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May 19th, 2008 XCSSA Meeting
Where: Nail Technical Center, San Antonio College (north of down town S.A.), room 025 (in basement) or look for signs.
When: Date listed above, 7pm
Subject(s): Formal subjects below, plus what ever people bring in to play with... :)
- The Arduino Open Source Microcontroller Dev Platform:By: Scott Simpson
What's a microcontroller? In short, a microcontroller is a one chip computer with built in A/D (analog to digital) converters, digital control lines (for controlling and measuring things), memory and more. You can think of microcontrollers as the "thing" that programmers and engineers use to effect the physical world. They're used in everything from dishwashers and automotive ABS systems to robotic systems and spacecraft.Scott is going to be talking about an Open Source based microcontroller development platform (based on the Atmel AVR microcontroller chip) that allows even the most basic beginner to really do some way cool stuff!
Scott is going to go over some of the basic differences between PICs and Microcontrollers, and then jump into:
If you've ever wanted to get into electronics, robotics, PIC microcontroller programming, or anything cool like this, then you owe it to yourself to come check out this meeting! It'll be a hoot!- The Arduino board and it's variants.
- The Arduino shields (interface boards)
- The Arduino IDE (Integrated Development (programming) Environment)
- Demonstrate writing, compiling, uploading and running sample programs
EDITOR'S NOTE: I've been frozen these last couple of years by my inability to choose between PIC or ATMel AVR. If you find your self in this dilemma, and want to know how they compare head to head, here's a fairly even handed PIC vs AVR 10 point comparison. Also.. in my own real world projects experience, I would say more more non-engineering electronics-hobbyist geeks (or non-C/non-ASM programmers) tend to lean toward the PIC family because of their support of the popular PBASIC language. While that's fine, your Engineering/CS/EE/OSS types seem to lean more toward the ATMel AVR family because of their nice RISC style ASM and portable C/C++ based support (e.g. avr-gcc, arduino, etc). But that's just my $0.02.
-tw
Other local user groups are ALWAYS more than welcome to attend our meetings...
No Charges or Dues...
ever...
Group Photo Album Check out our new Group Photo's area! Some good geeky pictures of stuff we love to do! "The XCSSA Files" All the useful info that we share and document--we store here and call, "The XCSSA Files". The files are chocked full of useful information that the guru's in our group create. The XCSSA Archives We have so much good stuff demo'd at our group, we've decided to start archiving the montly group pages. Check'em out! This area contains most of what we have done 2000-05 on and should give you a good idea about the type of stuff that we do on a regular basis... Our Mail List Like what you see? Join Our Monthly Mail List. This is not one of those chatty Spam user group mail lists... We promise. : v )
- 2007-05 XCSSA Presentation on "Building Linux SOHO Firewall Router w/DMZ"
- 2005-09 XCSSA Presentation on "Building a Linux Based MythTV PVR"
- 2005-05 XCSS Presentation on "BSD From Source"
- 2003-05: Tweeks' Sendmail Sys-Admin Cheat Sheet
- Many more such presentations and useful material from previous XCSSA session are in our XCSSA Files
SYSTEMS THAT INTEREST US
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MEETING FORMAT |
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Our user group's members are not your normal run of the mill geeks. We pride our- selves in having a wide array of technical and IT professionals who excel in their fields. I have found that I can bring most any question to the group and get an insightful answer, and thus, have begun pointing recruiters to our members as a service to both. Feel free to contact the members below for job history and resume information. They're a powerfully diverse resource!
| Email / Web / --- | Randal is a real entrepreneur! He owns his own software programming company, Endicore and does in-house X-otic systems programming on various OS' (including BeOS)! | |
| Email / Web / Resume | IT/Telecom-Geek. Solaris, Linux, NT/9x, Integrator Guru. Also President of XCSSA. | |
| --- / Web / Resume | A real Web/CGI/DB/Programming Guru! One of our remote members, but this guy really knows his stuff. | |
| Email / Web / --- | | |
| Email / Web / Resume | John Baker, "Super Geek Extraordinaire!" is a CS major with much expertise in hardware/firmware design, microkernel hacking, device driver writing and debugging, and much much more. Get him before someone else does! | |
| Emaili / Web / Resume | NT and 2000 expert with web development experience. Hot on network implementation and accounting. | |
| Email / --- / Resume | Norma likes working with RDMS, such as Oracle, in Linux and Windows. She is quick to learn new things and is constantly experimenting with things on her own. | |
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Email The XCSSA "Reverse Dictatorially Elected Coordinator" Thomas Weeks: tweeksjunk@theweeks.org