Project "Perscope booth" is an international three month project which is being created within partnership between Leibniz universität Hannover and Peter the Great St.Petersburg polytechinc university. First stage of the project was created during the VIII Fab Lab Polytech school.

Step 1: Concept

The main idea was to connect two cities: Hannover and St.Petersburg with a constant connection through a periscope with a display which will allow you to take a peek at what's going on there. So, here are the objectives we'd have to archieve in order to make the project:

Syncronize two Raspberry pi's through Internet
Make booth itself
Make “periscope” with LCD display and censor which defines angle of view
Make a rotating platform for web camera
Transmit control signal form periscope censor to motor of rotating platform which is connected to another Raspberry pi and transmit video stream to display of another Raspberry pi
Make a censor which can say if somebody’s using a booth to let people from another city know that they’re being watched so they could greet that person
Make another set of devices to deliver it to Hannover

Step 2: Booth

As we were short on budget we had to make it as cheap as possible. So we decided to make it as a floor, celling four collumns and two lightboxes for the sides with some info about cities we are connecting.

We milled roof and floor on a milling machine of 18mm plywood and got 40x40 wooden timber for collumns which we attached to the milled parts with metal collumns and screws. Also, to make it more transportable, we attached four wheels to the floor.

Step 3: Rotating Platform With Censor

As were unable to get fancy motors with encoders we had to reinvent a bicycle so we made our own angle censor with a resisor. It's extremely cheap and allows us to read the angle from 0 to 360 degrees but we lost the ability to rotate a periscope at more than 180 degrees each way. We made a modular platform with motor, resistor and 1:1 gear. All the parts were made on a laser cutter. Censor for periscope is quite similar.

Step 4: Periscope Helmet

As 3D printing a helmet would be extremely long we decided to make it on a milling machine using 2.5D milling and then conntect layers with screws and PVA glue for wood.

Step 5: Getting Video Stream

This was the first and only challenge we took with using Raspberry Pi. The main idea is to transfer video stream from the camera to Web and then connect to an ip adress from another device. We used motion service of Raspberry and then after dozen of reinstalling system (the Internet connection crashed constantly so we couldn't install the system without errors for a long time) we finally got a picture and could connect to a camera in local web with a smartphone.

Step 6: Materials and Components

For one set of devices during Fab Lab Polytech school we used

2.5 sheets of 18mm plywood
1 sheet of 4mm plywood
2m LED stripe
12 V power supply
5V power supply
Raspberry Pi model B
Nema 17 stepper motor
Stepper motor driver L297
50x80x16 bearing (№6010)
Web camera

Step 7: Successes and Failures

What have we managed to do:

Basically, the mechanical part

Booth
Periscope
Rotating platform
Getting video from camera
Connecting from separate device to camera video stream

What yet has to be done:

Another portable set of devices to send it to Germany
Making the censor work and making the program to control the motor with data from periscope censor
Syncronizing two Raspberries

So, in conclusion, we have to make almost the whole programming part and we have three months to master our Raspberry Ri skills.