A long time ago in a galaxy far away, our CTO, Jeff Kowalski, got his hands on some Raspberry Pi computers. For those not familiar with these devices, a Raspberry Pi is a very small computer that is low-cost enough that it can be used for special purposes. When Jeff acquired these devices, he decided to hand them out to employees who could try to put them to good use. I blogged about the whole experience:
- Internal Autodesk Contest: Win a Raspberry Pi computer
- Internal Raspberry Pi Contest: And the winners are...
- Raspberry Pi: Poly want a cracker?
- Toward Making Facial Recognition As Easy As Pi
- Using a Raspberry Pi Computer to Read to the Blind
One of the winning recipients that I did not blog about was Autodesk Solutions Engineer, James Wedding, P.E., who wanted to use the computer to make a diabetic blood sugar monitor for his daughter. Though James was only able to have moderate success with his Raspberry Pi, he was able to continue his pioneering efforts and eventually collaborate with the Nightscout project, a group that was developing a system to relay information from an existing continuous glucose monitor to the cloud for remote reporting and monitoring. When Jeff first heard the news, he remarked "Amazing! It's precisely in the vein of what we hoped to inspire, and even though the current tool doesn't employ a Raspberry Pi, James told me it was our contest that got him engaged in the idea."
You can read about James' collaboration on the Microsoft News Center:
Instructables is an Autodesk community where people share steps for how to make things. James was even keen enough to write an instructable that describes his collaboration:
Way to go James.
Medical advancement is alive in the lab.