PyCon 2014 !!!

Back in August/Sept., I saw the CFP for PyCon 2014 and was determined to submit more than one proposal.  After all, it's an awesome conference and it's in MONTREAL !!!  I was already dreaming about fantastic crepes, quiches, beignet's, cobblestone roads....

So, I pinged Akkana (hardware guru extraordinaire) and asked her if she would be interested in doing a joint tutorial by CodeChix on building PiDoorbell at PyCon.  And she said yes!

That was followed by a few weeks of frenzied emailing and design/logistics/hardware-list/etc.-gathering and hashing out and we finally submitted our tutorial proposal by the deadline.   This was the first hardware-centric proposal by CodeChix and so there were a lot of details that needed to be thought through.  Akkana and I had done a fair bit of it, but the PyCon committee had a series of questions that they asked us about logistics and how we were going to conduct the tutorial/workshop.  That took approximately one month or so to explain and detailing every aspect that we could think of.

I also submitted a second proposal for a talk on Phase 3 of PiDoorbell which involves face recognition.

Today, we found out that our PiDoorbell tutorial has been accepted !!

I did also mention to the PyCon committee that I did not have the bandwidth to do both the tutorial and the talk.  So, if one got accepted, I would appreciate it if they could give the other slot to someone else.

I'm so happy that the tutorial got accepted - I hope that Akkana and I inspire a whole bunch of developers to fiddle with hardware and solve their day-to-day problems with ease and competence :).

Thank you to the powers that be for this amazing opportunity to make a difference in our community on behalf of CodeChix!

Sneak peek - Intel Galileo !!

Well, thanks so much to Kim S., I am now the proud owner of an Intel Galileo !  This is being touted as Intel's answer to the RaspberryPi and BBB etc.

But wait, the price point is $60 ???  And it's targeted for education for high-school kids?

Here's a sneak peek:

There are some images on the web on the block diagram for this - and they aren't very good.  

I'm hoping to squeeze out some time from my schedule to see what this can really do.

First impression - for the general populace that isn't trained in electrical or computer engineering, this could be a bit of a ramp up for most to get started.

It uses the Arduino IDE (you gotta download/install version 1.5.3) and update the firmware - takes about 10 min or so to do all of it depending on your internet bandwidth.

It has a mini-PCI and is supposed to support upto 8 USB devices?  Stay tuned for more updates on this in the near future....