Project Overview

History

This project(Django design) was originally started by the Tooltron team(Julian Binder, Nishant Pol, and Tom Mullins). Tom was in charge of creating the majority of the Django CRM system which's purpose it was to determine from an RFID if a particular user was authorized to use a machine. This evolved into a new CRM system that officers have been using since then to register new members.

Early Fall 2014 Brent Strysko saw this system as an opportunity to work towards solving several goals listed below:

• Have more than just officers build "infrastructure" for the club (ex. Tooltron, Quotetron, Windowtron, clock, etc.).
• Infrastructure projects, unlike other projects are by design in the "always-on" state. There should be an easy way to programmatically interact with these projects.
• Lower the barrier to entry for new members to feel they are building something interesting. Blinking an LED on an Arduino is a good starting point but wouldn't having a message be spoken on the club speakers be more interesting if it was controlled by an Arduino with the same level of complexity as blinking a LED?
• Lower the barrier to entry for communication between users to projects(UTP) and projects to projects(PTP) so projects can build on top of each other without having to worry about the infrastructure allowing them to do so. There are a few commercial services that offer useful features related to this point, however at the time of this project's design and writing they either have limitations that are too complex for a micro-controller to process, $$$ after certain amount of activity, limited free features, etc.
• Allow club related data to be easily programmatically accessible to allow more members to be inspired to build more types of unique systems.
• Allow club information to easily be updated but also organized(not just a wiki list) allowing above projects and services to make use of it.

As he started developing the project to accomplish these goals he was advised to also expand it to a new website, one that could easily be updated as the current website at the time could not be edited easily. Since the website could use the same data already exposed by the CRM system, this was a logical choice. On November 1st 2014 the old website was replaced with this system.

Current Mission

This project's purpose is to easily enable a "connected club". There are dozens of technologies being used by projects at any given time. Technologies and designs go in and out of use and style frequently. For this reason this project aims to be specific enough to allow projects and users to all communicate easily but generic enough such that what is provided supports everyone's needs. This is accomplished by providing a REST API accessible from any internet connected device. At the time of this writing with both Python and Arduino bindings available communication with other Roboclub projects is as simple as a few lines of code.

For more details check out Getting Started: API.