Tuesday, August 25th 2015
Documenting things as they happen always feels like a good plan.
Skipping the travel, general introduction round, sight-seeing and lunch (all of which where excellent) and moving straight into our team activity.
After a round of introducing ourselves and stating what motivates us and what we were looking to take away from WeCamp1, we dove into forming “a plan”.
Our teammate Mitchel mentioned he had an Arduino with him. We all liked the idea of working/playing with the Arduino, so we tried coming up with a use-case we would like to build.
After some deliberation we decided we would like to build an HTTP interface for the Arduino, both client and server2. We didn’t have a specific use-case (although there was some mention of slack), so we decided we would think of an exact use-case at a later time.
1: Top section of the board
2: Middle section of the board
At this point we did a short (23 minute) timeboxed research round, digging up resources and checking out tutorials.
(Some of) our most relevant findings were:
We came up with a quick plan of attack3 and after identifying possible risks to our endeavour4 we set to work, creating a Proof-of-Concept5.
3: Top section of the board
4: Middle section of the board
5: Bottom section of the board
The first thing we had to do was connect all the pieces that make up our Arduino set. This was easy enough with the help of the manual it came with. We even got a LED to blink!
After that we connected an Ethernet Shield and started the Server Example. We ran into a hitch there, as we could not seem to get a response from the Ardunio over the ethernet. Luckily Jerry noticed we hadn’t plugged the cable in…
After that we still didn’t seem to be able to connect to the ethernet. It took some figuring out, but it came down to having to set an IP address on the laptop that the Ardunio was connected to.
After that we could make a request and get a response. We stood in amazement at the wonders of HTTP for a while before moving on.
I’m not sure if we also ran through the Client example as I got sidetracked by a discussion with Richard at this point. If the rest of the team did run through it in the time it took for the discussion to take place, it can’t have been too hard.
In either event we took a short break at this point. Beer may have been involved.
Having realized our basic proof of concept, Jerry did some more looking and found two libraries that seemed to do exactly what we are interested in:
This meant that our progress was coming along nicely and we would have to come up with a plan as to what we actually want to build. At this point dinner was announced so we went to enjoy a rather splendid meal (and desert). And there was much rejoicing.