So it’s about that time again when I decide I should write more blog posts and do more with my Arduinos etc.

It’s not that I haven’t been doing anything since my last post in….July! I actually have, I just haven’t deemed them interesting enough to write about.

For the past few months I’ve been attending fortnightly HackWimbledon events at my local library in..well duh, Wimbledon. The events see a varied mix of people (usually between 3 and 10 of them) get together to make, tinker and fiddle with different electronic things.

Sometimes I go to the events with a project in mind or perhaps just to fiddle with something new. Other times I’ve been and just helped out other people with what they’ve been doing.

In mid January the group started a mini competition, pretty simple really. Build something over the next 2 events (4 weeks) and be in with a chance of winning a Raspberry Pi 2. I decided to use this competition, along with an impending snowboarding trip to revitalise an idea I had made last year.

I titled the project ‘Offload’. The premise is to create a small, portable solution to the problem of running out of space on the SD cards of my GoPro cameras I use on trips snowboarding, mountain biking etc.

Version 1 was a Raspberry Pi Model B, a powered USB hub and a WiFi dongle. I connected a USB HDD and the GoPro’s to the hub and controlled the whole thing via an extremely crude web interface from the web browser on my phone, connecting via an ad-hoc WiFi network created by the Pi.

V1 had mixed success on my first outing on last years Snowboard trip. The web interface proved to not be of any use. Luckily I had an SSH client on my phone and was able to use the cmd line to perform the copying.

V1.1 was very minor improvements and was tried out on a mountain bike trip to Wales. It was a total failure, for some reason the Pi wouldn’t give my phone an IP address when I connected to the hotspot. I managed to get by on that trip via alternative means.

V1 was later lost completely. I formatted the SD card in the Pi, forgetting that I had stuff on there I wanted!

The plan for V2 was much more thought out. I’ll go into detail about it in my next post and hopefully get some of the code on GitHub and maybe even a few photos.