Design West – Day 1

Day 1 of Design West (ESC) is in the books.

It was a pretty good one (albeit a bit long with the show floor remaining open till 7pm PST).  We had a flurry of activity with both the SimpleLink-GPS CC4000 product launch yesterday as well as a steady flow of customers/attendees coming by the booth.

Today is “action-packed” where I have a number of media briefings, plus my speaking engagement on “Why Wi-Fi for Microcontroller-based Products” at 4:30pm.  It’s interesting to see how rapidly people are embracing Wi-Fi as one of the best solutions for the Internet of Things – I’m thinking it won’t be as hard to convince the audience today as I’d originally expected…

I only had the chance to attend one session yesterday, but it was a really great one!  Elecia White (Logical Elegance) and Robert Mitchell presented a topic called “When LEDs Become Intelligent, Christmas Lights Aren’t Just for December” where they bravely took an off-the-the shelf string of individually addressable tricolor LEDs (GE) and proceeded to “hack them” live in front of the audience using an Arduino controller to create easily programmable lights which could actually be updated using WiFi.  The overall premise was to allow you to keep your “Christmas lights” up year round by tailoring them to different holidays and events (pink, red and white for Valentines, green for St. Patrick, pastels for Easter, etc.). It was a great example of Wi-Fi + Microcontrollers!