Organizing a NodeBots day

[Divan Visagie]

I posted this on the nodebots subreddit too but this actually seems to be the better place to do it.

So I know it's quite a while from July (which seems to be when NodeBots day is hosted), I just wanted to get a little head start and know what I am getting into if I want to organize for the event here in Durban.

Specifically I wanted to know if there is any default opening talk that you guys give for the newbies. Whether or not its a bring your own hardware kind of thing or if the organizer provides hardware and if you have some sort of end of day goal for all the participants.

I think my big fear is getting a bunch of people in the room and not knowing where to go from there.

[Ray Pierce]

I helped to organize the Austin NodeBots day.

Typically there is a prerecorded video that the NodeBots Core team makes that can be shown.  In Austin we watched that video and also had a speaker show off one of the projects that had been working on.

The first year we did NodeBots day we asked the attendees to bring their own hardware, but we had a sponsor provide a five SparkFun Inventors Kits for those that didn’t know or didn’t have it.  We ended up giving those away at the end of the day.

This year, we made a concerted effort to get enough sponsor money to buy SparkCore Starter kits for 33 people.   We also charged for a Sumo Bot Jr. project kit that most of the attendee purchased.  We also tracked down discount codes from several vendors that really helped out on the price.  Most of those vendors have said that they wanted to work with us again next year since it gained them a lot of exposure.  All in all to get all the project kits and start kits purchased we ended up spending around $3500.

The first part of the day we spent getting everyone up and running on the SparkCores and the second half of the day was mostly spent building the project kits that everyone had purchased.

Some other things that we did: build a website (http://austinnodebots.com/), sent lots of email to potential sponsors, lots of follow up with sponsors, had a git hub issues list that we used as a task list, we also had a lot of help from the place that we hosted it at providing space, tables, chairs, power strips, refrigerator, bathrooms, etc.

Some resources you should probably look into:

http://nodebots.io/

http://forums.nodebots.io/ - I think this would probably be the best place to ask these questions BTW.

https://github.com/nodebots/nodebotsday

http://www.adafruit.com/

https://www.sparkfun.com/

https://www.spark.io/

https://github.com/makenai/sumobot-jr

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Ray Pierce
r...@digitalpierce.com

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[Divan Visagie]

Thanks for that helpful reply , really appreciated. Im thinking of setting up a day long before the international nodebots day just to get a feel for it and see what happens with a smaller group.

[Jason Denizac]

It's great to hear your interest! In addition to the big, synchronized International Nodebots day, there are a number of cities that do nodebots events on a more regular basis. You might be interest in looking over their planning websites and maybe reaching out directly to the local organizers.

Off the top of my head:

- SF https://github.com/nodebots/sf

- Portland (combined with their regular PDX Node user group) https://github.com/PDXNode/pdxnode

(And I think Austin might do things on a more regular basis too but I've never been)

On Saturday, November 1, 2014, Divan Visagie <visagi...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for that helpful reply , really appreciated. Im thinking of setting up a day long before the international nodebots day just to get a feel for it and see what happens with a smaller group.

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Jason Denizac
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