10 Year Challenge | Tell Us What You Can't Live Without for an ESP8266, Arduino Uno, or Arduino Nano!

RE: 10 Year Challenge | Tell Us What You Can't Live Without for an ESP8266, Arduino Uno, or Arduino Nano!

srpsco — Thu, 28 Nov 2019 15:49:36 GMT

Just wanted to say thanks, sorry it took so long.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B5aggjdgvao/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

RE: 10 Year Challenge | Tell Us What You Can't Live Without for an ESP8266, Arduino Uno, or Arduino Nano!

colporteur — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 13:47:24 GMT

Thank you Element14 and Tariq Ahmad (name on the bag) for the bag of swag and an Arduino nano board.

I have been on an extended trip and only just returned. I discovered a white shipping bag labelled from UPS with an Element14 return address. I missed the mark on latest RoadTests so I wasn't expecting anything. I am making the assumption this is the forum that generated free returns. I can't seem to find a posting of winners. If I missed the mark and this is not the place that provided the gift, please accept the accolades for supporting such a great site.

I wore the gray T-Shirt to bed I was so excited about my gift and dreamt of building physical computing projects with my new microcontroller bit shifter. Shades of the movie a Christmas Story and the Red Rider.

Sean

RE: 10 Year Challenge | Tell Us What You Can't Live Without for an ESP8266, Arduino Uno, or Arduino Nano!

larshaj — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 02:25:12 GMT

Woo whoo. Swag bag alert. I received the Arduino Nano, a tee, a cool dancing robot and more. Thank you Element14

RE: 10 Year Challenge | Tell Us What You Can't Live Without for an ESP8266, Arduino Uno, or Arduino Nano!

kmikemoo — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 01:21:01 GMT

Late to the game, but I can reminisce also. Happy birthday, element14. 10 years... looking back, it was just a moment ago. Ten years ago, I couldn't live without a computer (like many). It was already a fixture in the house. The kids used it - so we didn't have to drive them to the library. I PC gamed (still do). It's how we keep in touch with our distributed family. It was a focal point in our lives then.

My current choice is the Arduino. It fills the bill of "inspiring". It brought back writing code like I did back in the early 80's when computer magazines put the whole text of a program in as an article and you had to key it in. Back in the days of cassette tape backup. Arduino rekindled a love of tinkering and making and connecting stuff. I've used it at work to save weeks of time doing tasks that are now automated - by an Uno (my personal favorite). I've used it for temperature control on a diesel engine. I've used it as a data logger. It's awesome but more importantly... it brought out all the fun of being a geek again. I'm playing with other stuff now, but it was the Arduino that brought it all back home.

RE: 10 Year Challenge | Tell Us What You Can't Live Without for an ESP8266, Arduino Uno, or Arduino Nano!

sathasivam — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 07:39:22 GMT

2009........ I finally moved back to my hometown after a decade of working abroad. It was truly an eye opener. Everything wasn't computerized then and email was not a popular form of communication in the public sector. Let's just say every little thing took longer to complete and a few heart attacks along the way!

Fast forward to today it's a different picture, the public sector have embraced technology in every department. With forums, chatbots, emails! And I have discovered Raspberry pi, micro controllers and with the help of element14 community have discovered a whole new world of makers.

I Wasn't sure whether this challenge is still open anyway Happy 10th birthday element14!

RE: 10 Year Challenge | Tell Us What You Can't Live Without for an ESP8266, Arduino Uno, or Arduino Nano!

dthorpe163 — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 11:06:26 GMT

10 years ago I had just taken on my first job as a graduate, fresh out of an Information Systems degree at university. On my very first day, I was given an IBM T60 laptop running Windows XP, with an 80GB hard drive and a 1024x768 screen, given a printout of the VIM editor and shown Solaris UNIX for the very first time. Sun SPARC systems, no less which are pretty much dead and buried these days. Rapidly having to take on application migrations from one automation application to another, I realised quickly that I needed more screen real estate, but Windows XP had no effective support for dual monitors... until I found "Ultramon", which was just brilliant! Then came the email client... Lotus Notes with a 10MB mailbox! In an IT automation division, a 10MB mailbox is near unworkable and Lotus Notes as a mail client was... without using profanity... a total PITA. Outlook 2003 was in its infancy at my company back then, but I found an application to synchronise from Lotus Notes to Outlook and used Outlook as my daily client. What a dream by comparison!

I guess I could say that beginning paid work in an era of technological immaturity forces one to innovate... so since everyone is sharing - this was my "innovation" of a monitor stand. A box of CAT4 ethernet cable [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-cc433eb6-682b-4d84-82ac-7aefb973d615/4331.contentimage_5F00_1.png:16:16]

From the grainy picture, it's clear how times have changed in terms of phone camera performance too!

