 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar, a webcast, an online show. I don't know your word of choice, we'll take it. We're online every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. And that's when we do the live show. It's free and open to anyone to watch, as are our recordings. We record the show every week, post our recordings up to YouTube along with any websites or our presentations or whatever that are as part of the show. And all of our recordings are in our archives page, going back to when we first started the show in January 2009. And we do a mixture of things here, presentations, book reviews, mini training sessions, interviews. Basically if it's related to libraries, we'll put it on the show. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that do episodes of the show. And we sometimes also bring in guest speakers. And this week is one of the times when we do both. This is actually our monthly Tech Talk. Usually the last Friday of the month. Last week of the month on Wednesday is Tech Talk with Michael Sowers. Michael is our Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. He's here. And he comes in and talks more techy related stuff. Brings in guest speakers. And it has some tech news of the month since the last time he was here. So he is here today. And he's got a guest speaker. And I'm just going to hand over to you, Michael, to Andrew Drewson to take it away. Great. Thanks, Krista. And as she said, I'm Michael Sowers, Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Commission. And yeah, we are going to kind of geek out with some hardware today. One of the things I've been kind of keeping my eye on is a thing called an Arduino. And I'm not much of a hardware geek. I've built computers, but that's about it. And so it's one of those things where when I've talked about it in presentations, I usually talk about it for about 90 seconds. And then we've exhausted my knowledge of how those things work. So I thought it would be great to find somebody who actually knows something about this topic. And so today with us, we have John Lamasny. He's the owner of Lamasny Consulting, a technologist, consultant, and open source advocate working in New Jersey and beyond. He often works with schools, businesses, and libraries to develop technology-oriented training, programming, and solutions for all kinds of people. And I got to say, I've dug through his presentation archive. And I knew this was the guy I wanted out of the show today. So good morning, John. How are you doing? Good morning, Michael. Thank you so much. So why don't you go ahead and tell us a little more about yourself and your background and dive right into our topic. Fantastic. Well, thank you everybody for coming. It's actually snowing here in New Jersey, so I'm happy that I did not have to leave my house today. The thing that really excites me about being able to talk about technology is that I have a personal passion for it. And I think that it has great benefits. And I think that, well, at least my experience has been that many people are frightened of technology because of privacy concerns or because they feel like it's overtaking their lives or they feel like it is dangerous in some way or maybe just misunderstood. Something that as far as they are concerned, it's nebulous. It's something that they don't understand. So as a result, one of the things that I've focused on in my teaching and training with people and in libraries, which I'll talk about more specifically later, is coding literacy and also visual literacy, data literacy, and information literacy, which of course is something I think near and dear to every librarian's heart. So with coding literacy and visual literacy, I feel like I've struck a little bit of a nerve because when people understand something, it loses that fear. It loses that anger that we sometimes have for it. If we understand why something is doing something or why something looks a certain way and how to make something do what we want or make something look the way that we want, all of a sudden the mystery goes away for it and you can begin to become excited about it. So as a result, I have focused in my classes on things like Arduino and Raspberry Pi and Scratch and Inkscape, which is a fantastic digital illustration application, so that I can expand these ideas to many, many people because I don't feel like it's happening in the education system. I don't feel like it's happening without somebody being invited to participate in visual literacy or coding literacy. And as a result, sometimes a great coder doesn't get exposed to the ability to manipulate code or create code until later in life, whereas if it becomes more of a native literacy, a natural literacy growing up, then it just becomes a part of you. And as you walk through the world, you sort of apply that literacy in the same way that you apply your ability to speak or write or do math or whatever. So I'm here on my website at WellNasty.com and Michael just mentioned my portfolio of presentations. They are all Creative Commons licensed, meaning that you can use them as you wish without contacting me without asking my permission. The one thing I do ask in my Creative Commons license is that you mention me in credits or you leave my name where it appears in various presentations. But you can use my presentations as you wish. If you come to my website, which requires being able to spell my ridiculous last name, which is Lamassie and Michael did a great job. If you come here to lamassie.com and click on topics and then click on presentation portfolio, there is a link right in the middle of that page. And when you click on it, it will open up my Google Drive folder of public presentations. And there's all kinds of topics in here that are related to what we're talking about today. There's my Arduino presentation. Here's a talk about Android devices, Dropbox, Arduino and Raspberry Pi, storytelling with technology, food blogging, HTML and CSS, identity theft, et cetera. So if you're interested in the topic of Arduino and how to begin to integrate it regarding programming in libraries, feel free to use these presentations and get a presenter who knows something about these technologies. And feel free to start