The Christmas Boombox on Wheels

This weekend I attended an IoT hackathon at FabLabLondon which was a really nice break from all the other hackathons which I have been going to recently. There really wasn’t a sense of competition during the hack and as the space was a lot smaller than most hacks, it really felt a lot more relaxed and collaborative. The sponsors, Resin.io brought a LOT of hardware and gave us the opportunity to try out their Raspberry Pis running on their platform along with various things to connect to them such as screens, motors, LED light and various other things. The theme of the hackathon was to build anything with a festive theme and share your knowledge with others.

For our hack we decided to make a boombox on wheels which would follow you around playing Christmas music. The music was controlled by a web server I had which would accept requests via text using Twilio and then use the YouTube API to fetch the song and play it on my firefox phone which was hidden inside the boombox. This gave me the opportunity to do more with the Twilio API that I have done before as well as trying out the YouTube API which I am completely new to. I worked with Uroš who worked on the hardware of the box by installing the wheels and sorting out the speakers which we had to hacked into outputting to two speaks instead of single portable one. Sidd sorted out the electronics behind making the wheels move and the LED smile light up. In the end we won first place with the most votes, our prize was a £250 gift voucher to Kickstarter.