind of switch so this is just a logic switch that will allow a higher voltage to be turned on and off and I've called these my thingatrons because I can connect things to the internet with it and I was making so many that I made the PCB up so you can see here this is my little dyno I've got my dyno at the front I've got a thingatron connected in and it's connected to the Raspberry Pi go back to the coding so I've put that on the GPIO pin 26 so I've put that down there I'll tell it I'm talking to number 26 that little dyno is called Waite Dyno I'll connect it to the on and the off I'll deploy on and off so by this stage everyone was getting really quite excited about actually being able to control something just from a bit of software actually some real life hardware I'm connected over the internet to the Raspberry Pi so everything that I'm doing is not on my laptop it's actually on this Raspberry Pi all the programming is on that Raspberry Pi I'm just talking to it through the web browser on here but what if I didn't want to connect through with a computer well I can add a Twitter feed and if I look for Waite Dyno if someone wants to get their phone out and start tweeting if I connect actually what I've just done there this will give an output of whatever you tweet well I don't want it I said it needs a 1 or a 0 to actually turn it on so I need to change whatever you say change that to a 1 so I've just put a change node in there going to move things out a bit so if someone tweets it'll come through to the change and it'll wake up the dinosaur but because I don't want to turn it off I'll put a little delay in here let's start tidying things up a bit so after 5 seconds I want to change it let me take those off ok so hopefully you can now see so if someone tweets Waite Dyno we change to a 1 and turn the Dyno on after a delay of 5 seconds that same tweet will change to a 0 and turn my Dyno off I'm going to put that on there as well so a deploy I'm going to put a debug on there as well just in case so I can see what's happening ok can someone put their hand up if they're tweeted no one's tweeting oh yep so someone's tweeted having fun with robotic dinosaurs at Wuthering Bytes and someone else tweeted hello and the dinosaurs woken up so I can now completely disconnect my laptop from this and as long as the pie's got power connected to the Dyno whenever anyone tweets hashtag Waite Dyno Dyno will wake up and start nodding so some of these staff were thinking hey I can put this in the kids bedroom and actually have it upstairs and when it's dinner time I'm going to make Dyno and it'll start nodding but no a little toy dinosaur is well a little toy dinosaur I wanted to play with the big dinosaurs in the park so they gave me a little dinosaur this is Dee Dee the desktop dinosaur and she would actually work with all the thingatrons to make her work and she does exactly what the bigger dinosaurs do so she'll wag her tail she'll open her mouth and she'll bounce her body up and down in order to actually use whatever I do here on the big main dinosaurs we had to develop some more electronics and James McFarlane from Airborne Engineering has actually developed a whole set of touch bridge system that will allow and it's now in all the dinosaurs on the park and it will allow the Ralfby Pies to control motors I'm going to just go back to some node red here so this is on another pie but I've got the tail working on and off the jaws work and the jaws have got a sensor so they know when they're open or closed so it'll just do one up and down and the body and the jaws all at the same time now if I put this one here so you can also get them to talk so I've also now got a Twitter feed already set up here with Wuthering Bites connected on deploy so if anyone tweets or if anyone tweets Wuthering Bites hopefully she'll roar yes DD is female if you saw the clip on robot wars you'll understand that my Twitter rate has been hit sorry but I can force it and I can also make it say anything I want so you now actually have control of DD with these hashtags if you tweet any of those hashtags DD will start moving around I'm just going to disconnect the speaker because I'm going to play a video and I don't trust any of you so this is a video taken of that first hack session that I did at Black Gang Chine we got the staff together we got some makers and hackers together and we actually had someone Andy Samford-Clark from IBM who was at that first hack session and the staff was saying but we want when you walk past the motion sensor we want it to do something different every time just like rolling a dice we want it to be random we don't want it to every time do the same thing so over that weekend Andy was texting and tweeting to Dave Conway-Jones from IBM and together they put together a random node which if I can do this I've lost it it's somewhere on there there it is of the general build because the staff wanted it at Black Gang it was all taken open source and now it's there for anyone to use so here's the video of that first event so we're going to do a random find past all the dinosaurs the plan for day 2 is for the guys who have been learning to use what they've learned and make this dinosaur a new in whichever way they want to and do some samples around it and modifying the box that Mark started working on yesterday so he's already modified one of the dinosaur controllers but a Raspberry Pi inside it and that's worked really well because it's actually out in the park doing work for all the customers that are coming out at the moment have you had a sense of input? have you found a sense of input? some of the other dinosaur boxes to do the same thing you can be here today so I'm carrying on today what he started yesterday other people in this room are working on the software to go on the Raspberry Pi so when I finish the hardware they'll blow the software on the software will choreograph the movement of the dinosaur to actually make it a bit more sequence than it was before what do you mean get to know? what do you mean get the message into your program so it won't have to have a real sense of input you can see that there's no sense of testing down I've got a bit of a computer background so I've got the basics of how things work but I've got to see the language and that's all new for the program that they're giving to see is very so you hope you can get a dinosaur to sing a song? I'll charge you off I'll just put one dinosaur and set the pitch low and then let's go out can we hear it? c'mon hear it basically we've set it up or it's on a timer so every few seconds it'll activate a different motor and then we can so the sound will come so what's going on which we haven't done yet on my hand heal heal now fetch Raspberry Pi and Node Red really rescued the dinosaurs at Black Gang Chine but the dinosaurs from Black Gang Chine helped Raspberry Pi and Node Red get onto BBC Robot Wars so I think it's as the whole of the maker community it's a win-win all round that concludes my talk thank you