doing this kind of programming in your own spaces. One thing that I've done besides presenting in libraries and schools on these topics is to write about them. So if you go to lamassie.com, here is an overview of a project using an Arduino. There's an Arduino right there. And this one is an egg timer, a five minute, 10 second egg timer, where all those LEDs light up one minute at a time. And then when you get to the 10 seconds, the last one blinks. So why are we doing this? You might ask because I could go and get an egg timer. I could use somebody else's timer and just set it for five minutes and 10 seconds. The reason that I'm doing it is because I want to understand how it works. I don't want to have to rely on somebody else in order to provide a technology solution for me. I don't want to be just a consumer in the same way that you imagine that the only way that you were able to participate with words was to read them. You were not able to write them. You didn't understand how those sentences went together. It was magic to you. If you bought books and you were able to consume that information, but you were not able to put it out yourself, you can understand how frustrating and confusing and limiting that would be. I feel the same way about technology. I feel like when we do not understand, I'm not saying that we all need to be master programmers. I'm saying that we shall understand something about what is going on underneath the surface of a particular technology. One reason that I feel so strongly about this is because technology is moving to a closed place. It really is becoming more and more proprietary, more and more closed. Perfect example is take your smartphone out of your pocket and tell me how it works. Tell me what's inside of it. Most of us would be scared to try to open it because we would probably avoid our warranty first and foremost, but we might also be afraid of breaking it. I feel like that is a limiting place to be because if you can't get into something, if you don't know the structure of it, then you don't know how it works. It's not really yours. You may have paid for it and it may be in your possession, but it's not yours ideologically. I tried to talk about this in regards to Arduino because Arduino starts in a useless place. If you just take out, if you go into a radio shack and you pick up an Arduino as you see here and you bring it home and you plug it in via USB, it doesn't do anything. It does not do anything. You need to plug it in to a circuit where you need to plug it in to you need to learn something about the coding in order to get it to do anything at all. Raspberry Pi, another technology that I talk about, is more straightforward. You can plug it into a keyboard, mouse, and monitor and you can have a working computer. You can do other things with it too, but that is usually an easier transition, something that I talk about with audiences well as a different way of thinking about making technology work for you. Just as a parting note on visual literacy, right now I'm working with Delaware libraries on their dataset for 2014, fiscal year 2014. We decided to develop some infographics related to their data. I can see, for example, that philosophy and psychology and science and history and geography are represented here. If I wanted to see how that was different in relation to their physical circulation, we can see that literature is definitely being circulated more more. This is technology too, and this is related to visual literacy, but in my mind it all fits together. Understanding how to present this data means that you are not just a consumer of that information, but rather you can put your hands on it, you can manipulate it, you can edit it. Let me show you the presentation that I typically use for my Arduino classes, the programming that I do in Princeton Public Library, Piscataway Library, Sherry Hill Public Library here in New Jersey. This is developed into a much more hands-on effort over time. When it first started, it was strictly lecture. I would talk about what the Arduino did, and I would show them my Arduino doing something, but nobody ever laid their hands on wires, nobody ever plugged anything in, nobody ever wrote any code, and that has changed because of my very close relationship with some of these libraries, Princeton Public Library in particular. We have developed a program where we have the Argyrinos in kits that we hand out during the class and allow people to get their hands on it, because if you are just looking at something from across the room, that's a lot different than working to figure out what wire goes in what hole, or trying to figure out what I change in the code in order to make that white blink differently. We start off with a very simple circuit. Ahead of that, we just more or less talk about what an Arduino is. We introduce different sizes of Argyrinos, different purposes. We talk about what the pins are. Pins are essentially ports where you can input or output information over wires. We go over the Argyrino Uno that we're going to be playing with in the class. We talk about open source as a concept, and open source is essentially the opposite of proprietary in regards to software, and in this case hardware. The hardware is open source too, and what that means is that I don't need to go and buy an Argyrino. I can go read about how to make an Argyrino and make one myself, not the same money, but for the same reason that you're using an Argyrino in the first place. That is to understand how it works to have this literacy. I have not built my own Argyrino. I do not plan to, but I love the idea that I could, and I love the the idea that other people are. We talk about where to get one. You can walk into a Radio Shack while they still exist. You can go to Amazon or Element 14. There are lots of online communities where these people who came to this class can then follow up with the information we had in class by joining a community to learn more, to watch videos, and there are endless videos. Here's an example of a video resource on Element 14. It talks about basics, but they have very advanced projects that if you stick with it and you keep watching these videos step by step by step you become masterfully aware of electronics. In