On Thursday 27th October, we ran our very first hands-on LoPy workshop at Design Informatics in Evolution House. This was made possible by 10 brand-spanking-new Pycom LoPys sporting the very newest firmware less than 24 hours old, shared amongst 18 students and staff, including a couple of folk from outwith the University. And very possibly this was the very first workshop run anywhere in the world with the new production LoPy board! We were especially privileged to have both Fred de Haro (Pycom CEO) and Roberto Marques (Pycom software engineer) with us for the event (see Fred’s own post about his visit). For two hours we were busy hacking in MicroPython, sending messages over the new University LoRaWAN network — our own private set-up consisting of Kerlink gateways and our own deployment of The Things Network open source back-end. Some of the groups also managed to wire up a light sensor to the LoPy and transmit its data over LoRaWAN.
Immediately after the workshop we had an excellent presentation from Fred about the new Pycom boards coming out soon, including the new 5-way comms board which are an IoT developer’s dream. Roberto also explained how they had managed to fly a drone using LoRa comms for what essentially amounts to real-time control — inspiring stuff. Our special thanks to Fred and Roberto for coming to visit us and sharing their invaluable knowledge and insight, and to Daniel Campora (Pycom CTO) for preparing the new firmware for us. We also want to give a big shout-out to Sam and Eddie in Information Services for helping ensure the LoRaWAN infrastructure was ready for the event. The workshop was so successful and oversubscribed that we will be running the event again towards the end of November — watch this space…
