Archive for April, 2008

Over the Air, all over

April 5th, 2008

I am typing this during the demos of what has been developed. Considering the small number of people working through the night, and the lack of time to work on stuff through the day, I am surprised at number of entries how managed to produce something.

Nigel and I have been doing some playing with our idea, although because we were so far behind we have not entered it for any of the competitions. We started out with the idea of producing a Bluetooth version of Geocaching. What we ended up with is an Arduino sampling data, a server parsing this in to EEML, that is being relayed through a public facing server, and being rendered by a JavaScript applet for presentation on a mobile device. The idea of the project is to allow people to monitor things (temperature, light, etc) at a remote location. Our next project will be to figure out why we need to do this.

The event is not completely over, but I suspect I will not have a moment to blog anything later so I thought I would blog my closing comments now. It was a good couple of days and now I just need to go home to bed.

Over the Air

April 4th, 2008

This Friday and Saturday I am at Over the Air, an event hosted at Imperial Collage in London and supported by the BBC. The concept of the event appears to be a version of Hack Day crossed with a general conference, all with a focus on mobile technology.

There is a good number of the usual suspects here, and a lot of new faces as well. I have been to a few seminars and have been working with Nigel on a few mad ideas using the Arduino boards. A big thank you to tinker.it for the loan of the Bluetooth board, and we hopefully will be able to revile our work tomorrow, if we get it finished, if.

To be honest I am not enjoying the event as much as a BarCamp or Hack Day. Most people are not bothered about producing something unlike Hack Day, and as a result neither am I. Also there is nothing really wrong with the seminars, but most feel more like a sales pitch than something I can learn from, and nothing like the quality of knowledge transfer you get at a BarCamp. That being said I am happy to be here and hope that others are getting a lot more out of the event than I.

We have watched the TV on the big big screen, there is a Werewolf game going on at the moment, and we are all spaced out on the gazillions of comfy beanbags. Some of us are working on projects for tomorrow, but most of us are just chilling, blogging and working on personal projects.

I hope to conclude my brief summery of the event tomorrow, but there are plenty more blogs covering the event.

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