my opinion, this is the direction, one of the directions that Princeton Public Library has gone. They essentially have moved from a traditional library stature that is come here and borrow our stuff to becoming really a learning community. When you go into that space you're a part of a social community. You're a part of a gaming community. You're a part of the technology community. You're a part of still a reading community and a watching community, but they have really driven their educational efforts and developed great spaces for bringing people together to learn. In this particular case, in my case, I go there probably once a week when the season is going. I'm talking about technology and they also talk about a lot of other things and their programming is fabulous, but I think that libraries need to focus on this. If there is not programming going on, it's one of those things where you can find volunteers. I volunteer all the time in order to help libraries out, in order to get their programming on track. I've been lucky enough to develop a business around this in part, but I love talking to libraries just because they give me so much and I want to give so much back. Anyway, we go through inputs and outputs. We talk about the difference between an LED and a potentiometer. We talk about the difference between the hardware side and the software side. This is where it starts to get exciting, where we talk about what the code is and what it looks like and what we can change in order to make something react differently. In this particular case, we're showing the Arduino on the right-hand side in a schematic form and the code on the left-hand side. We actually end up manipulating this code in order to make the LED blink differently. We can see there, for example, there's a resistor. We talk about resistors and LEDs and what a diode is. Then we show examples of, if you were to learn this, these are some of the things that you could do. You could make this beautiful LED cube and I don't know what I'm going to be able to do. There's an Arduino. There is the LED cube and this is not a minor project. This is nothing that we can take on inside of one of these introductory classes. This is something that would take months, really, unless you had a team of people, you're going to be doing a lot of soldering. You're going to have to understand the theory behind it, but it's nice to see where you could go with it if you started off, you know, with such humble beginnings as blinking a light. Here's an example, a video that talks about home automation and how this gentleman developed a system that uses his Arduino to control his lights throughout his house. He learned a lot about the systems that are in his house, but he learned a lot about Arduino, too. Finally, this is a really fun Arduino-based project called Liquid Likbar, where a guy puts together this amazing tube filled with fluorescent water. He changes the color according to what's going on in his video game, and as his life increases or decreases, or his score increases or decreases, the level of the water increases and decreases, and because it's fluorescent, it looks as though it's like a life bar on the video game, and he can apply it to anything, because it more or less adjusts the level that he can apply to the things like what's the temperature right now, or what's the weather, right? He can change the color to show the weather. You can't buy this in the store, and so this is the exciting part of this, is that you don't have to wait for some manufacturer to make the thing that you have in your mind. If you have coding literacy, if you understand Arduino, you can build yourself. You can go and find somebody who did something similar to it and then build on top of it. Here's some more resources, and then we go into a demo where we open up our Arduino integrated development environment. I'm opening that up now, and we go through the blank code, and we talk about how, when you have a slash and a star and a star and a slash, that is a molding line comment. In other words, this is not interpreted by the Arduino. When you have double slashes, it's a comment, a single line comment, and that is not interpreted by Arduino. Then we get down to our first construction, INT LED equals 13. This is code, and we explain what a variable is. Variable is a placeholder for a value, and in this case it is an integer based value, a whole number. We are naming it LED, and then throughout the rest of the code, whenever we mention LED, 13 will be put in its place. But we don't have to put in 13. We put in this placeholder value, so that if we decide to change this to 14 or 22 or 12 later, we don't have to change it six times throughout the code. We just change it in one place, and it follows through to the rest of the code. Then we have void setup. Void setup and void loop are the two sections of every Arduino sketch. This program is called a sketch. It's written in a language called processing, and it's very much like C++, a very old, old standard of code. So void setup is the part where you set anything that you want to happen at the beginning of your application. And in this case we're saying pin mode LED output. That means we are telling the Arduino that on pin 13 we want to set that to output. We're going to have an LED on it, and so the electricity is going to be going out of that port into the LED and then back to ground. And then followed by the application, the loop, the thing that happens again and again and again. In this particular case we're telling it to write to pin 13 high. That means send 5 volts. The Arduino either sends 5 volts or 3.3 volts. And in this particular case we have it on a 5 volt circuit. So digital rate sends a 5 volt surge to LED, which of course at the top of our code says 13. Then delay 1,000. This means wait a second. 