Post Syndicated from Liz Upton original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/marathon-man/
This Sunday, Lee Bowyer will be running the Liverpool Marathon. He emailed me a few months ago with an idea about doing it with some additional hardware on board.
This is Lee. Photograph taken while not running.
Lee is running to raise funds for a charity called Addaction. He says:
I am supporting Addaction because of all the wonderful work they do with those who have alcohol and drug misuse problems. Thanks to wonderful people like those at Addaction I haven’t touched alcohol for nearly three years.
We got him talking to fellow marathon-runner Pete “Mythic Beasts” Stevens, they subsequently had long discussions about the corrosive nature of sweat, and things went quiet for a bit.
Lee bounced back into my inbox yesterday with a device to unveil. Meet the Raspberry Kiss.
Raspberry Kiss. Note little pancake motor.
Raspberry Kiss in sweat-proof housing
What’s it do? Dead simple: the device is strapped around Lee’s waist, and allows people to track him on a map as he runs the marathon. There’s a GPS tracker attached to the Raspberry Pi, along with a little portable modem and a battery pack. The modem uploads information from the GPS module to a database on his webserver (hosted on a Raspberry Pi, natch), so you can see where he is on a map on his website.
But there’s more! You’ll have spotted the little pancake motor in the first picture – it’s the same sort of motor that makes your phone vibrate. Every time someone makes a donation, the motor buzzes to let Lee know – motivating and massaging all at once.
Everybody who donates will be entered into a prize draw. At Raspberry Pi, we don’t normally sponsor prizes like this (simply because we get asked to do so several times a day, and saying yes to everybody would cripple us financially), but we’re breaking our own rule for Lee’s marathon. The winning name picked out of a (sweaty) hat will win a Raspberry Pi 3 with a case signed by Eben, a Sense HAT and a camera board; we might pop some other goodies in the bag too.
We recommend waiting until Sunday to donate (you can fill out a form on Lee’s website that’ll send you an email to remind you when the marathon starts), so that you can motivate Lee with charitable giving. Good luck Lee. We really hope the thing doesn’t chafe.
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