AGM

The AGM will be formerly written for next year but as an informal report:-

The Minutes of the previous meeting were signed off as correct and Reports by the Chairman and Treasurer were both accepted. The election of Officers proceeded as in former years with no changes to the Committee everyone being re-elected so therefore we remain with:-

Chairman Gareth

Vice-Chairman Duncan

Secretary Peter

Treasurer Michael

Paul did not wish to be on the Committee this year as he finds it impossible to attend Committee meetings. ( Surnames hidden for security)

The only other significant change was an agreement to increase subscriptions to £12 per annum. The free visitor charge remains in place for another year.

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The Internet of things - IoT

This is the first time we have had a discussion on this topic as it it relatively new and we sat around for a while trying to understand what would be included and perhaps what would not be included.

I've since looked it up as follows:-

"The internet of things is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to human or human-to-computer interaction." [Definition from Whatis.com]

Now that would have helped a lot! I am intrigued by the inclusion of animals or people as I thought it was purely machines and also some of the things we thought of were still requiring human-to-computer interaction.(H-C)

I think the definition implies a certain level of autonomy and unique MAC addresses.

So we began with Gareth's Zoe car control where he can communicate to set the heater or air-con on or quiz it for battery charge status. We thought this was in but it requires H-C.

Michael has a Nest system which turns his central heating down when he goes out because it detects when he crosses the threshold. I think that is a better fit. He also can view his house alarm system.

Duncan controls his set top box remotely to set up programme recording.

Peter also uses YouView from his iPhone to get the real time programme guide and set up his set top box on BT Vision for programme recording. I think this is not really IoT. Anyone with a SMART meter has a Thing.

At this point Peter demonstrated a BBC microbit, which he had recently purchased, and gave a run down of the features and methods of programming it.

They are distributed in schools to every pupil and were designed by a consortium of computer hardware and software companies. They can be programmed easily from Windows PC, Mac, Android or Linux machines and will the run stand alone. The programmes can be developed and tested before download and some quite advanced features are present.

It consists of a small board powered by USB or 3.3V battery pack.

On board is a 32 bit ARM Cortex M0CPU with about 30kB of memory, various I/O ports and two switches labelled "A" and "B". There is also a reset switch on the back and a status LED. The board also includes a compass (to 1 degree) and an accelerometer so it can sense movement (shaking).

The display consists of a matrix of 25 LEDs in a 5x5 array and can be programmed as a scrolling display for text and numbers. There is a built in default programme which runs as soon as the battery power is connected. This displays several patterns on the LEDs and gives instructions to "press A" or "press B" or give a "shake". After this it goes into a small game of chase between two LEDs, one fixed and one moveable by tilting the board to hit the fixed LED. Duncan liked it!

A Low energy Bluetooth interface allows pairing with an iPhone (smart phone) and programs can be written on the phone and then downloaded to the microbit. Microbits can see each other if paired too.

The whole aim is to get children to learn programming. There are several programming options from Microsoft's graphical block editor, Touch Develop, Javascript to Micro-Python a version of Python 3. The editors are now in a second generation but the older ones can still be accessed. Programs written in the block editor can be converted to written code as well.

There are several URLs for info.

Have a look at http://microbit.org

http://www.microbit.co.uk/hom

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre//mediapacks/microbit/specs

for more info.

In a way these could be part of the IoT via the bluetooth networking and they can be interfaced through the edge connector or connected to the RPI3.

Great for kids.

Peter