1,000 milliseconds is exactly one second, and so we delay for 1,000. And then digital rate LED low, we take our 5 volts away and the light goes out. And then delay 1,000. So whenever we have a delay it says keep doing whatever you're doing for this length of time. And everything is happening sequentially. And then it does it again. So in this particular case it takes our LED that we put on pin 13 and lights it on for a second, then off for a second, on for a second, off for a second. Now in our classes what we do is we take our arduinos, we set up this application, we get the LEDs to blink, and then I tell people to go and find their name in Morse code. And I'd sell them to figure out the code to write their first name in Morse code so that they could you know put it in a window somewhere and tell somebody whoever could see the LED what their name was. You know just an interesting phone way that involves a little bit of research because most people do not know Morse code. And if people if we're rushed for time I'll tell them to do SOS where it's dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot right. So at any rate by the time we are done people have played with wires, they have written a little bit of code, they have an understanding of the code that we're trying to write and they know what they need to know in order to go and buy an arduino for 35 bucks at their local Radio Shack around Amazon and they'd be able to recreate the project that we did and maybe play a little bit more. If they want to go further they can get the arduino starter kit which is put out by arduino itself and that comes with a bunch of wires and a bunch of LEDs and a bunch of motors and actuators that they can begin to use in order to understand how to write code in order to check the temperature, how to write code in order to sense light, how to write code in order to write an egg timer, right? So it's just it's been a lot of fun to take people who do not feel like they are programmers who are not programmers and have them understand that they are very close to becoming programmers if they want to. I've done this with programming for non-programmers when we talk about arduino or Raspberry Pi or HTML and CSS and I've also talked about design for non-designers people who feel like you know because they can't draw that they can't design or that they feel like when they don't when they open up word and they put some text on a page that they are not designing when in fact they are they just happen to be using a tool that is so poor for design and gives you so many limits and so few opportunities for really great design that you would think that you are not a good designer and design and coding and web development and all those things I feel go hand in hand in hand and really work well together. Finally I just wanted to show you this video the the blink sketch that we just looked at is very famous sketch because it's the one sketch that anybody who has ever worked with arduino usually does. Let me see if I can get this to start. You are now ready to make your first arduino project. We're going to do a very simple project blinking an LED. You don't really need an LED for this project because the arduino has a small one built in but it helps to have one. If you're using an LED you'll notice how one lead is longer than the other. The longer lead is the positive and the shorter one is the negative. Place the positive lead into pin 13 on the arduino and the negative lead into the pin label to GND. The reason we use pin 13 is because it has a built in resistor so you don't need to add one. Once the LED is in place connect the arduino to your computer and write this code. Notice how some minds of the text have... So what I love what I absolutely love about this video is that it's it's being done by what appears to be an eight-year-old or a ten-year-old and I just there's something very exciting about that and I think that most adults of what I have found is that many adults if they see a simpler mind, a younger mind doing something that they want to do they feel like they can do it. There's something just beautiful about that video and the kid in the video does such a great explanation of exactly what I talk to people about all the time in regards to arduino. So I can go on I can continue to talk to you about some of the things that I've done with arduino but I'd love to know if there are any questions. Yeah thanks Sean. I've got some but I want to remind the audience that we will happily take any questions you have and I like I say I as I usually do in these things I will always defer to the audience on this but I gotta say you've inspired me to I really got to play with one of these. I have a raspberry pie and it does what it does but it doesn't allow me to do much else. So let me let me see where I want to start here. Let's start with a big one. Okay so somebody comes up to you says I've heard about this arduino thing and I know I can plug in lights to it whatever but I just okay really what am I gonna do with it? How do you handle that question? Well if it's an elevator pitch sort of a situation where I'm just trying to very quickly give them an idea of what they can do I give a broad answer. I'll say whatever you can't do with your phone whatever you can't do whatever you are waiting for somebody else to make for you you can do yourself with an arduino and if they continue to say what does that mean you know I might give the example of the egg timer I might give an example of the led cube or I might give the example you know that there are a million examples of ways that you can make something that doesn't exist without you making it and but that honestly for me that is not the point of it the point of it is really to understand something about hardware and software because moving forward I think that the people who have that literacy gain a certain amount of power and the people who do not have that literacy moving forward have less power and in fact one of the odd things that's happening right now is all of our electronics basically our phones our tablets all those things are made in china and they in really horrible working conditions quite honestly where they work very long hours and and they have the knowledge of how these things go together there are people here who understand it too ideologically but but few and you know if you wanted to build a phone how would you go about it and I'm not saying that you would necessarily want to but if you wanted to how would you go about it and the answer I think for most people is you know well we go and see how other people are doing it and do it the same way and if that is the case