BarcampCHS 2013

Another BarcampCHS has come and gone. Got off to a bit of a late start (again), but once things were rolling, things seemed to go pretty smoothly from what I saw. There were some tasty breakfast items, and some great coffee by Coastal Coffee Roasters.

I limited myself to doing just one session this year so that I could actually go see some other sessions. Had orignally planned to talk about SELinux, but I couldn’t get that together in time so I went back to the Hamcamp session, and spent an hour talking to a few people interested in amateur radio. Tom/AJ4UQ helped out with a short demonstration of his RTL-SDR receiver and answered a few questions.

The first session I went to was one on nodecopter and node.js by Tom Wilson (@twilson63) from Jack Russell Software. Very cool with demonstrations of the nodecopter flying around and doing some simple tricks. They look like a lot of fun to play with.

For the afternoon sessions, I went to one given by Chad Hobbes (@itsallvoodoo) who talked about Arduino, Raspberry Pi and Beagle Bone boards and the differences between them. Interesting and informative, and it made me want to get some and start playing with them. I’m pretty sure there are a lot of radio related things they could be put to use doing.

The last session I went to was on digital audio signal processing by Ted Tanner (@tctjr). His presentation was a little mathy, but pretty easily digestible. Learned a few things and got my interest back up in learning more about SciPy/NumPy.

At the after party, I ended up in a discussion with Nathan Zorn (@thepug) and Dan DeMaggio about how to construct some inexpensive buoys to determine wave heights and direction, primarily to use for predicting good surf conditions. It was fun tossing ideas back and forth between the three of us.

And yes, I wore my blue Star Trek robe to BarcampCHS again this year (photo by @HeatherSolos).