Last weekend was SoOnCon, Southern Ontario’s annual hackerspace / makerspace / community workshop. This years was hosted by Diyode, and as is tradition, we were tasked with coming up with an interesting badge. We took this as an opportunity to throw our resources into the codeshield, get some proper circuit boards made, and get a hundred or so of the shields out into the wild.
We were very lucky to have some great sponsors for the project primarily Upverter, but also Innovation Guelph and Miller Thompson, and a private donation from Guelph lawyer Robert Berry. This support allowed us to put together 100 badge kits, each including a code shield kit, an arduino Uno, a battery pack, and a custom laser cut acrylic badge.
We’re kind-of marking this as the official launch of the code shield. There’s a wiki up at http://diyode.com/codeshield where we are rapidly posting documentation, source code, schematics, and will soon be linking to the board design on Upverter.
We had a new guy come by last week. He’d been given an arduino, and when he said ‘what’s this’ someone kindly pointed him our way. So with very little code experience, no electronics, and freshly soldered code shield, he sat down and started playing. It was interesting to watch him progress from running the sample code, modifying the sample code, trying new combinations, adding in new components, functions, etc. In very little time, he was rocking the arduino, and felt confident enough to start thinking about working with his own components. I went home that night with a smile on my face.
We’ll continue posting more code, and will soon be putting together some proper curriculum. I’ll be taking the boards into the classroom with some grade 4 and 5 students to see how they work with it. If you really want a board, drop us a line at the info address, but right now we’re reserving them for people who are willing to contribute to the project.
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