then they would just buy a contract with a company in china and that's how they would get it done if you wanted to build one yourself you could do it with an arduino in fact you could you could get all of the sensors every every android phone or iphone has about 13 to 20 sensors and you can put them all in and not even solder them but just you know have wireless connectivity have a cellular connectivity have a camera have all those things connected to an arduino and you'd be able to control it won't set aside for a minute that it would be the ugliest thing you ever saw but but the beautification of it is not the point it's the idea that in order to understand how all these things go together and how they all have what kind of circuits are involved you would that would be a lot of work because it's it's not something that a lot of people are doing not something a lot of people are writing about and i feel like we are almost societally moving to this place where we just expect that the next piece of electronics is going to exist it's going to do what we want it to and if it doesn't that's just too bad i don't i don't subscribe to that idea i i really feel like when something is not as you wish for it to be then there should be opportunities for you to make it precisely what you want it to be that's open source software where the code to that makes the software is distributed along with the software and you can make changes to fix the problems that you have with the software you can't do that with proprietary software in fact you could get into a lot of trouble for trying to do that with proprietary software if you try to open up a adobe photoshop and make changes to it where you try to open up microsoft office and make changes to it you are prohibited you are prohibited from doing that as opposed to open source software technologies like chrome and firefox and inkscape and the canoe image manipulation program and a lot of other open source technologies where they not only give you the working software but they also give you the invitation and opportunity to make changes as you wish and if you're not a programmer you could hand that off to somebody else in order to make those changes if that was what you wanted to do so but my point of course is you should try to begin to understand some of these technologies whether it be python or whether it be html and css and javascript right and one of the things that we have done to these classes on code academy which i'll bring up here for you i think i've started several of their classes yeah stressing started but yeah what i love about code academy is first of all it's free and secondly uh it is a step by step walkthrough of uh of how to learn about that particular technology and it gives you instructions and background over to the left and it gives you uh the code over to the right the working code and when you're done you click on save and submit code and if you get it wrong it keeps you there if you if you don't get past this particular lesson this will be the end of your path but you are challenged and uh it is suggested that you keep going so that you can get badges they have actually great gamification in here and like i said i don't know that everybody needs to be a programmer but everybody should understand code in the same way that many people understand a foreign language to the degree that they would be able to you know hear a phrase in french and they would understand it that's all i'm asking for for the average person is to to uh you know go into a website right if we if we go into wimacity.com and we right click and choose view page source this is very uh straightforward basic code this is html and css and javascript that renders my sites and this is not the way that i built it i of course used wordpress which has a beautiful graphical user interface in order to create this but i understand this code because if something doesn't happen the way that i want it to inside of wordpress i that doesn't mean that i just live with it it means i go into the code find out what's wrong and force it to work right and this is a big part of my business is is helping people to learn how these things work so that they can fix problems no matter what the problem a pixel is not in the right place i want it to be two pixels to the right okay well it's going to the css and change that whereas you know if all you are doing is using the front end of wordpress which is like i said beautiful you may feel limited that doesn't mean that the opportunity is not there for you to make that change but that um you have to make the effort to learn that literacy in the same way that you may be effort to learn how to write and to read etc okay i i promise at least the rest of my question so far less philosophical in nature but no no that was great answer i one one thing that the things we're saying about you know you you should know this stuff or else people will do it to you are are you familiar with the book um program or be programmed by douglas ruchkov i am very very very uh similar ideas yes yeah i i feel like that that is it we we are weaning towards a place where you know for example we also often talk about the digital divide and the people who have and the people who do do not have and raspberry pi for example begins to solve that problem and open source software often solves that problem because i i don't teach proprietary software if i teach about design i teach open source design and part of the reason is that i don't i don't um predict that my that the patrons who are coming to my classes have two hundred dollars to go and get illustrator or you know have a friend who is in an academic institution and can get an academic copy or whatever the case is i would rather just have the functionality and have it be open and available so it's you know i'm i try to keep a low threshold of entry available for everybody at all points okay just want to remind everybody if you've got any questions for john just go ahead and either raise your hand or type them into the q and a area um so let me let me talk to you a little bit more about the hardware so people would know what what they're kind of getting into um and i and i saw a little bit from the video where you obviously need to