Thursday, March 26, 2009

after the dweenotalk..

Im just having a cup of tea before bed,so a few moments to reflect on the talk I delivered tonight - an intro to Arduino.

Its a big subject arduino, hard to cover in a short talk. Intros always tend to just scratch the surface, and in-depth talks tends to lose people on the bottom end of the learning curve too quickly. I tried my best to pitch tonights talk somewhere between those extremes, but I wonder if something got lost, or at least watered down in the process. You cant be all things to all people all at once.

My delivery wasnt very polished either, mainly because I just had to throw the material together at a run. Some stuff could have had less detail, other stuff needed more. Its always hard to gauge this till you have run through it a few times.

Oh well... It will be better next time. On the whole though I think tonight was a useful talk for most people. feedback was good. Im pretty sure most people learned at least what arduino is, and what it "could" do for them if they start on the learning project - which of course was the purpose of the evening. I think I got over the enormous flexibility and power of the platform, and also the relative ease of getting onto the ladder - something that other platforms cant compete with. I think the main selling point for most people was when the notion clicked home that you can take a few other bits of hardware and quickly glue them together with a few lines of code and pow! you have a remote ATU,or an antenna analyser, or even just a device that flashes a few LEDs

Time will tell. Success will be measured in how many people actually take onboard the project and experiment :)

Dweeno talk tonight!

Tonight Im giving my Talk on Arduinos and introducing the club Arduino project, so I had planned a day in the office to finish off the powerpoint presentation and sort out the arduino sketches for tonight. But... so far its not been quite the start to the day I had expected.

First call of the day has been a trip up to the repeater to re-set the logic... again... so now its 10:07. Ive got a brief bit of work to do mid day too. So a chunk of the day has gone already. No time for blogging really, but I am updating a couple of other info and security sites and blogs, so a quick diversion via here wont really hurt much. Then I really MUST get on with stuff, or there wont be a Talk tonight!

Anyway, my main reason for stopping by is to add a quick post pointing to my new storytlr site - http://chrisjw.storytlr.com which has replaced my old swurl space. Its another stream aggregation system pulling some of my assorted public feeds into one spot. There probably wont be a huge amount of stuff of extra interest there - basically it currently has this feed, twitter status, tumblr pix uploads and blog, my other chrisjw - random thoughts blog (life linux and other geekishness) plus pictyre feeds from picasa and flickr. Oh... and possibly of a little more interest my public bookmarks from delicious. Hopefully storytlr will be a longer lasting replacement for swurl.


I will add a posting later with links to the arduino talk info.