Thursday, March 26, 2009

after the dweenotalk..

Im just having a cup of tea before bed,so a few moments to reflect on the talk I delivered tonight - an intro to Arduino.

Its a big subject arduino, hard to cover in a short talk. Intros always tend to just scratch the surface, and in-depth talks tends to lose people on the bottom end of the learning curve too quickly. I tried my best to pitch tonights talk somewhere between those extremes, but I wonder if something got lost, or at least watered down in the process. You cant be all things to all people all at once.

My delivery wasnt very polished either, mainly because I just had to throw the material together at a run. Some stuff could have had less detail, other stuff needed more. Its always hard to gauge this till you have run through it a few times.

Oh well... It will be better next time. On the whole though I think tonight was a useful talk for most people. feedback was good. Im pretty sure most people learned at least what arduino is, and what it "could" do for them if they start on the learning project - which of course was the purpose of the evening. I think I got over the enormous flexibility and power of the platform, and also the relative ease of getting onto the ladder - something that other platforms cant compete with. I think the main selling point for most people was when the notion clicked home that you can take a few other bits of hardware and quickly glue them together with a few lines of code and pow! you have a remote ATU,or an antenna analyser, or even just a device that flashes a few LEDs

Time will tell. Success will be measured in how many people actually take onboard the project and experiment :)

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