Report: Dip your toe in Arduino

[Toby Catlin]

Hi all,

We ran the first Norwich Hackspace event last night, Dip your toe in Arduino. It went very well in my humble opinion. We were originally aiming for a hands on session with everyone present having their own board to program. In the end this proved too ambitious and a very gentle intro with a demo of some boards, IDE and the Blink sketch plus some light measuring code was just about right for the audience. I think we had about 8 people which was perfect as we could all introduce ourselves and had quite a relaxed vibe. 

I ended up doing the presentation slides and material in HTML using reveal.js presentation framework. So this means with a bit of tidy up, it could be some of the first content for our website. I am keen that future talks would also use the same format so we can start to build up a small library of tutorials.

Massive thank you to Marion for doing the hard work of getting bums on seats. We had some people coming in via Hot source and Marion's extensive address book. I think there is appetite for a rerun of that talk aimed at total beginners and a part two which would cover a more complex project, like a NFC chicken coup.

Everyone who attended certainly liked the idea of a Hackspace and hopefully will be joining this mailing list. I think this tacit of running little talks via meetup can work really well to build interest and memberships. So if you are willing and able to give a talk on anything at all pls shout out. It doesn't have to be electronic, just something you are confident in talking about for an hour or two. 

thanks

toby