Hackaday LA Meetup
This past weekend, I was fortunate enough to come across the “Hackaday LA” Meetup group. They were hosting their monthly Meetup at the Supplyframe Designlab in Pasadena, which is an engineering laboratory fully stocked with 3D printers, woodworking, server farms, PCB assembly lines, and so on.
The theme of the meetup was IoT, or rather “IuT”, the Internet of useful things! The event started off with a presentation by “Alberto Molina”, the winner of the 2016 Hackaday Prize. His winning entry was a modular robot named “Dtto” (yes, like the Pokemon). Each module in the robot has two halves, one of which contains the following components:
- Arduino Nano
- Bluetooth shield
- 5 Servo motors (for hinging and coupling).
- NRF24L01 Transceiver
- Infrared Transceiver
Each module is housed within a 3D printed enclosure. Some of the suggested use cases for Dtto were for exploration or search and rescue missions.
The schematics for the 3D printer and code have also been open sourced, and Alberto encouraged fellow makers to create their own modules to experiment with. https://github.com/otrebla333/Dtto-Modular-Robot
Next, Mike Szczys, Hackaday’s editor in chief followed up with a talk about his long running interest in analog electronics, and his experiences in creating an “Astable multivibrator” for blinking LEDs.
The event concluded with a series of lightning talks, where various attendees came up to demo projects they had been working on. One demo showed a mousetrap that sends notifications when triggered using nothing more than an ESP8266 WiFi module and a 9V battery pack. This caught my interest because it showed how the ESP8266 can utilize its “deep sleep mode” to conserve energy and only wake when triggered. This gave me a few ideas on ways I can expand on the home automation project by placing sensors around the house to passively collect and send data with minimal power consumption.
Another lightning talk showed off the “ISS above”, which is a Raspberry Pi that tracks the trajectory of the “International Space Station” and sends out real time location notifications via twitter and a Web UI. As the ISS approaches the Pi’s location, the Pi begins blinking an LED. The ISS happened to be passing over our location that night, so were able to actually head outside and briefly see it fly by! Great ending to an epic event, I’ll definitely be looking forward to the next one.
