[TriEmbed] catching up

[Pete Soper]

I was stunned to notice that at least two msgs I thought I'd sent to 
this list quite a few days back are not in the archive, so I must not 
have hit "send." I have a terrible habit of editing a message over a 
stretch of time, and that really bit me. I've had some health 
distractions for the past several months and they got out of control 
recently, but I'm doing much better now and we can all hopefully keep 
the list active now. There are more than 150 subscribers to this list, 
and surely somebody has something to share.

Here's a summary and cut and paste of the missing msg that isn't 
obviously overtaken by history.

The first meeting at NCSU on the 10th was absolutely fabulous, with 22 
attendees, excellent short presentations and discussions. There will be 
meetings at NCSU every 2nd Monday at least through May of next year (and 
every reason to expect an OK for another year, etc). Thanks again to 
Seth Hollar of NCSU for going above and beyond to enable this and Greg 
Dunko of NCSU for jumping in to help us build momentum within the NCSU 
community.

There was a meeting at Splatspace the day after Makerfaire that had five 
attendees with some interesting discussions.

There was supposed to be a meeting this past Saturday at Splatspace but 
others will have to say what went on. For July and later the actual 
meeting date will continue to be up to Scott Hall. The Meetup info for 
that meeting is still not "new TriEmbed name aware", as far as I know, 
so continue to equate "Arduino Hack Afternoon" and similar labels aimed 
at Saturdays at Splatspace with this organization.

Thanks to Ian Jeffries and Shannon Code the http://TriEmbed.org web site 
is well bootstrapped and ready for simple, static content (we're not 
ready for fancy dynamic behavior until somebody can step up to be 
webmaster).

A mail forwarder at web at triembed.org is set up to capture web-related 
bugs, content requests and submissions, and offers of help. Anything of 
general interest on it's way to the web site should of course go to this 
list.

There is some content for the web site in the works as soon as I can get 
to it:
    A calendar-like table of some sort to keep up with the meetings and 
planned agendas. For July Paul MacDougal will show us how to get started 
with AtTiny development and I'll provide a few minutes about getting 
going with Raspberry Pi. (More on this with the June 10th mtg details 
below.)
    Links to some docs like the agreement with NCSU, blank attendance 
sheets, etc.

I've connected with the TI application engineer covering this area and 
there is already some fun stuff in the pipes stemming from that.

OK, I've no doubt forgotten 16 details, but that's going to have to do 
for now.

=== Intended for about June 13th
The first meeting at NCSU seemed very successful. There were 22 
attendees with huge quantities of expertise to share. The AV equipment 
was outstanding and everything about the NCSU support for these meetings 
was first rate.

For next time:

   1) The "A" in the "map pointing to EBII" linked from the web page is 
pointing to the proper end of the building. If you come in from the 
parking deck to the west you'll regret it. Park "northeast of the A" off 
Oval drive. The room is straight in, down the hall and on the left 
(number 1228).
   2) Some of us will try to get there earlier and stick some sheets in 
strategic places to give folks a clue about where in this huge set of 
buildings room 1228 is located.

Here are some topics for min-presentations and tutorials at future meetings:

    1) Getting started with AtTiny so the big wad of chips recently 
gotten via the group buy can be put to use (Paul MacDougal, July)
    2) Intro/how-to covering a range of sensors (mixed up about the 
names: this person will no doubt identify himself at some point!)
    3) Automation how-to for "a Raspberry Pi making a phone call and 
reporting something related to a sensor in my house." (need a volunteer)
    4) How to make a (plain vanilla, "Hitachi standard" parallel) LCD 
work with an Arduino  (need a volunteer)
    5) Getting started with Arduino (need a volunteer)
    6) Jumpstarting Raspberry Pi (Pete Soper. Hard limit of 15 minutes 
in July)

There were probably more suggestions that I couldn't capture. 
Comments/corrections/proposals welcome.

Count on attendance by NCSU students at future meetings, especially from 
the ECE306 course run by Greg Dunko (Director of the ECE Design Center).

Shannon Code, Ian Jeffries, and Ron Craig have info and ftp access to 
the web site.

Scott Hall, Paul MacDougal, and Justis Peters have access to the email 
list ('cept there is something weird going on with the admin interface 
as I write this and the ISP is researching it. The moderation interface 
is not affected. I sent out a simple tutorial with some pointers for 
those new to the list infrastructure).  New subscriptions, attempts to 
send large msgs, etc, will block (with automatic email to the sender) if 
nobody's available to moderate. Ordinary msgs to the list by subscribers 
are not moderated.

-Pete