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Happenings, Meetings

October 9, 2017 Meeting Recap

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  •  Announcements
    • On October 20th Nordic Semiconductor is conducting an all-day seminar with members of their R&D organization on Friday, October 20th. They’ll cover the nRF52 chip series, Bluetooth 5, Bluetooth Mesh, and “802.15.4 and Thread: Mesh technologies for IoT applications”. They say somewhere that attendees will receive an nRF52 dev board. Registration here.
    • Monday, November 1st at Duke University the IEEE/Robotics (aka TAR) meeting will offer a presentation about Duke’s humanoid robot project. (This is not the same as the IEEE project being done at the Forge Initiative )  Again: this meeting is not at NC State for November. Pizza and beverages at 6:20 pm, the program starts at 7 pm. Location, parking, and other details and painless “register now”  button to gauge the pizza order are here. Program:
      • Humans and Autonomy Lab – Humans’ Interaction with Autonomous Systems, by Dr. Michael Clamann
      • Explainable AI, by Dr. Alexander Stimpson
      • Experiment on Humans’ Trust in Risk-Aware Autonomy, by Dr. Lixiao Huang
    • November 8th at the McKimmon Center at NC State will be PCB Carolina, “North Carolina’s Premier Electronics Trade Show”.  They offer outstanding food, a range of technical presentations and many vendor and organization booths to do with PCB design and production, and electronic assembly as well as related vendor’s wares. Details here.
  • Problem of the Month
    • Paul presented his “sorting a mixture of colored marbles” mechanical+electronics problem and gathered ideas submitted by the attendees
    • Details of problem-solving sessions are available here.
  • LTSpice talk. The materials are on Carl’s GitHub repository here  and he’ll update it as the project matures.
  • Show-and-tell
    • Glenn Smith showed a charging base he build for his Ham Radio.  There was a 3D printed (ABS plastic) base with a LiPo charger board inside.  It plugs into his car dash (not via cigarette lighter port, but a more robust connection).
    • Paul MacDougal showed his mushroom growing box.  A plastic tub with a 12V fan, a CO2 sensor, and a DHT22 temperature/humidity sensor.  An Arduino monitors the CO2 and turns on the fan at 800 ppm CO2 and turns off the fan at 750 ppm CO2.
    • Paul MacDougal showed his pushup counter based on the horizontal ultrasound sensor technique suggested in the September meeting.  It worked well “in the lab”, which has hardwood floors, but not so well on carpet.  He will continue to develop this project.
  • General discussion and final questions

Archive of past meeting slides, videos, code and design files

Happenings, Meetings, Projects, Site Announcements, Tutorials

September 11 Meeting Recap

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  • Announcements
    • Sparkcon starts this weekend with “Geek Expo of Maker and Digital Arts” back at the Redhat Annex on Saturday from 11am to 5pm. And this just in. Adam and Dan will be there with this stuff:

      Maniacal Labs @ Sparkcon this Saturday: they’re back!
    • Raleigh Mini MakerFaire is September 23rd. Splatspace will have a learn to solder booth and other things to share. TriEmbed is passing this year but multiple folks will be attending with handouts.
  • Problem of the Month
    • Paul presented his “counting pushups” problem and gathered ideas submitted by the attendees
    • Details of past problem solving sessions are available via the “Problem of the Month” main menu above.  Or here.
  • Home Automation Presentation
    • What can we say? Ben stunned much of his audience, especially during the Q&A.
  • Show-and-tell
    • Paul gave an update about his power over ethernet development project and his ongoing wrestling match with 802.3AF.
    • Alex presented his “leg movement logging via accelerometer using European Data Format” project using a Teensy USB and open source tools and custom Python code. He gave everyone a great accounting of a typical development project based off open source starting points and got the final results he was after. The GitHub repository for his project is here.
    • (No notes were taken: if you contributed something please drop a line on the email list so this can be back-filled!)
  • General discussion and final questions

Archive of past meeting slides, videos, code and design files

Meetings

September 11th Meeting: Home Automation

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“I am Ben Goldberg, a 5th grader in Durham.  I am proficient at programming in Arduino and Python and playing Pokemon GO. 😉

My talk is about a smart home light I made for my bedroom using a Raspberry Pi as the server and a ESP8266 to control the light and be a client on my Raspberry Pi.”

 

Come to the meeting and learn how to make a smart light that integrates with Apple HomeKit. This presentation, another Problem of the Month, and the usual discussions and show and tell are all in store. Meeting details

Meetings

May 8th meeting: well pumps, shade trees, and hot solar

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There are a few things to share from this month’s meeting :

  • Folks compared notes about participation at RARSFest last month. The “non-commerical” aspect of Triembed folk’s participation at the next RARSFest is expected to be free. Whoever takes the lead on preparing for the next one can arrange this and get “just the right spot” for tables if they contact the organizers early in the process (4-6 weeks ahead).
  • Shane Trent passed a heavy duty patent law exam and is now a seriously useful resource for area developers wanting to invest in IP via the patent process. Congrats, Shane!
  • Paul MacDougal shared his setup for remotely detecting potential freezups of his well pump.
  • Chip McClelland showed an air temperature logging addition to his repertoire of park service tools being embedded at Umstead. This will allow the park staff to measure the cooling effect of newly planted shade trees.  Chip also passed around his full custom battery management board for folks to admire (built at Pete’s shop).
  • Pete described tests of the Silvertel AG103 Maximum Power Point Tracking solar powered battery charger board and a ten watt Ecoworthy solar panel being prepared for the “Little Library” Jeff Crews (of Splatspace) built and installed at the Durham Scrap Exchange.
Happenings, Meetings, Tutorials

December 12th Meeting: Better than Blinky

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blinkinglightsfromgoogleimagesPaul MacDougal will talk about alternatives to the classic Arduino beginning program and shares this summary:
“Blink is a great first example for Arduino programming, but a really bad example of embedded programming. With 99.9% of its time spent in delay(), nothing else can happen. This talk will show how to rewrite blink in several different ways to allow it to play nicely with other functions.”

Join Paul and others at NCSU for the regular meeting. More details on the “at NCSU” meeting page.