Category Archives: Happenings

Upcoming events and meetings. A feed of notices in lieu of (but hopefully some day augmenting) a calendar.

Happenings, Meetings, Projects, Tools

For Wednesday 6/29: Face to Face COMMUNITY PROJECT MEETING (click here)

Leave a comment
TriEmbed Community Project ESP32C3+Dialog Mixed Signal FPGA
ESP32C3+Dialog Mixed Signal FPGA DIP or SMD adapter board

On Wednesday, 6/29/22 at 6:30pm at the Forge Initiative, 2172 N Salem St Suite 001, Apex, NC 27523 there will be another meeting of the TriEmbed comunity project to create and use development tools coupling ESP32 microcontrollers with Dialog mixed signal Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs).

Best to park on the street or in front of an adjacent building if possible so that folks who find the hill hard to walk can park in front of the door.

This will follow up from last month’s “installathon” format to refine tool chain installation and get as many people as possible up and running while turning attention to the Dialog Synthesis tool and creating and running some simple FPGA applications. There will also be demos of things around the corner and related technology (Aaardvark has a graphing function now!) A lot of work has gone into the project (special thanks to alpha testers Jaime Johnsen, Rob Mackie and Dawn Trembath and note taker Glen Smith). Bring your laptop (currently best support is for Linux followed by Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) but raw Windows will succeed with extra work and Docker images are in the works to take the sweat out. An ESP32 dev board is highly desirable but there will be a few spares at the meeting. The meeting will be facilitated by the usual suspects Rob Mackie, Nick Edgington and Pete Soper and is scheduled to end at 9pm.

The daily infection rate in Wake county is currently 433 per day and there will be high risk people at the meeting. Please wear a mask (available at the meeting). There will be an ice chest with some soft drinks to enjoy outside but you’re invited to bring your favorite.

Happenings, Meetings

October 9, 2017 Meeting Recap

Leave a comment

  •  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

1 Comment
  • 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

Happenings, Tools, Tutorials

SMD Soldering Demo @ Triangle DIYBio Popup

Leave a comment

Today until 2pm is the second day of an open house of the area Triangle DIY Biology organization near Scrap Exchange in Durham. I was button-holed to “do something” at this event and decided the easiest thing to demonstrate would be how to hand solder fine pitch SMDs. TriEmbed info sheets are on hand and we’re also plugging SplatSpace. I’m using a little space at the popup to coordinate curation of Fred Ebeling’s Collection of electronic parts at SplatSpace.