[colug-432] 2016-03-15 CARPE Scribbles: Photon Weather Shield, Azure Cloud, Fire, Pi Day, Rho

[jep200404 at columbus.rr.com]

Thanks to Improving for their hospitality.
The space was good and they even provided food and drink.
Their Wifi worked with Linux laptops.

bare board

    http://wyolum.com/projects/BADGEr/
    http://www.seeedstudio.com/
    http://2013.oshwa.org/

level translator

    TXS0108
    http://www.ti.com/product/txs0108e

    AN10441 Level shifting techniques in I2C-bus design
    http://www.nxp.com/documents/application_note/AN10441.pdf

https://opensource.com/life/16/3/how-configure-raspberry-pi-microcontroller

Brian Sherwin gave presentation on pushing data from sparkfun photon weather
shield to azure cloud.

    https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13345
    https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13630

It's very nice how the photon module plugs into a proto board.

I showed up about an hour late. Still got hardware.
Brought a raspberry pie to share. Ate one slice myself.

The Photon needs to connect to Wifi,
but was thwarted by the room's Wifi,
which required that a click to accept the terms.
The Photon has no way of clicking to accept the terms,
so it was denied access.
Brian set up a hotspot to work around that.

Then a guy came in asking for fire extinguisher.
There was fire dripping down from a ceiling vent in the western entrance.
Ethan put it out. There was nasty smoke.
There were two big ways out:
east entrance (without smoke) and smoky west entrance.
Only one person went out the smoke free east entrance.
Everyone else went out the smoky west entrance. Dumb!
Ethan noted that people tend to go out the same entrance they came in.

In calling the Columbus Fire Department,
I forgot to include the 614 area code, so time was wasted calling them.
Then I had to wait for a dispatcher.
Eventually the building alarm was going off. Ouch! Loud!
One surprise is that even with the delays,
my call was earlier notice to the fire department
than the automated one from the building.
I guess the moral of that is to call the fire department
even when one thinks that automatic notification is being sent.

Since the building has five floors, many fire trucks came.

That was the end of the meeting.

In haste to get out, I put my laptop in its bag without putting it to sleep.
When I thought about it later, I worried about it overheating.
The laptop was nuts, complaining about /dev/sda errors.
Did hard shut off, then reboot. That did not help.
Later, even after removing battery for a few minutes,
it would not boot, saying there was no hard drive. 
It turned out to be a simple problem.
The hard drive had wiggled out of its connector enough to quit working.
I pushed it back in and it was happy.
(The proper drive carrier is missing.)

The rest of the pie was likely thrown away the next morning. Bummer.

A Postlude on Pi Day
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3044109/linux/a-postlude-on-pi-day.html
Sandra Henry-Stocker
http://www.computerworld.com/author/Sandra-Henry_Stocker/

Another Greek letter
http://linuxgizmos.com/4k-android-media-player-sbc-has-40-pin-pi-expansion/
(no ATSC support)