#Snowdonbuild - Final Day

Day 6 of #snowdonbuild - a unique collaborative project in open hardware and open software, held in rural Snowdonia.


The remote farmhouse in Snowdonia, which has been Snowdonbuild HQ for the last 6 days.



Most of the team, Bethan, Sam, Glyn, (PV Panels) Matt, Trystan, Suneil - and Ken behind the camera.

So we've nearly come to the end of the build session - and judging by the lack of bodies at 8:30am - it seems that last night might have been a late one!

Today is the day that we pull all the project threads together and put together a full system and documentation.



The "Bothy" extension to the farmhouse, which forms the accommodation and lab areas.

The team prepare to line-up for a final mug-shot by the solar PV panels.

Over the last few days we have built a solar PV monitoring system and used the Nanode to control a simple solar tracker.

Making full use of the popular wireless JeeNodes, Glyn and Trystan have incorporated the JeeNode wireless functionality into the Nanode, and also devised ways of configuring the Nanode from a web browser.

Sam has been looking at the server side of things, and found ways of making very efficient web pages from minimal amounts of served HTML.

Matt has been working on various drawings and artwork, which will be used on the new Nanode and openenergy websites, and throughout the documentation pages. Here's an example of a Nanode graphic that Matt has produced to help illustrate some of the Nanode documentation. As an attention to detail - the resistor colour codes are actually correct - Nice one Matt!

Suneil has built up a veroboard version of the solar PV measuring circuit, so that it can be plugged directly into the Nanode to make a simple demonstration board which anyone can copy.

And on the last day, I was mainly responsible for lunch - a real feast of porkchops and sausage casseroled in Strongbow Cider and Chardonnay - with mountains of potatoes and gravy.

Back Row. Suneil Tagore, Ken Boak, Matt Gaffen, Sam Carlisle.

Front Row Trystan Lea, Glyn Hudson (Photo: Bethan)

In all, we had six developers working on collaborative openenergy and Nanode hardware and software projects for the best part of five full days, and two half days. At times the development work continued to 5am (Sam holds the endurance record) and restarted at 7:30am.

The outcome of the exercise is a strong development team with a wide variety of skills and expertise - who have proven that they can work together efficiently on exciting open source energy projects. I hope that the Snowdonbuild 2 is the first of many such collaborations.