So, we had packed our bags and headed to the other side of the world. And it was a smash. The warm welcome from YBF Ventures was fantastic and the array of breakfast goodies was mouth-watering. Our Melbourne event was packed with 60 people and we even had a few walk-ins. It was brilliant.
Fred kicked off the event as always, but sadly this time around we didn’t have the wonderful Bettina. Nevertheless, we weren’t deterred, and Fred gave a very interesting overview regarding the evolution of the Pycom customer network choice; cellular really came into its own in 2019. Fred then outlined the plan for Pycom’s roaring 20s. There are a lot of brilliant things in the pipelines so stay tuned!
Christian then kicked off getting folks up and running on Pybytes and Pymakr. We always try to remind people to pre-download Atom or VSCode as this can be a very time-consuming part of the workshop, but as always, Christian is happy to troubleshoot any road bumps. With every event, we provide a Slack channel for participants to chat and help each other out. It was really interesting to see the community come together to provide solutions and help keep the workshop rolling forwards – all for one and one for all!
Vodafone’s Stephen Stork then took to the stage, outlining Vodafone’s NB-IoT network. They are currently looking at 100 million connections by the end of 2019 and receiving a billion euros worth of revenue from them. They plan to launch networks in another 6 countries by the end of this year and the big picture is rolling out a global network that one SIM works on – all under the title of Vodafone global roaming.
So after fielding a few questions from the floor, we then hit a very well-deserved lunch break and everyone milled around happily. We had folks from IoT Meetups, hobbyists and the more business inclined engineers. One man had even flown over from Adelaide for the day, just to attend!
We finished lunch and followed it up with sending data to Pybytes. We also tried getting connected to LoRa and TTN, but we found out that this was a bit of a moment of trial and error. Ultimately, we didn’t have much luck (as there wasn’t a gateway near) but nevertheless we took the room through the process. You ask and we deliver!
So, it’s g’day from us in Melbourne. It was a workshop we learnt a lot from and we will be taking your feedback forward into the next round. Don’t worry if you missed out this time, as we’ll be back before you know it! Bigger and better than ever! A special thank you to all our partners who have supported us with sponsorship for this series of #GOINVENT workshops: Espressif, Mouser, Semtech, Sequans, Sigfox, Vodafone and Verizon. 