Hardware Hack Day @ MozLDN, 1

Last week we ran an internal "hack day" here at the Mozilla space in London. It was just a bunch of software engineers looking at various hardware boards and things and learning about them :-)

Here's what we did!

Sole

I essentially kind of bricked my Arduino Duemilanove trying to get it working with Johnny Five, but it was fine--apparently there's a way to recover it using another Arduino, and someone offered to help with that in the next NodeBots London, which I'm going to attend.

Francisco

Thinks he's having issues with cables. It seems like the boards are not reset automatically by the Arduino IDE nowadays? He found the button in the board actually resets the board when pressed i.e. it's the RESET button.

On the Raspberry Pi side of things, he was very happy to put all his old-school Linux skills in action configuring network interfaces without GUIs!

Guillaume

Played with mDNS advertising and listening to services on Raspberry Pi.

(He was very quiet)

(He also built a very nice LEGO case for the Raspberry Pi, but I do not have a picture, so just imagine it).

Wilson

Wilson: "I got my Raspberry Pi on the Wi-Fi" Francisco: "Sorry?" Wilson: "I mean, you got my Raspberry Pi on the network. And now I'm trying to build a web app on the Pi..."

Chris

Exploring the Pebble with Linux. There's a libpebble, and he managed to connect...

(sorry, I had to leave early so I do not know what else did Chris do!)

Updated, 20 January: Chris told me he just managed to successfully connect to the Pebble watch using the bluetooth WebAPI. It requires two Gecko patches (one regression patch and one obvious logic error that he hasn't filed yet). PROGRESS!

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So as you can see we didn't really get super far in just a day, and I even ended up with unusable hardware. BUT! we all learned something, and next time we know what NOT to do (or at least I DO KNOW what NOT to do!).