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In the following years, I got into coding (mostly PHP and CSS) and building my own computers in a pretty big way (Pentium 3 back then!). I dabbled in some PIC programming, but quickly became overwhelmed trying to get my head around assembly code, given the lack of IDE at the time. Then the SLR photography which saw me evolve in frustration from the little LG camera phone-quality pictures of above, to a Canon EOS450D and to these days a smartphone and Canon EOS5D.

These days, I am passionate about understanding the world around me and trying to make a difference somehow. My tool of choice these days is the Arduino MKR series MPUs, as they have enough storage and memory for lots of calculations and code, WiFi support and are rock solid with pretty much any module or code. I gather data from them, pump it out over WiFi via a MQTT bus to a message broker (Mosquitto) running on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+, which then pulls the data into a time series database (via Telegraf to InfluxDB). Grafana produces some very pretty charts like the below (the figures are high due to cooking, nobody be alarmed!), making at-a-glance understanding of my surrounding environment a "breeze", no pun intended!

[View:/resized-image/__size/747x379/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-cc433eb6-682b-4d84-82ac-7aefb973d615/contentimage_5F00_191410.png:747:379]

And that brings us to today...

I'm still working in IT, although in a totally different field now (IT security, but I still do loads of automation). I geek out heavily with my gadgets around the house hiding under every box and nook and cranny in the room. Everything is connected, everything runs at the speed of light, and the world is not isolated to what I can fit on my hard drive any more thanks to the "Cloud". So my top 5 of what couldn't I live without any more?

Internet and Google. It wasn't much 10 years ago, with Yahoo and Altavista Search dominating the market. Don't know the answer? "Google it!".
SSDs. Waiting for Windows to load? Grab a coffee and come back in half an hour. Want to run that data copy? Don't use your PC or it will extend to infinite "Microsoft Minutes", due to random vs. sequential disk IO. SSD was a revolution (no pun intended)!
LCDs. The higher the resolution of a CRT, the blurrier it gets. The desk space usage alone deserves a special mention!
Microsoft Outlook. Personal life, work life... it is the ONLY choice. Lotus Notes was unusable back then, and it still is today (yes, it still exists!).
Single-board computers (and the associated IDEs). RPI that runs on USB power? Assembly that can be compiled from C++? Computing power at micro-scale with passive cooling? Hell yeah!

I'm not going to say I couldn't live without a smartphone or social media, because I'm quite content without either... but then again, it's also the way we connect [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-cc433eb6-682b-4d84-82ac-7aefb973d615/4331.contentimage_5F00_1.png:16:16]

10 years ago I knew the name "Farnell", as my dad purchased a lot from them for his work - but I definitely had no idea of any forum. I was still dabbling with PIC and CMOS logic back then, but it was more a spare time thing than anything else. 10 years seems like an eternity ago, so in any case, happy birthday to element14!

RE: 10 Year Challenge | Tell Us What You Can't Live Without for an ESP8266, Arduino Uno, or Arduino Nano!

scifi316 — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 03:13:10 GMT

Something basic that I cannot live without back then and right now would be the computer. It's something so fundamental in my life that I would probably not be able to live without one.

RE: 10 Year Challenge | Tell Us What You Can't Live Without for an ESP8266, Arduino Uno, or Arduino Nano!

colporteur — Sun, 28 Jul 2019 01:37:49 GMT

[View:/resized-image/__size/900x900/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-cc433eb6-682b-4d84-82ac-7aefb973d615/contentimage_5F00_191408.jpg:900:900]

Ten years ago when I replaced my home desktop computer, I invested in a hot swappable drive bay. I fully loaded the storage bay with three hard drives. The cost of the fully populated drive bay was almost a third of the full purchase. In order to cover the cost of the hardware, my kids got no Christmas presents that year.

I had tried the multi-boot operating system (O/S) configurations using one drive and found it frustrating. My primary O/S is Linux. I have an expectations of five nines (99.999) uptime. Software upgrades causing conflicts with boot loaders reminded me of having nightmares after watching a horror show. Yeah I wanted to watch the scary movie the same as I wanted to keep up with software upgrades but, the nightmares were never fun.

The storage bay with three hard drives enabled me to have a dedicated drive for Linux (primary O/S). Another for that other O/S put out by Microsoft, used once a year with the tax man makes me accountable. The third drive gave me flexibility to dabble in other O/S loads or a drive to accomplish a forklift upgrade of my primary O/S and then port the data across the two drives.

I recently performed another desktop upgrade. It took some extra money but I had the system built with a three drive bay storage. The computer store guys gave me all kinds of grief about the configuration. They tried to convince me there were better solutions than dedicated hardware.

