Category Archives: Meetings

Monday January 13th: RTOS

real time operating system
NC State, Centennial Campus Engineering Building One, Room 1007, 911 Partners Way, Raleigh, NC 27606 (same as IEEE/robotics/TAR meetings through May) Monday, Jan 13, 7-9PM. A map for finding the meeting and additional details here: https://triembed.org/meetings/at-ncsu/

Agenda:

Announcements 

Problem of the Month: Paul MacDougal

Presentation: Charles Lord, an area embedded development professional and expert instructor, will go over RTOS fundamentals as well as providing heuristics and guidelines to help answer the question of how much "real time behavior" you need. (Charles will be giving a presentation in February too: stay tuned for details)

Show and Tell and general discussion: Including examples of two new OSH Park PCB service offerings to be passed around for close inspection: do it yourself, pro quality flexible PCBs and clear solder mask over ENIG traces on a black substrate (so cool you should bring your shades to look at it!) Also, you can see their latest improvement over the old "mouse bite" tab routing that is being delivered more and more often. 

Door prize giveaways: Protocol highly variable!
 
(Prospective donations for the giveaway box always welcome!)

Image copied without permission from https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/r/realsyst.htm

April 8th Meeting: Hitchhikers Guide to LoRaWAN! by Charles Lord

LoRaWAN™ – a Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) specification intended for wireless battery-operated Things in a regional, national or global network. Join us as Charles Lord reviews the elements of LoRa and LoRaWAN, the advantages (and disadvantages) of this protocol, and the tools we need to develop IoT solutions that use LoRa – including building your own LoRaWAN hub. Charles will do a demo and show some examples of ways to build your own LoRa network for fun or commercial use. We will also look at how we can build our own LoRaWAN gateway using an inexpensive kit for both development and for deployment where a local LoRa provider doesn’t exist – and how to interface where we do have providers – like in the Triangle!

Charles J. Lord, PE is an embedded systems consultant and trainer with over 40 years’ experience in system design and development in medical, military, and industrial applications. For the last twelve years, he has specialized in the integration of communication protocols into clients’ products, including USB, Ethernet, and low-power wireless including ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, LoRa, and Thread.

Meeting Details here.

Image from Cisco’s LoRaWAN datasheet.

February 11th Meeting: Microbe-powered Remote Sensing

 

The presentation slides are now in the meeting archive here.

Many different kinds of microbial metabolic processes  generate free electrons that can be harvested, either to enhance activities like water treatment or hydrogen production or to be a source of electrical energy.

Join us at the next TriEmbed meeting to find out how simple-to-make microbial fuel cells can be used to power embedded systems for truly remote sensor applications.

As well as seeing the presentation, you’ll be invited to join in a brainstorming session to invent and explore different solutions to a practical problem involved with a specific project.  There will also be a raffle for IOT and other gadgets and gizmos and embedded development supplies from the giveaway box.  The last part of the meeting will be devoted to show and tell and general discussion.

Meeting details are here.

NCSU and area CE/tech-interested students: This is for you!

Owl that judges emotions via Google AI
Robotic owl that judges emotions via Google AI

In a recent edition of the Embedded FM podcast, you can listen to ideas for projects from a fire hose. This is a concentrated and amplified version of the sort of ideas regularly floated, discussed, and demonstrated every second Monday night in one of the NCSU engineering buildings during monthly Triangle Embedded Interest Group (TriEmbed) meetings.

If you’re a student hoping to find a killer internship or permanent job doing embedded development this summer, check out TriEmbed. Details are under the Meetings dropdown menu above.

We look forward to seeing and getting to know you there.

 

October 9, 2017 Meeting Recap

  •  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

September 11 Meeting Recap

  • 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

September 11th Meeting: Home Automation

 

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