Since I cannot get all of my parts in time, I have postponed the start of the class till January. I did go ahead and run the first session for people who wanted to get started right away and got them blinking LEDs and handling button events. There were about 15 people. They left the class with a Panda Tinkerer and a manual. They had a wide variety of experience. Mechanical, Electrical, embedded software, lab technicians. Some experienced OOP, some no OOP at all.
The class will start again in January - if I have parts for the sensors.
Class started again today. About 15 students. A few had reports of what they had been doing with the Pandas over Christmas. Many comments about how much easier and more powerful they felt the platform was over other micro-controllers they had used. Lots of questions about, “So, can I do this? Can we build a fixture to do this? You can really drive our 10 amp motors with this?” and lots of comments like, “Whoa, I am going to save a pile of my budget with this stuff.”
I start the second set of students on Thursday - a total of 30 students for 5 weeks, then I will go through the waiting list and start more classes.
The best thing I did for this class - train 3 teaching assistants from my team to help each student in the class. It went really well and there was a lot of enthusiasm.
This is really working well. This morning, I have new people emailing me asking for spots in the next class based on what they are hearing from students already. I am also getting pushed to bring in some higher end platforms like Cobras and Rhinos already! It is moving in exactly the direction I had planned, but faster than I imagined.
I have just noticed that you have put an image of the kit on Fezzer. I thought Fezzer is for code sharing as stated on main banner of the site as well.
Do you really think it is the right place just to post an image of your kit? Wiki sounds like a more appropriate place for that.
@ Architect: Actually, I did think that it was a helpful item that people would want to know about. I know that there was no category for fez related items that are not code, but I thought it was an oversight and that things of this nature fit with the spirit of the community. If you one else thinks that fezzer should be a repository for items other than code, I will happily take it off. I really was trying to be helpful. It was not meant to be an image of “my kit”, but a suggestion for an easy way for people to organize their GHI sourced components specific to Fez development. This was in no way commercial - I don’t know if that is what you meant, but it may have been - I wasn’t trying to promote anything. I meant to share a helpful item that I did not think should be lost in the forum threads. Perhaps the wiki is a better place for it, but the wiki isn’t nearly as easy to post to.
It doesn’t matter to me if it is commercial or not. But I still think that Wiki (Micro Framework Projects) site is proper place for this kind of post. It still fits with “the spirit of the community”. The content is created by the community for the community on both sites. There is more or less clear separation of the content though:
Fezzer - pure code
Wiki - projects, tutorials, custom enclosures, cases etc.
This is just my opinion. I am a little bit of a purist, so no offense.
Taught the second section of class one and the first section of class 2 this week. Both went really well. Still no pictures for you - I keep forgetting my camera.
Section 2 was Digital I/O, Analog I/O, and display technologies with labs for each topic. Next week is SD Storage and motor control.
I got a call a few minutes ago and another group wants a class for 10 engineers right away. I have 30 in class already. I think this will be full-time for me for the next year or so. i was planning to train about 50 people - it is starting to look more like up to 100.
