Nodebots Day: My humble submission before Skynet

I recently attended my first NodeBots Day in Arlington, VA on July 30th. NodeBots Day is an international event where people get together to learn and to teach and to explore the capabilities of robot programming using JavaScript. Hosted and sponsored by Curiosity Media, with additional sponsorship from Boucoup and Sparkfun Electronics the event was scheduled for over seven hours of coding and experimenting. Organized by the awesome people behind Node DC, you had the option of bringing in your own equipment, or purchasing a kit for a pretty decent discount.

For around fifty bucks, you get an Arduino, solderless breadboard, and a number of wires and LED lights, a servo, some sensors and resistors and such, as well as a manual walking you through some of the different things that you can do with the kit.

Using Beacoup’s Johnny-Five JavaScript Robotics Programming Framework, you can access a series of tests that will let you program for certain functions. From making an LED blink, to ringing a bell, to activating a fire alarm, you can run and test the programs without even having the Arduino and such. If your code passes the test, you can wire up the Arduino with the required components and run the program. If everything is wired correctly, you’re working the Internet of Things! One thing that I and a lot of other rookies forgot to do is covered in the instructions that come with the Arduino kit: you have to “flash” your Arduino. You’ll have to download Arduino’s software and go through their steps to make sure that your Arduino is fully connected to your computer. There were many of us that got tripped up on that step.

Once you get through all of the tests, there’s still plenty of stuff that you can do, with the only barrier being your imagination. At the end of the day, everyone gets to show off that they made.

All in all, the process was a lot of fun. I struggled to get through the tests, but once you get your LED to blink, the desire to make your Arduino do more and more interesting stuff is pretty strong. I wasn’t able to get through all of the tests, but I’ll keep playing with it and experimenting on my own. Next year’s NodeBots Day will see me being able to do lots more.