Advanced Arduino course in Sydney

Today I attended an "Advanced Arduino" course organised by Little Bird Electronics.

Despite what could only be described as "bungling" leading up to the course (the venue was significantly changed late the night before and not everyone was contacted), Justin Clayden did a fine job of holding everything together.

It was the first time this course had been run and the timing didn't work out. I enjoyed it and got the opportunity to build a "shield" out of Veroboard for the Arduino to which we attached a servo, a tri-colour LED and a Hall effect detector.

We all took away a little goodie bag of components but I would have welcomed some printed notes with worked solutions to the exercises. To address this Marcus Schappi (CEO of Little Bird, shown below) has set up a wiki and invited us all to participate.

As is often the case in these things, meeting the other participants and finding out what they get up to was the highlight for me.

I'm sure this workshop will benefit from a run-through and next time it will be a little better organised.

I'm an ex PIC programmer but I've been won over by the Atmel AVR family. So far I've been working with the naked chips programmed with gcc but the Arduino platform gives you an on-board programmer and the ability to print text back to a console on your computer with ease. (Having recently debugged a DDS VFO with just one LED), I can see the value of this.

One strange thing I noticed, over 90% of the people brought Macs, one ran Ubuntu. It kind of seems like the people doing interesting things with computers use MacOS.

Anyhow, my sincere thanks to Little Bird for putting this day on.