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 28th 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
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.
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
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 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.
