Not sure if anyone else is in the Richmond, VA area, but Andrew Duthie from Microsoft will be doing a presentation on MS Gadgeteer and .Net Micro this evening. I will be there, would enjoy meeting anyone else from the board that might be attending.
@ devhammer, you going to be there? 
He’d better be ! :o
Great to hear, and thanks for sharing the info (I should have thought to mention it myself, and apologies to anyone who is in the Baltimore, MD area, since Pete Brown and I did a Gadgeteer talk there last night).
Please make sure to introduce yourself…will be nice to meet another TinyCLRer in person! 
Also, for folks who can’t make Richmond, I’ll be doing the same talk again on the 13th of December in DC:
[url]http://dcdnug.org/dnn/Home/tabid/40/ModuleID/399/ItemID/18/mctl/EventDetails/Default.aspx[/url]
@ Stephen - as you may have guessed form the other comments, forum member devhammer = Andrew. He and Pete Brown (who uses his real name here) have been evangelizing the heck out of the gadgeteer stuff lately in your area. Maybe we should call them the “Ministers of the MicroFramework”
@ Ian,
As Brett noted, I kinda have to be there, since I’m presenting. 
Unfortunately, my big demo (the one I’ve been working on in this thread ([url]http://www.tinyclr.com/forum/1/4820/[/url]) is working, but will be short, because the IR heli that I’m using for the demo is so beat up that it only lasts a few seconds before it crashes. Need to get a new one, but haven’t had the time. Will have a fresh heli for DC .NET on the 13th. Hopefully, I’ll get video up from one of the UG talks as well.
I recorded last night’s talk that I did with Pete, so if I can find a place to host the video, I’ll drop a link here for folks who can’t make it to one of the talks in person.
Here’s a pic Pete posted of our demo setup at last night’s talk:
[url]http://www.flickr.com/photos/psychlist1972/6433475437/[/url]
Not shown there is the Kinect I had for that part of the talk.
@ devhammer - Kinect as input for Gadgeteer? If so, details please!
LOL, well, I do know Andrew Duthie as DevHammer but in some strange “twist of brain” universe, for some reason, didn’t note that he was on here, connect the name, whatever…arrrg ??? So, see you tonight Andrew, looking forward to the presentation 
Short version is that I’m using an event handler from the Ethernet module’s built-in lightweight web server to handle incoming messages from the Kinect, which are sent using .NET webrequests. The payload is the data I want to send over IR, for which I’m using a modified LED eblock (the stock IR LED eblock doesn’t have sufficient output).
I will be doing a full write-up on the project, and sharing all the code, once I get a little extra time for clean up and organization. I’ll put the code up in appropriate chunks on the wiki, to make implementation as easy as possible, and I’ll likely share the full code for both the gadgeteer and Kinect sides on my blog at [url]http://devhammer.net/[/url].
Will you be sharing your heli code? I’d like to borrow that demo.
@ Stephen,
LOL! The intartubez will do that to you … easy to miss connections between your online pals and folks ITRW.
See you tonight! Hoping for a full house! Speaking of…I’d probably better hit the road.
@ Ian,
Absolutely. The code I have right now only works with the Syma 107, which is why unfortunately that demo may not shine tonight, since of the 3 helis I have right now, only one is a genuine Syma 107, while the other 2 turned out to be knock-offs (all too common problem, from what I’ve read), which use a different IR protocol. And my only genuine Syma is in sorry shape, having been put through too many crashes for it’s tiny frame to handle.
Hopefully by the next demo on the 13th, I’ll have had time to reverse engineer the knock-offs’ IR protocol, and will include that in the demo code as well, so that I can control either heli from the Gadgeteer and/or Kinect.
Loads of possibilities here.
Will be fun to see what kind of bodily contortions you have to do in front of the Kinect to get the helicopter to fly ;D
Kinect v2 is gearing up with a version that will be better for PC based stuff with a shorter focal length (sitting in front of your monitor) and much better resolution overall. Won’t be long before we can control everything by actually waving our hands and uttering an incantation (the latter for effect only, of course)!
@ devhammer Oh, I thought part of your demo was that you made it “learn” the codes. I’d like to learn more about that process.
Andrew, uh, DevHammer, uh, whoever did a FANTASTIC job tonight, great group there and he had a awesome presentation…flying the little helicopter thru his Spider and Kinect was the coup de grase…lots of oooh and ahhhs…and honestly…WAY up there in the cool factor
@ ian,
The code I started with does just that…capturing commands from a source, and then replaying them. Some of the code can be found on the wiki here:
[url]GHI Electronics – Where Hardware Meets Software
Chapter 13 of GHI’s “Internet of Things” ebook also shows the code:
[url]http://www.ghielectronics.com/downloads/FEZ/FEZ_Internet_of_Things_Book.pdf[/url]
Since I wanted to be able to do more than just play back static snapshots of commands (which is fairly important when you’re dealing with things like throttle, pitch, and yaw), I modified the project to support sending the specific control values that I wanted to encode in the IR signal.
@ Stephen
Thanks for coming to the meeting…glad you enjoyed the demos, and thanks for sticking around to chat afterwards. It was a great discussion, I thought. Hope you’ll share more about your telescope project as it progresses.
If any Gadgeteer gurus are going to be passing through Calgary Alberta Canada and wouldn’t mind doing a Gadgeteer presentation here, please let me know and we will set it up for you.
Thanks
Blake McNeill
Speaker Coordinator
Calgary .Net User Group
http://www.dontnetcalgary.com
mcneillb@ dotnetcalgary.com
Duke Nukem Forever!!!
Welcome to the forum! ;D