LilyPad Arduino MicrocontrollerThink about a coat that detects changes in air and body temperature and automatically adjusts to keep you comfortable. How about a sonar based device enabling you to see in the dark? Or always having your music player, video player, radio, and mobile phone with you wherever you go because they are built into your tshirt? eTextiles, electro-craft, wearable electronics; it’s about taking technology and transforming it around your body, creating symbiosis. Whether you’re looking to augment the human condition with technology or you’re more interested in the romantic ethereal glow of twinkly lights, you have to start somewhere.
In this short series of workshops we will provide a quick introduction to the Arduino Lilypad line of wearable electronics. We’ll look at how to tell the micro-controller (the smart component) what to do, and how to use some sensors and actuators*. And then how to put it all together into an actual, wearable, project.
Taking place one evening a week, for three weeks, we hope to introduce you to a new passion that combines electronics, programming, and crafting. Sound scary? The only pre-requisite is that you have a laptop (with USB port) you can bring to the workshops. We’ll help you with all the rest.
*components that do something, e.g. a buzzer makes a sound
So you started to crochet, but never quite got further than a square that turned into a triangle? This is the class for you. We’ll look at some further techniques, such as crochet in the round starting with a magic circle and stitches for decreasing. During the class you’ll get a reminder of the basics, and then we’ll make a sphere, which combines increases with decreases and is a great starting point for making hats or amigurumi toys.
Ruby is the language and Rails is the framework that stopped people yawning at web development, encouraged coders to try and better themselves as developers and is now the first choice for an overwhelming number of startups, as well as lots of forward looking enterprises. In this 3 hour introduction, Declan McGrath (aka @theirishpenguin) from Intercom will guide you through the same thing all those people had to do – build your first Ruby on Rails application.
We’ll start with a look at Ruby and its syntax before walking our way through the models, views and controllers that comprise a Rails project. By the end of this evening you should know your routes from your database migrations and have a starting point to go on and build other Rails applications.
Pre-requisites:
Course level – you’ll be expected to have a bit of an understanding of programming already. This is *not* an intro to programming course. Having said that we will be sticking with the basics of Ruby – so if you’ve written a few programs before in any language then you should be able follow along 🙂
There won’t be time to install Ruby and Rails on your computer on the night. So you’ll have to have it installed before arrival. You’ll need Ruby 1.9.3 and Rails 3.2.14 installed along with sqlite (which let’s us store data). If you’ve any questions on installing the post a comment on this Ruby Ireland Googlegroup thread
Basic knowledge of HTML
When: Thursday, August 8th. From 7pm till 10pm.
Cost: €5 for non-members, free for members
Please sign up using the form below. Updated to add: We’re full! Thanks for the interest everyone.
This is a five day outdoor international camping conference, hosted every four years, for hackers, makers and those with an inquisitive mind. On 31st July 2013, 3000 of those minds will descend upon on an unassuming patch of land, at the Geestmerambacht festival grounds, 30km north of Amsterdam.
The Irish hacker & maker communities travelling to OHM invites you all to join us in forming an “Irish Embassy” This will be our village presence at the camp. We’ll be show casing any participant projects and coming up with new collaborative initiatives as the camp progresses. Become one of the Irish inhabitants or at least drop by and say Conas ata tú? We look forward to seeing all our friends and making new ones.
Its time for our electronics bootcamp again. This is a quick, practical / hands-on introduction to electronics. Its suitable for complete beginners, as no previous knowledge is required. If you’re curious about electronics and don’t know where to start, then this is for you. No soldering required, as we build everything on plug-in breadboards. We’ll be building and testing circuits covering DC, AC, analog and digital electronics.
You’ll have a chance to play with components, multimeters, oscilloscopes, signal generators and other electronic test equipment.
This event will be run over 2 half-Saturdays, the first half on Sat 13th July and the second half on Sat 20th July, from 12:00 to 17:30 each day. Cost for the bootcamp is €50. To sign up, open this article and fill in the form. There are 8 places available.
Date: Thursday, June 27, 2013 – 18:00 to 19:30
Location: Science Gallery Cafe
Admission: Free
Tickets: pre booking advised
We are delighted to be invited to speak at the upcoming Data 59.0 event. A night full of interesting talks on hardware hacking, hackers and hackerspaces. Original post from Data continues below.