connect it to a computer uh to to get the program from the computer into the arduino um and correct me if i'm wrong you can basically run one program at a time correct that's right and and uh you can do several things within that program right like so for example in your loop you can have things that break that loop and uh so let's say that we have um a button or in this case uh on the seg timer right there you can barely see it right there there is a a sensor that when you turn it over it resets the loop so you can have a button or a sensor you know like a light sensor or a temperature sensor that says based on the input from this sensor do the following otherwise do the do this sure right and um so you can have multiple loops within the loop that that run uh depending on the environment or the sensors or whatever and um so yes it does run one program at a time but within that program you can do lots of different things sure so like if you wrote a second program you would overwrite the first one as complicated or as simple as the program is it's still if you want to if you want to run multiple programs you need multiple boards basically uh oh that's that's an interesting that's an interesting point yes so okay you can only write one particular application at a time to the Arduino uh and you know so for example if i wanted to have an analog read serial run and i wanted to have blank run i would not be able to run both of these applications at the same time however i could combine them depending on their functionality into a single application and write that entire application to the arduino and depending on the functionality that i want it would it would do both sure okay um what is the okay once you disk once you've programmed it and you disconnected it from the computer what's the power source oh uh it does need power so if if you uh if you disconnect it from the computer there is on the other end of the arduino let's see if i can bring a better picture can you see this large image yeah okay so uh here we are looking at the arduino uno over here power ports over here analog ports over here digital this is usb this is the reset button and down here is a special power input for a battery pack okay so you can power it by usb but if you wanted this to be something that uh worked in your backpack let's say um you would have to use the battery pack and you can connect the nine bolt to it okay could could you plug it into a wall if it was going to be kind of mounted somewhere is that it could as as long as you do the translation between the power coming from your wall and power going into the arduino so don't don't send it 110 volts uh uh right off out of the wall is that you will end up with a with a blue meldyn piece of plastic yeah okay fair enough okay something very important to consider um watch it actually leave that picture You kind of talked about running a program and outputting, in the case of the example you had the output of the LED. What sort of inputs are built in and what sort of inputs are available for this? There are, when you think about this before I say this, there are no inputs built in. There is a single output built in and that is right here. It's a built in LED that's where it says L there and so you can, for example, without connecting anything, tell that LED to do something. So that's an example of an output. Another example of an output would be a motor or a fan. Another example of an output would be a screen where we could have an LED screen, for example. Examples of inputs include things like a light sensor or a charged couple device, like a camera. You could have a potentiometer and let me see if I can get you some good images of that. Well while you're doing that, for example, the somewhat humorous example I usually give to people within Arduino is the one I heard about where you stick a sensor in your plant soil and then it tweets you if the soil is too dry. Yeah, so that is a moisture sensor. So if I... And then the output, what would be the output in that example? It would be serial output. So you can use the Arduino to read the input from a moisture sensor and then you can have it output to a website or you can have it output to a screen and based on that output or actually right in the code you could say if moisture level goes below 0.2 or actually it would be on a range of 0 to 1024, 1023. So if moisture level goes down to 500 then use the Twitter library in order to tweet that I need water. And I'm trying to thank you. One of my favorite sites for this kind of thing is Adafruit.com. Adafruit, ADA. Adafruit. Yep. Chris is keeping track of the links here, so. Oh, good. So this is Adafruit and they have all of these predetermined projects that you can use in order to play with your Arduino or Raspberry Pi. Here's the brand new Raspberry Pi model B plus that has four USBs, that's exciting. I like the secret knock activated drawer over there in the bottom. Yeah. That was good. Let's see. If I go into sensors. Oh, GPS. Yeah, GPS is input. Sometimes they come in the form of a shield that just connects directly to your hardware. Accelerometers, many of these things are found in your phone, for example, like we were talking about. Here's a serial JPEG camera with video. Here's a motion sensor, very common. Here's a sensor pack. I recognize this. This is a pressure sensor. That is a temperature sensor. This is an LED. These are connectors. These look like either pressure or temperature sensors. Battery. Waterproof digital temperature sensor, love that. All these things, oh, microphone amplifier. Fingerprint sensor, look at that. I almost want to say here that instead of, I mean, some people might have a project in mind and they'll see if the parts exist, but I'm always thinking at least the way I work is I start looking at the parts that are available and go, ooh, what could I do with that? Right. I mean, there are endless, endless sensors available. This site is also great because as I said, you really, you can go to their learn portion and just go and learn about sensors or you can go and learn about Raspberry Pi or go and learn about Arduino and it's high quality, really high quality things broke down. Hey, there's the Moto 360, the brand new smartwatch, right? It looks