The first Limerick Hackathon will take place on Saturday 21st November. Thanks to the Fab Lab on Patrick St for donating their space. The theme of the hackathon will be Arduino-based hardware projects.
You can register for the hackathon, read about who should attend, or check below for latest updates.
Despite the cold outside we had a fun day today at the first Limerick Hackathon. Projects included:
The consensus was that we will try and run another hackathon some time in early 2016. Thanks to Ger Walsh at the Fab Lab for facilitating us on the day.
You can like our Facebook page where we will be discussing what to do for the next Hackathon.
The hackathon will form a basic hackathon format with introductions and descriptions of project ideas, forming into groups based on those project ideas, hacking and then a show and tell at the end.
Everyone will introduce themselves and optionally describe a project idea that they would like to invite others to join. Some people attending the hackathon will be bringing their own ideas for projects that they want people to join, and others will be looking to join a group.
People will join the group with the project idea that interests them most.
Lunch will not be provided so teams are free to grab lunch locally, or get pizza delivered…
Each group will informally present their work to the rest of the hackathon.
Thanks everyone for registering for the hackathon! The good news is that our orders from China have started coming in. We ordered from a number of different suppliers to keep us under customs limits and also to avoid being dependent on one supplier delivering in time. We previously posted a complete list of what we ordered.
First to arrive was an Arduino starter kit. And what a starter kit – over 70 components. The kit was unbelievable value – the only problem is there is no documentation at all with it, and even the website doesn’t give much of an indication what each component is.
We’ve sorted through each component and listed them below. We have given links to the individual component on the seller’s site – sometimes this gives useful information and sometimes it doesn’t.
Two components (RFID module and the LCD display) need header pins soldered to the boards, we will have to wait until our soldering iron arrives to play with them.
Top row:
Bottom row:
Now to have some fun playing around with this stuff!
We pooled some cash together to order some boards, sensors, shields and other bits so that we would have some things to work on. We ordered from AliExpress.com – shipping takes a very long time from China but the items are unbelievably cheap. Bear in mind that if you order from a supplier outside the EU there are potentially import duties to be paid over certain thresholds – this post on boards.ie summarises the rules well.
If you do have any bits lying around the house please bring them – we added a field to the registration form so you could let us know what you’re bringing, we will post a list of gear closer to the date so you’ll know what will be available.
Here’s what we ordered:
If you’ve never messed around with an Arduino board, but would like to attend the hackathon, it’s fairly straightforward to get started over a few evenings. All you need to buy is:
The language is vanilla C – so if you’ve ever programmed with a C-style language such as Java, PHP, Perl, Objective-C etc. you should feel right at home.
We suggest buying a book primarily because the easiest way to get an Arduino starter kit is to go down to Maplin on Childers Road. Here’s the link to their starter kit. Unfortunately we didn’t think much of the book that was included in the kit, it is (badly) translated from German and there are some mistakes in the sample projects.
A good book to get started is the Make: Getting Started with Arduino: The Open Source Electronics Prototyping Platform (Amazon UK link) which is written by one of the Arduino founders. If you’d like to browse for ideas or look at more advanced projects we liked the Arduino Cookbook from O’Reilly. We will have electronic copies of both books at the Hackathon.
The hackathon is aimed at programmers who want to get together with other programmers to hack for fun.
You don’t need to be an expert in Arduino, but we do ask that people have some familiarity by at least downloading the IDE and running a few small projects on their Arduino board. We have added a post suggesting some resources for getting started with Arduino.