ARDUINO DAY KENYA 2015

ULTIMATE HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE MADNESS

Arduino Day Kenya 2015 rocked! The day was celebrated with exuberant participation from our makers’ community .The event was characterized by huge enthusiastic crowds (130+ attendees), inspiring speakers, award winning Arduino/Intel Galileo project showcase and exhibitions, and more than 11 sessions, all tailored to local audience.

Similar event also took in Boston (USA) at MIT, in Torino (Italy) at Officine Arduino, in Malmo (Sweden) at Arduino Verkstad, in Budapest (Hungary) at Arduino Hungary, and in Bangalore (India) at Arduino Karkhana and other parts of the world. The East and Central Africa was hosted by Intel at DeKUT team at the Dedan Kimathi University of Technology.

Saturday March 28^th 2015, 9:00 am| DeKUT.

After several weeks of diligent preparation, +Intel At DeKUT  finally opened their doors at 8:30 am for the worldwide Arduino Day 2015 celebrations. By that time, developers, Micro-controller experts and newbies, engineering students, designers, crafters and maker had lined up at our registration desk. They were warmly welcomed by the registration team. Everyone produced their tickets, their names were checked after which they were allowed to get in. Arduino Day Kenya 2015 was specifically dedicated to Intel Galileo, Arduino, Internet of things, Intel Developer Zone and Wyliodrin.

By 9:30 am, all were seated. +antony oroko , the Kilele Lab’s official and the former Computer Society of Kimathi president gave the welcoming and keynote address thanking everyone for coming and encouraging people to create awareness through the social media platforms.

In the first talk, +Ngesa Marvin explained what Arduino Day is and told the students to be proud of themselves because they are celebrating a worldwide event with the main event taking place at MIT, the world best engineering university. He then talked about his newly acquired role at Intel as an Intel Student Partner. He enlightened the audience about the Intel Student Partner Program and informed them what the new partnership spells out for them, and the perks it brings. He advised the students not to hesitate to let him know if there is anything in particular they want see. He also promised Intel sneak perks to students who will participate actively and who will produce the highest number of tweets with the #ArduinoDKE15 and #IntelAndroid hashtags.

Thereafter +Michael Ikua took it up and talked about getting started with Intel Galileo and Intel Edison using Wyliodrin. He explained that this platform allows programming and controlling Intel Galileo remotely from a browser. Each program running on the Intel Galileo can be shown on a dashboard and incoming sensor value can be graphed thus offering monitoring support.

It also allows multiple board deployment as all the programs related to an account are stored in the cloud.

And to set it up you only need three simple steps, creating an account, adding Intel Galileo or Edison board and deploying first program. “As simple as that”, He concluded.

+Billy Rotich  the co-founder of Softballot then gave a great presentation on the most hyped “emerging technology”, the Internet of Things. He explained that The Internet of Things (IoT) is a scenario in which objects, animals or people are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. 

He then walked us through the scenario in the video showing intelligent in which assets were able to sense location, proximity,  temperature, vibration, light levels, motion or something else and then it processes the data and transfer it to a central location which are later used to make better decisions.

+Ngesa Marvin   then emphasized more on how Intel have used their outstanding performance and energy efficiency to improve manufacturing  by analyzing and processing collected data and how students can continue to aggressively explore key aspects of IoT technologies.

                    Arduino UNO R3

Bob and Arthur from Mechatronics class then took the students through Arduino Uno, the board’s specs and how to program it. The session saw attendees go through a practical session with a live demo of how to program the board using Arduino IDE.

+Ngesa Marvin  again took to the stage and explained that Intel Galileo and Arduino Uno were almost the same and in fact looked the same on the surface. He highlighted the groundbreaking collaboration between Intel and Arduino in which the expansion headers on top of Galileo looked the same with the Arduino Shields and that the Galileo boards were compatible. The compatibility makes the Galileo board’s usability and introduction a snap.

