Philly Native Andrew McGill Creates Obama Detector Device

Andrew McGill via LinkedIn

Really Smart Guy Andrew McGill is best known in Philadelphia for his website PhillyRapSheet.com, which scans court filings every 30 minutes to tell you who was arrested and for what. And now he’s come up with a device called the Barack Obama Detector, a desktop device that will tell you where our president is located.

McGill made the Barack Obama Detector at his new gig at Washington D.C.’s National Journal. The Cheltenham High and Penn State grad previously worked for the Allentown Morning Call and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

He built the device in about an hour and for less than $100 using an Arduino, a microcontroller device that employs an open-source platform. People have used the Arduino to make auto-lacing shoes, a flame-throwing Jack-o-lantern, a jacket-mounted turn signal for bicyclists, and now a thing that tells you where the leader of the Free World is.

Well, it doesn’t tell you exactly where Obama is, as that would probably be a major security threat and would take a lot longer than an hour to create. By scraping Obama’s public schedule, the Barack Obama Detector alerts the user if he is in Washington D.C., elsewhere in the United States or overseas. Obama’s location is indicated using one of three light bulbs.

Watch McGill explain his device over at the National Journal.