Rat Operated Vehicle & Brief Introduction to CircuitPython (November 8th 2022 – MUG Meeting)

Visit mug.org for details on how to participate in the meeting (links, phone numbers, and Youtube Streaming).

Topics Include:

Rat Operated Vehicle 

No, not a Remote Access Trojan. Not a model. Small furry things that scurry along walls, with tails and ears. The University of Richmond trained them to drive. Michael Lucas watched the video, looked at his rats, and said "It's time I put you squeaky little bastards to work."

Lucas runs Unix and writes books. He does not do hardware hacking. His soldering iron was over fifty years old. We're in a pandemic, though, and he need to do something on weekends. The researchers published their plans. How hard could it be to follow them?

It turns out that teaching rats to drive was the easy part. 

This presentation will walk (drive?) through the process of assembling the Rat Operated Vehicle and (depending on the proclivities of the participants) could have a few demonstrations of the vehicle in action.

Michael W Lucas has been a network and Unix administrator for decades, and has written quite a few books about them, including the brand-new edition of "DNSSEC Mastery" and the forthcoming book "Open BSD Mastery: Filesystems." Other titles include "Networking for System Administrators," "TLS Mastery," and "git commit murder." Learn more at https://mwl.io.

Brief Introduction to CircuitPython
 

CircuitPython uses Python to program hardware on low cost microcontrollers.  The CircuitPython ecosystem is designed to be a beginner friendly programming language. Adafruit has a large number of tutorials and examples to get started and allow easy experimentation. CircuitPython is open source and is maintained by Adafruit Industries in New York City. 
 
This demonstration will show a beginner development board and how the CircuitPython ecosystem works. It will show how the source code is edited, how the code is saved and restarted, how libraries are used, and how the REPL console is used for interactive output. Online resources and tutorials will be shown to help anyone get started with CircuitPython. 
 
James O’Dell is an Industrial Robot Programmer in the automotive industry.  James is a CircuitPython enthusiast who has way too many different development boards. James teaches CircuitPython workshop at i3Detroit Makerspace. 

Plus we'll have our regular features: Jobs Looking for People, People Looking for Jobs, and much more!