Had a great time on Saturday, and I hope everyone else did as well. We went through and made sure everyone understood the new code and got all the way up to the point of working with the RF radios.
During the next class what we will do is go ahead and connect the radios up to the Arduino's, and test them and how they communicate with another Arduino. I'll have a master Arduino with a display that will poll the weather station for weather data and display it (which was the original design). Anyone who wants to build this part is welcome to, it's going to consist of an Arduino with the NRF module, the Nokia 5110 display and a couple of push buttons. I have a LOT of push buttons if anyone needs them, and I think I'm going to work on mounting a couple of sets on breadboards so they can be plugged into the Arduino easily.
Once we have everyone's Arduino communicating properly, then we'll switch over and get the Raspberry PI's setup and configured. If you have an extra monitor please bring it, otherwise you definitely should bring at least the Raspberry PI, a keyboard, a mouse, whatever SD card is needed for the version of Raspberry PI you have, and a power supply. We did find some nifty small 7" LCD screens on Amazon for about $30 and that is a very convenient option especially for the class. If not I'll have at least one monitor possibly two that we can use to get everyone's Raspberry PI setup on the network and we can use them through VNC on your laptop.
We will then go through the basics of the Raspberry PI and how to connect things to them, we'll probably hook up a light and some switches and program those. Then we'll go ahead and hook up the radios to the Raspberry PI and try and get them talking to the weather stations.
I'm going to be working on the software for the Raspberry PI this month, and also on building an anemometer and a weather vane, which should be very easy to hook up.
Right now I'm planning to have the next class on the 12th, and I'll post again once I've confirmed that I can get the conference room here at Inmar.
Thanks!