May 29 -- Second Meeting of Humboldt Microcontrollers Group

Short post tonight -- just got home from the second meeting of the Humboldt Microcontrollers Group because it ran long. Which is a good thing, since people wouldn't have hung around past the nominal 8 PM meeting end time unless they were enjoying themselves.

We only had four people for most of tonight's meeting, which is about half the size of the first meeting. We hope the low participation in tonight's gathering was because the other people from the first meeting just couldn't make it to tonight's meeting but are still interested and will be at future meetings.

About 2/3 of the way through the meeting, another person joined the group. He first had to find
someone to let him in the building because the doors to the Greenway Building were all locked. The front door had been propped open with a wooden wedge and the meeting information posted on the laminated sign on the front door saying to keep it open until 8 PM. Unfortunately either someone accidentally kicked the wedge out of the way or closed the door on purpose before 8 PM, because a couple people were unable to join the meeting because the door was locked.

I apologize to anyone who attempted to come to the meeting tonight and was locked out. To address the issue of the front door being automatically locked after 5:30 PM, for the next meeting (on June 12) we will:

1. Put the wedge in the door to hold it open and write the meeting info on the laminated sign.
2. Check on the door at 6:30 and 7:00 PM to make sure it's still open.
3. Put a Humboldt Microcontrollers Group meeting sign on the front door with a phone number of someone in the meeting to call if the door is locked.

We also might meet down in the front lobby area at the big round table. That way we can see the front door and know if it gets closed during the meeting.

We talked about a wide range of subjects in tonight's meeting, but the two primary microcontroller topics were CapSense and IR sensors for motion detectors. I'll write more about those two tomorrow -- too late tonight for technical topics.

For the June 12 meeting of the group, we'll be focusing on the #5 Blum video tutorial, which covers motors and transistors. If there are people new to microcontrollers at the meeting, a group will split off into a separate area to talk about the first Jeremy Blum 'Basics of Arduino' videos. The more experienced people will cover breadboarding or other work they did on the topic of motors and transistors, as well as any specific exercises or questions they had from the #5 video.

Hope to see lots more people at the June 12 meeting, including anyone who was inadvertently locked out tonight...

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