Back in the office now and can barely keep my eyes open! What a great weekend, I can't believe the amount of attention our blimp got, lots of photos, lots of people wanting to help out. In the end we had a team of 5, myself, Niqui, Alistair, Stephen and Shawn. We went through about 5 different verions of the blimp, different hardware, different kinds of comms, different interface ideas. The concept we finally got to was pretty cool, and it would have been working great for the presentation except for the bluetooth, there were more devices in the room than the software could list, so we couldnt pair them. I had my phone sending images up to a web server automatically over the Wifi but it was too heavy with the rest of the kit.

Still, we won the award for best hardware hack, which was unexpected. There were some really great hacks in that category, like the real/virtual reality mashup with paper submarines controlling virtual submarines in second life.

We did an interview with the film crew there but I'll be pretty surprised if they use it, we'd barely got the thing working and were about to go on stage to demo it, so we were a bit distracted.

The site's still up at bli.mp, the balloons are somewhere over London as far as I know, and we've got a blog here. We'll get photos and videos on there, and hopefully find out where the balloons got to, and we've got some plans for a new version of the system that will let you fly the blimp anywhere in the world!

Thanks again to the team for getting this idea off the ground :)

Labels: blimp, hackday, hackdaylondon