By Eric Miller, Celina Bekins, and Jared Briskman
In the Olin College Library, we have a tool called the Idea Harvester. The Idea Harvester is about the height of a person, rolls around on caster wheels, and has a variety of features - including an HDMI-enabled screen, a roll of butcher paper, a light, a soldering arm, and a bell.
For this project, we set out to build a Baby Harvester: a mini version of the Idea Harvester. The Baby Harvester stands a little over 10 inches tall and sports a 2.4” PiTFT screen, a thermal printer, and a button, all connected to a RasPi 3 that sits on the bottom. The Baby Harvester is a platform, meant to enable all kinds of printer and/or screen usage. Outside developers can write apps for the Baby Harvester, as demonstrated by our sample app. The backend server can be found here.
Documentation can be found in our wiki.
This project was completed for a class called Hacking the Library, taught at Olin College of Engineering in the Spring of 2018 by Oliver Steele and Jeff Goldenson.