like they took it apart to see how it works, which is exactly what I'm talking about. There's Lady Aida right there and the fact that she destroyed this watch in order to help us to understand how it works gives you the entire, that is the entire philosophy is let's find out how these things work and why one thing does one thing and why another thing does another thing. So let's talk about your, the programs for the public you've done, you kind of implied this but what sort of age groups have you done these sessions with and what is, have you noticed any, assuming there's been a range, have you noticed anything different in dealing with say the younger ones or the older ones in giving these presentations if somebody else wanted to do them? So I'll tell you, I have given a few classes that were specifically for youth and that's been at Princeton Public Library and also at Cherry Hill Public Library but all the classes that I give, I welcome any age, those classes were specifically limited to children so that it would be a certain kind of a class and that class was on scratch in both cases. Scratch in case you are unfamiliar with it, if you know a 10-year-old they probably know exactly what it is, is an MIT project cloud-based block programming application. So you end up putting blocks together like this in order to have something happen, either an animation or a game and it looks like somebody made a billiards game for example. So what I love about this is not only that you can see games that other people made but then you can see inside the game to see how it was that they made this. So this is loading. So there's the game and you can see that people have remixed this in order to make improvements on it where they saw that improvements needed to be made. But if we go to see inside, this is a fairly complicated scratch project but it's nice to know how to make it if I wanted to, how to make my own billiards game. And then there are many other scratch applications that are much, much simpler than good starting points. So we have focused on scratch as a programming for youth sort of a thing. The youngest that we have typically is like six. I think a six-year-old has trouble in a class like this unless they're an exceptional six-year-old. A nine is usually a better starting age. They have enough patience and calmness and ability to sit in one place that this will of focus required for this kind of learning can happen. And we have also done Arduino and Raspberry Pi for younger groups but that has not been as successful. We're just not there yet. So if a library was going to do something on, we'll stick with our Arduino here. What sort of age minimum are you thinking might be a property? Well, in your experience, obviously. In my experience, I think that that can happen really well. Arduino can be taught really well to let's say a 12-year-old. And that may even be a little bit high but it's the kind of thing where dexterity is important and abstract understanding is important and a certain excitement about this kind of thing is important. So I would say 10 to 12. I want to underline the fact that if somebody wants to come with their six-year-old, I always welcome that. So that's perfectly fine because I want them to be exposed to the ideas but when that happens there tends to be a little bit of boredom going on because it's a high level of discussion. The last question I have is let's say you have completely inspired someone. They want to get an Arduino to play with and then maybe in a couple of months they want to do a program in their library. What are they going to need in their kit? Would you recommend to do it? Obviously at least a couple of our Duinos but where would you go from there if they just said, hey I want to do a class maybe for like 10 people at a time. What are they going to need to get? I would suggest four kits and I would suggest not getting an off-brand kit and I do suggest getting a kit meaning that putting your own kit together is a good opportunity for there to be inconsistencies whereas if you go to Amazon and do a search on Arduino starter kits you will find the official Arduino starter kit and there are others that will be available for more or less money but this is really the one, let me just check before I tell you that. Here is one for $64. It's made by MAKE which is highly associated with Arduino Raspberry Pi and the MAKE movement. I would suggest something like this and it comes with LEDs, actuators, sensors, wires, and photo resistors so there is a whole bunch of stuff in here and all of the projects related to these items are available online so you can go and specifically make use of the projects that are made for this kit on the MAKE magazine website. Alternatively, the one that I have and absolutely love is the official Arduino starter kit. You can get it from lots of different places but this would be more expensive and this comes with a great book and you can almost see, right, so it comes with a LED readout, it comes with a breadboard, comes with a motor, comes with a battery pack, comes with potentiometers, comes with temperature sensors, all kinds of stuff and a great book that leads you through how to make use of all of them for $100. So that's a pretty hefty investment though and unless you have people clamoring that $100 a pop for four kits is probably a large chunk but I think that this is a popular topic and every time, at least at Princeton Public Library, that I gave a talk on either Arduino or Raspberry Pi, I just gave a talk on Raspberry Pi two nights ago, the room is packed. We have a 12-person lab and we usually have to go and get chairs so that all the people who are coming can sit down. Instantly, on my website, these are some of the things that we're talking about. My next talk at PPL is in January for Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and related topics. As I said, graphic design for non-designers, all of these ideas really go together and I think libraries who are doing programming about differential literacies will attract an audience that wants to know about that topic. Cool. Okay, I've got one last question for you just for fun. What is the coolest thing you've ever come across built with an Arduino? Oh, let me see if I