 

Another Nairobi School-Lenana School story

This time no war!

After that +Chris Barsolai , Co-Founder Tech DeKUT went on stage to talk more about Tech DeKUT, how it started and how it grew to be the most optimistic tech community in the university. He started off by explaining to people exactly what Tech DeKUT is. Tech DeKUT, to him, is more of a family, not a club, not a society, not a bunch of workmates, but a family, a band of optimistic youngsters brought together by their common love for technology, and their enthusiasm in changing the institution that houses them for the better. He clearly emphasized that Tech DeKUT was never about the money, it was all about patriotism and having fun with tech. The group was founded by three tech enthusiasts, who coincidentally used to be rivals in high schools, but on meeting up in university, discovered that they had a common love for tech.

 Soon after, +eve kaberere carried away the audience by her presentation. She first talked about twitter mood light where Arduino connects directly to any wireless network via the WiFly module, continually searches Twitter for tweets with emotional content, collates the tweets for each emotion, does some math, and then fades the color of the LED to reflect the current World Mood; Red for Anger, Yellow for Happy, Pink for Love, White for Fear, Green for Envy, Orange for Surprise, and Blue for Sadness.

She inspired everyone to get behind their laptops and build stuff that will solve Africa’s own problems. Her talks were inspiring and were definitely worth our while listening to her.

She pointed out that the community generally is hostile to women and discourages their participation in the tech world.

She appreciated the amazing ladies who braved the man-dominated tech world and placed everything aside to attend this event. She advised them to be bold, confident and fearless in their lines of interest, be it in tech or leadership.

“The good news is that Intel at DeKUT have an equal number of ladies as men”, she concluded.

The rooms were full to capacity and some had to listen from outside. The first room was this full (refer to the picture on the left), such that we had to even acquire a second room before going on a break.

The crowd was hyped and really curious to get to know more about what the presenters had talked on. They frequently asked questions, some of them even following up on the presenters to inquire more about their presentations.

After this eye opening discussion we had a break where everyone got a chance to enjoy the juice and snacks, this also provided a short networking session where the attendees met old friends, made new valuable ones and even exchanged contacts.

 From the moment the event took off, all things went as planned until this break when the generator we had been depending on malfunctioned. We had been previously warned that there would be no electricity on the same day. We had no option but to move to Auditorium for the afternoon session.

The break then extended to lunch hour.

 +Intel At DeKUT  team and members of Computer Society of Kimathi quickly transferred all the necessary items to the next event location. This was a major setback but the team was up to the task.

Once the transfer of everything was complete we were now ready for the next session. We were amazed that the number of attendees had even increased. 

 

Afternoon Session, 2.00pm-4.30 pm

DeKUT Auditorium

The sessions resumed at exactly 2pm providing us with a chance to see creativity, innovation and Engineering at its best. Students displayed their projects and their IoT startups to the audience which they had built on their own using either Arduino or Intel Galileo.

Denzel was the first to speak .He elaborated more on coding the Intel Galileo board using Node Js.

Immediately after, +Ngesa Marvin  took to the floor for another session(Galileo 101). Time and again he reminded the students to look inside , “The boards may look the same, but for us, its what’s inside that matters, the low power super-fast brain on the chip, Intel Quark Soc X 1000 series processor”  He said.

According to the Intel Student Partner, the main difference between the boards was the shiny Intel processor at the heart of the micro-controller.Then he started to explain more about the board. It was an incredible first experience for many! He introduced the microcontroller board as a rapid prototyping environment which combines the power of Linux, Intel Quark processor and Arduino programming environment. The new developer board is simple interactive and can support complex projects like humanoid robots. The main advantage of using Quark processors is that it that it is faster and power efficient compared to other well-known architectures. Besides that, Galileo has an on-board RTC (real time clock), which is able to track time even when the board is powered off. Other boards rely on connection to the Internet to get the current date and time. . He also talked about other features of the board such as Serial, W-Fi, Bluetooth and GSM cards Connectivity, USB Interface, Wireless Access among others.

