Massimo Banzi, author of Getting Started with Arduino and co-founder of the Arduino Project, is presenting a workshop at the upcoming Interaction10 conference in Savannah, GA on February 4, 2010:
The Tinker Tookit is a modular system of sensors and actuators being developed at Tinker.it! in London for the past couple of years. It allows designers to prototype and test tangible user interfaces with Arduino very quickly and without any knowledge of electronics. During this workshop we’ll explore the basics of Arduino and get to build cool stuff within the first hour. You’ll experience first hand accelerometers, touch sensors, colour sensors, and a lot more technology without having to spend a month talking about atoms and electrons.
Bring your laptop (Mac, Windows or even Linux) and your energy.
As a bonus, he’ll be joined by Making Things Talk author (and fellow Arduino Project team member) Tom Igoe. It’s two Make: Authors for the price of one!
Tangible Interface Prototyping with the Tinker Toolkit
Interaction10 Registration
In the Maker Shed:
Getting Started with Arduino
Our Price: $12.99
This valuable little book offers a thorough introduction to the open source electronics prototyping platform that’s taking the design and hobbyist world by storm. Getting Started with Arduino gives you lots of ideas for projects and helps you get going on them right away. To use the introductory examples in this book, all you need is a USB Arduino, USB A-B cable, and an LED. By Massimo Banzi, co-founder of the Arduino Project.
Making Things Talk
Our Price: $29.99
Programming microcontrollers used to require an expensive development environment costing thousands of dollars and requiring professional electrical engineering expertise. Open-source physical computing platforms with simple i/o boards and development environments have led to new options for hobbyists, hackers, and makers. This book contains a series of projects that teach you what you need to know to get your creations talking to each other, connecting to the web, and forming networks of smart devices.
8 thoughts on “Massimo Banzi’s Tinker Toolkit workshop at Interaction10”
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Wow…I was 1/2 way to getting days off work to drive up to Savannah. Then some reality kicked in…
$250 for the 4-hour course.($750 to go to the conference!)
$169 for 1 night in the host hotel.
Gas..food..
Unfortunately $600+ isn’t in the budget to pusue Arduino fun. :(
Be looking for the online coverage!
(Admission limited to 45 people per class..@$250..$11.5K gross for a 4 hour class at capacity. Nice! The blurb quoted above is the complete class description as found on the site. No indication what goodies, if any, you get for your money.)
(And, as usual, I was wise enough to copy the comment before submitting… so when it was rejected for ‘text entered wrong’ I don’t have to type the ^%$# thing again! Here goes try #2..)
@Volkemon:
I managed to get the Inn at Ellis Square for $90 a night on Hotels.com, so I saved a little $ there. Also, if you’re only interested in this workshop, I think you can specify workshops-only when you register, so you wouldn’t have to pay the conference fee.
But as far as conferences go, this is cheaper than other conferences I’ve seen with speakers of this quality. Even if they were able to max out the capacity, a conference is a pretty expensive thing to run. I don’t know the specifics of their costs, but you might have temp staffing, facility rental, catering, and travel/lodging costs (and sometimes an honorarium) for the presenter. You might even have to guarantee a certain number of guests at the hotel to get your discounted rate. And even with great speakers like Massimo and Tom, there’s no guarantee that you’ll max out the session, so there’s always a chance it might run into the red.
If you are looking for inexpensive Arduino fun, check out this Ask Make column on finding Arduino workshops: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/09/ask_make_where_to_find_an_arduino_c.html and also the Maker Events calendar at: https://makezine.com/events/
– Brian
Thanks Brian. Guess I was just a littly whiney this morning..
I imagine the economic reality of a conference today might not be 100%booking.
May do just the workshop anyway, and camp out in the old microbus. I put a couple hundred in hardware to start my arduino education, maybe it is time to put in a few $$$ in classroom time.
Thanks for the other links too.
I hope you can make it; I’ll be reporting from this workshop. I’ll be the guy blogging and taking pictures and videos, so say hi if you’re there!
You might also take a look at sites like HotWire and Priceline. There are a bunch of forums on BetterBidding.com that will help you get some good guesses as far as translating the HotWire descriptions to actual hotels and also lists recent results by city. You can sometimes save serious $$ that way.
I used that strategy to find a reasonably priced hotel room when I was helping with Maker Faire Rhode Island. I live about 45 minutes south of Providence, and it was worth it to basically buy an hour and half’s worth of extra setup time each day I stayed up there. But not worth paying full price :-)