Thursday, May 15, 2014

First Meeting of Humboldt Microcontrollers Group

So I figured the first meeting of the Humboldt Microcontrollers Group (which was tonight, May 15, 2014) would be a pretty quiet one, likely just Nick and me, maybe one or two others.

It turned out that instead of two or three people, we ended up with nine people participating in the kick-off meeting for the group! If we have nine people, or more, show up at the biweekly meetings (next one is May 29, put it on your calendar), we'll have to figure out a bigger meeting area. But having lots of people show up is a good problem...

Tonight's meeting was mostly a meet-and-greet, finding out what each person's experience with electronics was (if any) and what will make it worthwhile for them to participate in some, most or all of the group's future meetings. The interests ranged from just learning about microcontrollers and how to make one do simple things, all the way up to making a tracking mechanism for a radio telescope.

For the May 29 meeting, the current plan is to start out with a short discussion and demo on one of the topics covered in the 4th Jeremy Blum Arduino video tutorial. We won't repeat what is done in the video, but Nick will pick one topic from the video, and he'll go a little more in-depth about that, or show and explain some aspect of the topic that Jeremy didn't include in the video.

After Nick does a short show and tell, we'll split up into a learner group and an advanced group. The learner group will discuss the topics and exercises in the 4th video, and make sure all the learners are up to speed on that, then go back over anything in the first three videos that people might not have had a chance to ask questions about tonight. Nick will facilitate the advanced group in working on a project or designing a future project, or he'll come up with some other way to get the advanced microcontroller people learning, teaching or just having fun making something with microcontrollers.

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