He advised the audience to later apply the knowledge in building something that could solve problems in our own country. “Hardware and software for humanity! Now after knowing all this things, what will you make?” He asked.

Questions from the participants were then entertained and answered. 

SoftBallot mind blowing vision of future elections

What will the future elections look like? +Softballot Kenya  is answering that question .In the following session titled Start-up X hour, Irene Ng’etich, the +Softballot Kenya  technical lead presented their company’s mind-blowing vision for future elections. She explained how the emerging technology helped carry out their class mock elections in a record 10 minutes. Giving a glimpse to the future generation elections, the system enables a secure and anonymous time-saving voting process from any part of the world, on any internet enabled device. Once launched, it will be able to run Elections, Polls, Surveys and Referendums for universities, schools, boards, associations, or anyone!

Adapting this new technology will avoid election violence, election fraud, and most if not all election crimes.

She however refused to release the full information of their system as it she said it was confidential. Full details will be released soon once phase two is complete.

She also warned that the idea has already been patented and anyone who dared to use their technology without their concern would go jail. “People have nowadays migrated from the era of land grabbing to idea grabbing”, she exclaimed.

She requested +Intel Kenya to support them in phase two the same way they did to Erick Kimathi’s Smart Loo. The same project has gained recognition at various competitions and major events. “The future belongs to those who prepare for it today” she concluded.

Then we entered the Intel Galileo Disruptive Innovation session where Michael Githinji using videos and graphics to elaborate explained how rhinos are getting hip to IoT. Connected ankle collars are now being used to track the critically endangered black rhinocerosThe ankle collar provides each rhino’s geo-location and movement data, which is encrypted to ensure poachers cannot get to it, and then sent to the cloud. This enables researchers to track the location of the animal, monitor its behavior, and know when it’s in distress—all in an attempt to help save this species.

Intel Galileo Showcase and Exhibition

This session featured ground breaking innovations running on both Arduino and Intel Galileo developed by students. Erick Kimathi, Intel Student Partner from Egerton presented his smart loo project which he told the others to expect it in the market soon. In this project, anyone can know if someone is inside the loo or not, the toilet flushes itself and is able to regulate the inside temperature. The smart loo also has a light sensor which automatically enables lights to be on when a person gets in the loo at night.

Wesley Akonya then introduced their automatic water detector. This project is about an automatic water detector that identifies availability of water and switches on the pump whenever there is water and switches off the pump whenever there is no water. This project aims to ensure the maximum utilization of available water by preventing wastage and to act as automatic switch to water pumps .The same project won first place in the Lions of Science competition and the involved student are heading to German after graduation.

In another exhibition, students were amazed by how Arduino Uno could be used to analyze big data .Francis Gikeri, former Google student Ambassador then presented on how a similar board, Raspberry pi could be integrated with  Proteus to make circuit design easier and at the same time simulate everything.

In between, questions such as “What is the latest intel processor” were asked and those who got the correct answer walked away with Intel branded t-shirts.

Everyone then wished +Arduino  the best Happy Birthday as they interrupted the laser beam. The Arduino Happy Birthday project was developed by Intel at DeKUT maker’s community under the close supervision of Mr. Veron Nangani.

Finally, +Ngesa Marvin  gave the closing remarks by thanking all present and all were free to leave at their own convenience.

The event had been organized by the DeKUT Intel Student Partner and the Computer Society of Kimathi (CSK) with additional preparatory and support graciously provided by +antony oroko , Kenneth Njihia and Mr.Verol Nangani.

Get more event Photos, slides and details about Arduino Day Kenya at +Intel At DeKUT  and Facebook pages keep on checking this BlogSpot for news events and more.

Let’s do it again next year, See you at the Arduino Day Kenya 2016!