Monday 21st March
Arduinos and Friends – John McDonald (Actinium) and Jason Tolloy (ROK Technology).
John introduced us to his Dalek development which uses an Arduino Mega and a number of shields ( add on controllers) to drive the motors and provide speech. With a separate classic Arduino Uno he was able to show how sketches (C++ programs) worked. So we saw both the hardware and the IDE
Just when we thought we were getting the hang of this stuff Jason came in and introduced the other competitors in the space, The Raspberry Pi, Netduinos, the PCduinos and others. It seems that while the shields are plug compatible across many of the products the operating systems and support tools are totally different. It seems the difficult think is to pick the produces that will come out in front.
Jason showed us the ThreadBoard he has developed and is producing. This is a prototyping board that aimed at make developments easier with any of the devices discussed.
There was a Prize draw. Alex Moss claimed the HP F4C80AA 7500mAH power pack donated by Arena Business Technology and Colin Kemp the ThreadBoard donated by ROK Technology.