can find it. Lightbox is pretty cool, but yeah. Yeah, Lightbox is really cool. Let me see if I can find it. Okay, while he's looking, I'll just remind everybody we're going to be wrapping it up here very shortly after this question. So if you've got any questions, now is your opportunity to type them in to get them into the recording and we've got one. Yes. Someone wants to know, so do they use the kits in small groups? Yes. So if you buy four kits and you have 12 people, it would be three people per kit. And you can, of course, that can become exponential. If you have 20 people show up or 25 people, we don't do pre-registration at Princeton Public. Okay. We used to. And I say that as a contractor for Princeton Public. I am not a librarian. I'm a technologist. So I don't want to give a false impression. So let me see. Yeah, so as many people as show up, each of them gets a task within the kit. So if we're trying to put together the circuit that we just talked about, we might have one person who's responsible for adding the LED and one person who's responsible for adding a momentary switch, and one person who's responsible for adding the wires that give positive and negative power and ground, and one person who's responsible for connecting the rails to the LED, right? And so as a result, everybody gets involved. Everybody gets hands-on. And if somebody really doesn't want to participate and they just sort of want to see what's going on, then they can. And they can, you know, somebody else can do that. So let me see if this is the one. This is not the one, but this is interesting too. This is the one that I was thinking about. Okay. So you take like long exposure photos with that thing wiggling around. Right. And because we're able to use the Arduino in order to control. But I mean, there's all kinds of, if you go on YouTube and you do a search on the word Arduino, you will just find, if you're into this kind of a thing like I am, or even if you're not and you just sort of like cool stuff, well, you'll be here for weeks. I mean, I've watched playlists like Overnight. This is the last one I'm going to show you. This is one where a bunch of LEDs are in the shape of a globe. And it goes through the construction of it. And at some point it actually has a demonstration of it. Yeah. And, you know, I apologize in advance because if you don't like dubstep, you're going to hear a lot of it. Well, thanks for the warning. My pleasure. We'll do that. All right. Well, John, thank you very much. This was wonderful. And I think you filled in what I needed to know if nothing else. And we got a couple of questions from the audience here. So I think we filled them in. And we can kind of tell who's attentive and it looks like everybody was very attentive during the session. So just because there weren't a lot of questions doesn't mean they weren't participating. No, I understand. Yeah. You've done plenty of these. John, I want to thank you once again. We're going to take back control for just a couple of minutes to wrap up the show today. So give us all here just a second to do that. Change for center. And I just wanted to say thank you so much for the opportunity. It was a real pleasure to be here today. Yeah. There we go. Sorry, I got to click the right buttons here to do all this. I just kind of have one piece of news here that I wanted to talk about today, which I found out about yesterday. And this is kind of as a result because Susan Nicely and I here at the commission have been doing a series of e-reader workshops lately. And we've got a couple of questions about how can you deal with overdrive on a Chromebook because I'm running the Chrome OS. So not necessarily the same thing as an Android phone, but running that. And what we had been telling people up until yesterday was you would have to use the overdrive read functionality, which is to read your books on web browser. But as of yesterday, there is an overdrive app for the Chrome OS. So you do not install this in the Chrome browser. This is if you have one of those Chrome laptop computers running the Chrome OS. The overdrive app is now available for that platform. So I just want to throw that in. I'm going to write a blog post about that. Maybe this afternoon, maybe after the long weekend, people will like more information. But if you have a Chromebook, just go to your Chrome Web Store and you can find that. And Krista did find it. So it will be in the show notes. I'm going to add it to the show notes so you'll be able to jump to it when you see the show notes. All right, so with that, I'm going to wrap up Tech Talk for this month and hand it back over to Krista. All right, thank you. Thank you very much, John and Michael. We did get some comments that thank you lots to think about. Yeah, definitely. So yes, that will wrap it up for today's show. It is being recorded, so it will be available maybe later today if I get to it before I go. Otherwise Monday for the holiday. Yes, because the library commission is closed Thursday and Friday. Yes, so I hope you'll join us next week when our topic is addressing the legal information needs of immigrants and non-native speakers. Kathy Liddell is from Northlake, Illinois, and she contacted me and wanted to do this same presentation. I wish that at their annual state library conference. And she wanted to get it on Encompass Live to share with more people. So she's going to be on the show next week talking about what they've done in their library district there. It's always wonderful when people volunteer to be on the show. Yes, please do. So I hope you'll join us for that and any of our future shows. If you are a Facebook user, Encompass Live is also on Facebook. So please do like us there. If you do, you get notifications of when the shows are starting. So here I put a reminder this morning. Reminders of when upcoming shows are going to be on and recordings are available. We post all of that onto our Facebook page. So if you are a big Facebook user, do like us there. And then I think we are good for today. Thank you very much for attending. I think you just turned off sharing screen. Yeah, I'm sorry about that. There we go. Anyway, thank you very much for attending and we'll see you next time on Encompass Live. Bye.