Shitbox Rally – Telemetrics, Cancer, 4,000kms

As if I wasn’t busy enough already… with three jobs, a never-ending house reno and a list of unfinished personal projects stretching back to my teens. So of course, I’ve got involved in a new crazy venture which has led to the fusion of my various day-jobs with Deepend/Nomad and GoGet car-share along with my personal interests in the Internet of Things and curing cancer.

Shitbox Rally – The Internets Team!

Matt and Dave are driving from Perth to Darwin in a $1,000 car for Cancer Council and have decided to deck it out with as much Internet-connected tech as a 12v battery can push through a second-hand inverter. The developers at Deepend and Nomad Agency have weighed in, building a website in a week, a Rasberry Pi cluster containing a LAMP stack to harvest photos and sensor information, to manage Spotify streams and several redundant Internet connections.

The guys at GoGet were more than happy to pitch in, so they’ve donated time and equipment to wire up the car with the Fleetcutter telematics hardware and a custom server, which I’ve just finished installing. It’s in fact an full installation of the fleet-management system, doubling up as a trial of the Fleetcutter SaaS offering I’ve been developing over the last 6 months. More importantly they’ve donated an snazzy orange wing-mirror.

It’s been a win-win situation for the two companies as Deepend’s urgent need of a smart API into the vehicle has really focused my efforts on tidying up the Fleetcutter offering, which is incredibly powerful and complex internally but doesn’t have a simple interface for open consumption by developers (at least not for internal business purposes, it has several public APIs). Having a specific set of urgent needs from experienced developers has been given me clarity in an MVP API.

It’s amazing what you can achieve as a team when you get all behind a charitable venture with a deadline!

Shitbox tech ACD v2

 

This is what (probably) we’re planning to build in the next two months. Quite a bit is already done, but there’s still a long way to go. I’m sure there’s going to be some late nights in April…

You can read more details of our progress on Deepend’s Chrysalis blog.

So far:

http://chrysalis.deepend.com.au/technology/rally-the-future-against-cancer-shitbox-repairs-part-1

http://chrysalis.deepend.com.au/technology/shtboxrallyweek2update

http://chrysalis.deepend.com.au/shitbox-rally-2/rally-the-future-against-cancer-shtspiration

And don’t forget to donate to Cancer Council at RallyTheFuture! Thanks.

 

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