Memos From the Cube

I forgot to write about this the other day, but better late than never. Last Monday we Melbournians had our first (of many?) real-world meetups where several AVRFreaks members got together for a drink and a chat. I had a blast of a time, and it was great to finally put some names to faces in the AVRFreaks community. Turnout was good, with eight or nine people braving the 43 degree (Celsius, not Fahrenheit!) heat outside in the city.

I must say, it was both fascinating and odd to be talking to people who you’ve only met over the internet; it was a sort of surreal bleeding from one world to another. That said, all the members were very engaging and I hope there will be many similar meet-ups in the future with more people attending. One thing that shocked me the most was that one or two people actually mentioned things I’ve written here on my blog – I wasn’t aware that anyone actually read the junk I put down here; I’ve been using it mainly as a brain dump to ease the mental pressure. I’ll have to be more careful what I write in the future.

I hope Neil will forgive me for appropriating his group shots so I can post them here. I’ve labeled everyone with their first name and AVRFreaks username, so you can put a name to the, well, name. Click the photos to enlarge.

Awesome. One of the highlights of the night (for me) was the personal demo Mike gave me of his pet project – a LUFA USB host connecting to and downloading a webpage via a Three Mobile Broadband USB modem. There’s a heck of a lot of work he’s put in there to get it all up an running, including mashing LUFA, a set of PPP code examples, a TCP/IP stack and a lot of glue logic together to make a small unit of pure awesomeness. With a bit of cleanup it could become very useful for mobile units in the field, downloading updates straight from the internet wherever there is mobile coverage. Let’s see people do THAT with a Zigbee :).