NodeCopter Lounge At CascadiaJS

With the gracious support from Microsoft Windows Azure, Matt Podwysocki and I (Chris Williams) were able to create a great little “Intro to NodeCopter” lounge event over the two days of CascadiaJS. Set up just outside the main room of the event, we had two Parrot ARDrones available for individuals to run through some test flights. In total we were able to allow almost 45 people fly the drones over the course of the two days with almost everyone in attendance at least stopping by to see what was going on. We had several individuals sit down and start to dabble with the available hardware to extend or start new projects with the NodeCopters.

One of the more successful projects during the conference was to start the evolution of the previously built wii-drone from an arduino microcontroller system over to a more encapsulating Raspberry Pi based system. Another project that garnered a lot of interest, but is still in process was Rick Waldron’s efforts to get the Johnny-Five and node-serialport libraries to operate with the Arduino Leonardo boards. While not strictly a traditional NodeCopter event, the lounge provided a great place to discuss interesting and novel ways of using JavaScript to interact with the real world.

In summary, we are happy to report that the event overall was a huge success with many individuals primed and ready for their first, full-fledged NodeCopter event. The lounge style provided a nice, “walk-up”, and low-commitment variation of the NodeCopter event and afforded some amazing conversations in the process.

More pictures available from Matthew Bergman (link) and the CascadiaJS SkyDrive

Once again, a HUGE THANK YOU for supporting us to