Our first meeting was a great success with fifteen attendees plus myself, ranging from neophytes to years of professional experience with embedded systems. Wow, talk about diversity!
At our next meeting, a group member has volunteered to show two of his projects. One is an environmental monitor that records temperature and humidity, and calculates dew point every 5 minutes. Data is both stored on an SD card and sent to a serial port. The other project is a stepping motor test fixture designed to help determine the best operating mode for motors to be installed on a 3D printer. This will be our first show-and-tell and it really looks good.
If there is time, I’ll demonstrate the initial setup process for a new Raspberry Pi.
The big news in the world of open source hardware is the new Raspberry Pi 2. It’s claimed to be 6-times faster than any existing Pi, and there will be a version of Windows 10 for the new board. Don’t get all excited, this will be a version of Windows Embedded tuned for robotics. This article explains a little more. The processor is a quad-core ARMv7 with 1GB of RAM. Here’s a comparison chart with the new model, plus an older chart with various other boards.
Resources for the February meeting:
- Projects materials list
- Environmental monitor sample code