Thank you to Logic Supply for their generosity and generally-awesome facilities!
Thanks to our presenters Brian, Matthew, and Anthony! There was a whole lot of knowledge and understanding flowing around that table and it was a great experience to evesdrop on it all despite not being the most well informed electronics hobbyist (yet!). Brian certainly had some kits and gear that were tempting to buy, and the free breadboard was really cool. I know I'll be perusing his site quite a bit over the next few days (wulfden.org) It struck me that the Lilypad Arduino board, which can "Go through the wash" might be an interesting Arduino board for the ROV project ... if it can handle being underwater, it makes me wonder if it would be more resistant to moisture when used inside the ROV? I'm not saying to run the board submersed... but that if it got wet, it wouldn't be a huge deal to dry it off and keep going? Just a thought. I talked with someone (Sam maybe? ... who was sitting beside me again?) about his basic example of programming an Arduino board from his Mac and making an LED flash... it seemed to me that we could do another Arduino meeting with some presenters showing, on a projector, them writing out some basic code and commands to do different things: and Arduino programming tutorial type of night. Start with something super-simple like making the LED blink for those who have no experience, and move on to controlling motors and servos and sensors. Go over the basic circuits being built so folks who don't remember electronics 101 can get refreshed without feeling like they are asking stupid questions, and then show the code that interfaces with the chip and the circuit... etc. Just a thought to anyone interested in leading such a presentation... I think there were a wide variety of skill levels with electronics hobby work present last night... you have folks like Flint who used to work with Charles Babbage and can tell you why the Babbage mafia sucked, and then folks like maybe Sam and Josh who know enough to fool around but haven't built a major Arduino project yet, and folks like Me who used to know what I was doing, way back in University but consider handling a soldering iron a yearly event, and probably folks with little or no experience at all, but who are curious. And it seems also that most of the people there have a lot of software programming background, so seeing the hardware mixed with the code would be interesting...? Anyway. It was one of the coolest meetings I've been to for VAGUE and am super-glad that the idea was suggested and followed through on. Thanks again! Live Long and Prosper! -Nick This communication, including any attachments, is solely for the confidential use of the person(s) named above. If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete/destroy the original. Any reader other than the intended recipient is hereby notified that any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this message is strictly prohibited.
