August Meet
Meet up on 1st August at #Lightboxlab
There was a great attendance for our August Drogheda Makerspace Meet up so thanks to all who attended on the night. Jonathan demonstrated the use of Thingspeak which is a web based open application platform which can be used to send and receive data via HTTP requests. So as a demo Jonathan hooked up an Arduino with a temperature sensor and added the Thingspeak Twitter API to a python script which grabbed the temperature output and automatically tweeted it directly to Twitter (25 degrees btw). As another demo a motor was added to the Arduino and started directly from a Tweet from the web. As proof of concept this has loads of possibilities for future #lightboxlab projects around the area of automation.
I brought along the Raspberry PI with the expectation of hooking it up with the Arduino but hit some performance issues with it thanks to a cheap ebay SD card :( Next time round I'll be better organised to show off the coolness of this device properly. So instead we played with a few NFC tags I had with me. With the aid of a few Android NFC enabled phones we were able to program the tags with an Android app called NFC Task Launcher. With the tag programmed scanning it enabled the phone to launch the task assigned which in this case was a pre-programmed tweet. In real world situation I use another Android application called Tasker in conjunction with the NFC Tags. A swipe of the one attached to my car dock does the following:
- Disable Wifi
- Enables Bluetooth
- Enables GPS
- Turns screen rotation on
- Launches my Car Dock Android App
- and Speaks any SMS messages I get through my car speakers
Disconnecting the bluetooth then reverts to my normal phone settings. I think we'll see a lot of these tags as they are pretty versatile.
There was animated discussion throughout the evening of other subjects along with a demo of a cool Minecraft plug-in developed by Jonny Devine. Links to some of the subjects are linked below
http://www.thingspeak.com
http://www.makeymakey.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouya
http://www.leapmotion.com
http://www.thebox.myzen.co.uk/Raspberry/Magic_Wand.html
Last of all we'd some great discussion centered around what Lightboxlab is all about, future projects, tutorials and future makerspace requirements as lightboxlabs develops. Again it was great to see the interest and attendance last night and thanks again to Mr. Sean McEntee, Incubation Centre Manager, DKIT for facilitating us with the use of the Millmount Incubation Centre. See you all soon for the next one!