Space beckons for Raspberry Pi coders

'Team Terminal' from UTC Lincoln

A team of students from a University Technical College supplied by Rapid have won a prestigious competition, by designing a Raspberry Pi application that will be taken to the International Space Station next month.

Henry Barker, Ralph Reader-Sullivan and Theo Drabble, from UTC Lincoln, won the Astro Pi competition with their series of games that will test astronauts' mental dexterity and reaction times in space. The Astro Pi initiative will see British astronaut Tim Peake run a series of programs on two specially designed Raspberry Pi units as part of the 'Principia' mission. 

Calling themselves 'Team Terminal', the Lincoln students came up with their idea after unearthing some NATO research about the mental atrophy that affects astronauts in space. Their series of reaction games record the response times of the astronauts, with the ultimate aim of discovering how reaction times change over the course of a complete mission. Mentored by Mark Hall, their Computer Science teacher, the students received an added bonus when their entry was voted the best overall submission from the five secondary schools whose ideas made it onto the ISS. The prize for their school is to be photographed from space by an Airbus or SSTL satellite.




The two Astro Pi units Peake will take into space comprise a Raspberry Pi Model B+, a custom real time clock board and the Sense HAT, a bespoke shield created by the Raspberry Pi Foundation for use on the mission. The Sense HAT includes an LED matrix display and is fitted with a range of sensors to measure environmental conditions such as humidity, temperature, pressure, magnetic field and acceleration.

Rapid has been a supplier of UTC Lincoln for several years and helped provide the school with Raspberry Pi computers and accessories that were used by 'Team Terminal' in their project.

Tim Peake

Over 200 primary schools, code clubs and hundreds of secondary schools from across the UK entered the Astro Pi competition. There were seven winning ideas and inventions, including programs that detect the presence of other astronauts on the ISS, use the telemetry data from the NORAD detection system to show the flag of the nation the ISS is flying over, and an environmental system monitor which continually measures the craft's temperature, humidity and pressure and highlights any potential dangers.

The 'Principia' mission launches on December 15th.