New ThingLabs IoT Workshop Kits

It felt a bit like Christmas on St. Patricks’s Day! That is because the first batch of the new ThingLabs IoT Workshop Kits arrived today. We will have four (4) new IoT Workshop Kit configurations, in addition to the two (this and this) that we already have. This will allow us to create workshops for a variety of hardware and operating-systems, including Linux, Windows 10 IoT Core and Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS).

Today we received the Intel Edison and BeagleBone Green kits based on the Grove sensors.

The ThingLabs Tinkerers are busy working on new workshops for these kits and more (see below). We have a full-day workshop on April 18, 2016 at the Walt Disney World Swan for the DevIntersection conference (register with discount code SEVEN to save $50).

Here are all of the kits we are building new workshops for…

Linux-based Micro-Processor Kits

IoT Workshop Kit: Intel Edison Edition

(1) Intel® Edison for Arduino

(1) Grove Indoor Environment Kit for Intel® Edison

IoT Workshop Kit: BeagleBone Green Edition

(1) SeeedStudio BeagleBone Green

(1) Grove Starter Kit for SeeedStudio BeagleBone Green

Windows 10-based Micro-Processor Kits

IoT Workshop Kit: Raspberry Pi 2 Edition

(1) GrovePi+ Starter Kit for Raspberry Pi

(1) Raspberry Pi 2 Model B w/ ARMv7 Quad Core 1GB RAM

(1) USB Wi-Fi Adapter

(1) Power Supply

(1) microSD Card

Check out the ‘Windows 10 IoT – Connected Nightlight Workshop‘ that uses a Raspberry Pi2 with a breadboard, LED and a photo-resistor instead of the GrovePi+ kit.

Micro-Controller Kits

IoT Workshop Kit: ESP8266 Edition

(1) Huzzah! Adafruit.io Internet of Things Feather ESP8266 – WiFi Starter Kit (soldered headers)

(1) USB to microUSB cable (6′)

(1) Breadboard

(10) Jumper Wires

IoT Workshop Kit: Arduino Uno Edition

(1) SparkFun RedBoard – Programmed with Arduino

(1) SparkFun Weather Shield w/ soldered headers

(1) SparkFun USB Mini-B Cable – 6 Foot

Checkout the ‘Node.js – Connected Weather Station‘ workshop for Arduino and Particle Photon

IoT Workshop Kit: Particle Photon Edition

(1) Particle Photon Kit

(1) SparkFun Photon Weather Shield

Checkout the ‘Node.js – Connected Weather Station‘ workshop for Arduino and Particle Photon

Another IoT Workshop Scheduled

If you saw this post you know that the last IoT Workshop my team and I hosted was a blast. We are getting ready to add some new labs to ThingLabs.io in preparation for another workshop event on Monday, September 14th. If you missed the last one, you should definitely come to this one – and it’s part of a great new event (disclaimer – I have been helping with the IoT content planning).

The new event is TECHintersection and it is being put together by the founders of DEVintersection, DotNetRocks, and one of the masterminds behind large scale events including Microsoft TechEd, //build and AWS re:Invent. The event has a shared focus on three topic areas that are tightly intertwined – the Internet of Things, Architecture and Security. Its looking like it is going to be a great few days spent in the city that gave birth to TED Talks – Monterey, CA.

For the IoT Workshop (we are calling this one IoT Firestarter) we are planning a full day, with lots of hands-on time. We will likely be using a new board, which will result in an entirely new set of labs. In this workshop we will go from building your first hardware project to ingesting telemetry into Azure and creating data visualizations with PowerBI (of course we will still do some command/control stuff – and maybe even bring a couple robots…who knows).

Throughout the conference there will be great sessions, including technical sessions from the Windows IoT and Azure IoT product teams, a few sessions from my team on how we have build IoT solutions in the real-world (including connected cars, constructions site and more), and a couple companies who have built IoT start-ups will be there to share their story, including Josh Supalla from Particle.io and a keynote by Adam Benzion, the co-founder of Hackster.io. You can get the full session list here.

I hope to see you there!

IoT Labs @ ThingLabs.io

Over the past few week my team and I have been working on a set of self-paced labs for building Internet connected Things using Arduino. Last night we got together with 150 of our closest DevIntersection/anglebrackets friends and had a great hack event. Lots of developers got their first exposure to Arduino and to building connected Things. For lots of people it was their first time build hardware instead of just software.

All of the labs are published at ThingLabs.io and lots more labs will be coming soon.

Thanks to all that attended last night – we had a blast.

IoT Workshop: Lesson 3 – Input Controls Output

In this lesson you will combine the ideas that you learned in the previous lessons (here and here) to make a LED change its brightness based on the level of light available – essentially a nightlight. You will learn a couple of new methods you can use and we’ll discuss Pulse Wave Modulation (PWM) briefly.

You can view the lesson on Instructables.com.

Arduino: Reading Analog Voltage

In this lesson you will use two resistors – a static resistor and a variable resistor – to create a voltage divider that enables you to effectively understand the intensity of light detected by the photoresistor – essentially a light meter. In the previous lesson you learned how to send OUTPUT and in this lesson you will learn to collect INPUT.

See the lesson at Instructables.com.

Arduino ‘Hello, World!’ – Sending Digital Output

I just posted my first lesson to Instructables.com. This is the first in a series of IoT lessons using the Arduino Yun. The lessons will build from this ‘Hello, World!’ lesson to fully connected devices leveraging Cloud IoT services, web and mobile apps, and backend analytics and machine learning.

Check out lesson #1 here.