Three Eyes Monkeys – The future of Pi in the sky
Raspberry Pis with camera modules, ready for testing.
Okay, it’s a whole year since my last post on this blog. I’ve been busy.
Flying Monkey TV was selected for an Arts Council England (ACE) funded mentoring scheme in 2010, via The Culture Company‘s Artimelt programme, aimed at incubating early-stage projects that might then go on to greater things.
Although the project has had some funding early on, it was not much and nothing ongoing. We also applied for funding from Umbro Industries, 4IP (now defunkt) and Nesta‘s Digital R&D programme, amongst others, but no joy so far. I suspect I am a whole generation too old for Umbro and we didn’t seem to tick the right boxes for Nesta. In the meantime, I’ve decided to stop applying for stuff and start applying stuff, if you see what I mean. Life is short and funding applications are a very onerous task best left to professional administrators.
At least to give ACE their money’s worth, I have been continuing to develop techniques and accumulate equipment to progress the project despite its lack of funding. The downside is that it gets done when it gets done. Anyway, out of my own pocket I’ve just acquired a little testbed of equipment that I can use to test my ideas.
If you were reading my Flying Monkey TV Missing Link blog from a couple of years ago, you will know that some of my technical research of the time, thanks to a small bursary from Access Space, Sheffield UK, was rendered entirely pointless by the launch of the Raspberry Pi platform. It’s taken me a while to get around to it, but late last year I got my first Pi and this week have just accumulated three more, and all four with camera modules. I have only just got together all the various bits and bobs to make it into a functional network, but stay tuned for more shenanigans.
I am also testing battery-powered setups and solar charging, so expect a few passes close to the sun.
Flying Monkey TV 