MIT Workshop: Physical Computing, Prototyping, Cities, and Selves: A Day-long Hackathon
When: Monday, Jan 11, 10AM-4PM.
Where: Room 9-451 (Map)
Please bring
– A laptop
– Your favorite microcontroller module (ie an Arduino) + a cable to connect it to your laptop
– Optional: your smartphone + a cable to connect it to your laptop (for BLE development)
Also, before Monday, try to install all the software related to your hardware (ie Arduino IDE, Xcode, etc). I’ll provide a few dozen sensors for you to try. I also have a few BLE boards if you want to try connecting your module to your phone.
Rough Agenda:
- 10:00: Intros
- Your name and department (if applicable)
- Your experience with physical computing
- What you want to do today
- 10:30: Overview Presentation
- 11:00: Overview of Tools (roundtable discussion & experimentation). I’ll briefly discuss the tools I’m bringing and providing tech support for: Arduino, various sensors, and iOS. If you are bringing other tools and want to share your knowledge of how to use them, I welcome you to do so at this time.
- 12:00: Experiment with your tools. Connect a sensor to collect data!
- 01:00: Check-in. Put together a sketch or slide on how your module would provide insight for cities and/or selves.
- 02:00: Check-in. Wrap-up your experiment.
- 02:30: Presentations, Refreshments, Group Vote, (small) Prizes
- 03:30: Deconstruct your modules, return borrowed tools, and provide feedback.
- 04:00: End of Session
Notes from the Session
- Participants (in abc order): Arlene Ducao, David Hsu, Colleen Kaman, Chris Willard, Francesco Wiedeman, and You Wu.
- First activity: Setting up the Arduino with an analog sensor (potentiometer) and LED.
- You Wu introduced the board he currently uses for prototyping: Particle.io’s Photon.
- Sensor experiments: tilt sensor, pulse sensor, DHT22 temperature sensor, Adafruit GPS logger shield. I need to do some maintenance on the logger shield materials–they weren’t working properly.
- Chris also set up his Raspberry Pi as an audio module.
- Since our group was small, a “hackathon” didn’t make much sense. Working together was more fun and interesting.