Well, we pulled off a very successful #GOINVENT World Series Workshop in the city that never sleeps (and neither did we, courtesy of jet lag).
We kicked off the day to the soundtrack of honking yellow taxis in SoHo, while happily enjoying proper New York bagels, cream cheese and some sizeable cups of coffee curtesy of our fabulous hosts Lofts at Prince.
As the final few folks took their seats, we were ready to begin.
Fred kicked us off with an introduction to Pycom and our mission, where we are currently as a company and shared some hard-learnt roadmap insights. Our brilliant Christian then took to the stage, signalling a start to the tech session.
goinvent new york hackathon
So, let the wild rumpus begin!
goinvent new york hackathon
FiPys were gently removed from goodie bags and expansion kits placed delicately on tabletops. These two were then put together, making sure that the FiPy was the right way up (this is vital) and that the antennas were where they should be.
internet of things connected devices
Following this, we took everyone through our Pymakr APIs and how to connect to ATOM’s IDE. Easy peasy. We had a fairly significant glitch on the WiFi network which sadly caved in under the duress of hundreds of connections (yes, each mobile phone, laptop and even each browser window represents a connection which adds up to hundreds of connections for the poor WiFi routers). Fear not, this was soon resolved by our hosts and Christian was able to carry on with the session.
Our partner Sequans then dazzled everyone with an overview of their portfolio and their very own Rajenish Jain gave some really good tips, tricks and insights into Cat-NB1 and M1.
By this point, everyone was feeling a bit peckish, so we stopped for lunch. As people milled about and chatted, we learnt about some of the amazing things that people are using Pycom products for. The uses ranged from a treasure hunt game to tracking to assisting visually impaired people – what an amazing and innovative crowd!
After lunch, everyone gratefully received the new Verizon SIMs and we got back to setting up on Verizon’s Cat-M1 network via Thingspace.
devices connected to the internet
dev boards solutions
We were lucky enough to have Michell Golner from IoTNation pay us a visit, and he presented to the audience a few nice tools to help them engage with the very active IoTNation community in New York. They are also present globally, so check out this map to see where your nearest IoTNation ecosystem is!
dev boards solutions
After the excited chatter quieted, Catalin (Mr Pymesh) ran a session about PyMesh, our LoRa mesh. This meant that everyone was on the same page and ready for a firmware update. (Something we had to do in order to run our next session with Sigfox (with Pybytes.))
After the firmware was updated, SigFox’s Head of Technology Adoption, Nicolas Lesonnec, gave a remarkable deep tech overview of SigFox as a network. He showed the audience how Sigfox are solving real-world challenges in IoT. Our lovely audience then began connecting to the local Sigfox network, which meant that everyone was ready to explore connectivity!
As the day drew to a close, more drinks and nibbles were brought out (something that was much to the crowd’s delight). Again, we got to chat to a whole host of inspiring developers and wow, you guys never cease to amaze us! It’s all happening in New York.
It happens at every #GOINVENT workshop, we think we have heard it all and boy-oh-boy are we wrong. We have such a rich idea base in our community and it’s so inspiring to hear all of the different ways you are using our products.
So, that’s a wrap New York. We’ve loved every second here and you never know, we may be booking our return flight sooner than you think!
A special thank you remains to all our partners who have supported us and not least with sponsorship for this series of #GOINVENT workshop series:
Espressif, Mouser, Semtech, Sequans, Sigfox, Vodafone and Verizon.
semtech, espressif, verizon, sequans, sigfox