Lucky my kids had completed university when I made the purchase or they would have had to find jobs to pay for their education. Ten years of experience working with discrete drives is the hardware with, I can’t live without.

Sean

RE: 10 Year Challenge | Tell Us What You Can't Live Without for an ESP8266, Arduino Uno, or Arduino Nano!

e14 Contributor — Fri, 26 Jul 2019 20:20:56 GMT

Ten years ago I couldn't live without a computer and access to the internet. Today the age is different a comuper is irelevant when you can do everything from your smartphone. I propable couldnt live without aliexpress where I can buy cheap components for my tinekring.

RE: 10 Year Challenge | Tell Us What You Can't Live Without for an ESP8266, Arduino Uno, or Arduino Nano!

kk99 — Fri, 26 Jul 2019 13:37:49 GMT

[mention:44fa45702fda4d95b457f69505107f36:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05] and Element14 thank you very much for swag. The solderless breadboard is awesome.

[View:/resized-image/__size/620x465/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-cc433eb6-682b-4d84-82ac-7aefb973d615/3527.contentimage_5F00_191407.jpg:620:465]

RE: 10 Year Challenge | Tell Us What You Can't Live Without for an ESP8266, Arduino Uno, or Arduino Nano!

dixonselvan — Tue, 23 Jul 2019 02:28:57 GMT

[mention:44fa45702fda4d95b457f69505107f36:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05] Thanks for the swags! More blue men means more fun.

blue man

When Arduino UNO becomes a hovercraft,

[View:/resized-image/__size/640x295/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-cc433eb6-682b-4d84-82ac-7aefb973d615/contentimage_5F00_191406.gif:640:295]

RE: 10 Year Challenge | Tell Us What You Can't Live Without for an ESP8266, Arduino Uno, or Arduino Nano!

paj — Sun, 21 Jul 2019 20:48:45 GMT

What could I not live without 10 years ago? I struggled to think so I asked my wife. Easy she said that @#!@s! Play station and Lara @#!a@#! Croft. And I am ashamed to admit she was right. Back then I looked forward eagerly to each game being released to sate my appetite. Then out of the blue in 2013 my son bought my first Raspberry pi and I was instantly transported back to my ZX Spectrum days only now it was better: more power; more toys; sensors; python. A whole new world opened up for me. Now poor Lara is forgotten and I look forward to each new release of the Raspberry pi so I can maintain my collection. My wife says I should seek professional help for my addiction and I think she might be right. So, is there any professional out there who can tell me who has stock of the Raspberry pi 4?

RE: 10 Year Challenge | Tell Us What You Can't Live Without for an ESP8266, Arduino Uno, or Arduino Nano!

wesee — Sun, 21 Jul 2019 01:47:16 GMT

Ten years ago, computer like laptop/notebook became what I can not live without because of work and playing game.

Nowadays, smartphones with its app become one which are not separable from my live. I carry at leave two smartphones, one for working and communication; another one for games like pokemon.

What will be in next ten years? wearable devices with its app which can be attached or implanted to human body. Thinking of it, I guess this could take more than ten years to realize.

RE: 10 Year Challenge | Tell Us What You Can't Live Without for an ESP8266, Arduino Uno, or Arduino Nano!

MARK2011 — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 09:07:36 GMT

Element14!

Happy anniversary and thank you for your being with us!

I would like to start from defining the background and constans

- computer and fast internet link were “must have it” then and now.

Precise and reliable multimeter and good soldering iron also.

In terms of my profession - energy efficiency - that’s the main motto and still I can’t imagine my projects, research in all scope of activity - without it.

Talking about differences:

I hope my memory isn’t wrong and as I remember 10 years ago in the field of electronics & IT I still have used CD/ DVD as main data archive, 2 large CRT’s were necessary, it did not bother me that they took up a lot of space.

And wires - my projects required lot of wires...

Now I decided to move from local storage to cloud solution and honestly I can’t imagine work without connection to my cloud data.

WiFi solutions and equipment seems to be obligated instead of long rails/ buses in the past.

Expression “IoT” starts to replace “SCADA” and is required in my realm more and more.

Regarding hobbies and wireless tools - well I can’t live without thinking of ESP 8266 & 8285 or ESP32 presently.

We can add the smartphone, whose applications help and support many activities in both my professional and private life.

What else - 10 years ago I wasn’t as addicted to coffee as now…

And… glasses

RE: 10 Year Challenge | Tell Us What You Can't Live Without for an ESP8266, Arduino Uno, or Arduino Nano!

larshaj — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 01:42:03 GMT

Happy 10 year anniversary!

http://www.bits4bots.shop/blog[View:/resized-image/__size/620x384/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-cc433eb6-682b-4d84-82ac-7aefb973d615/5277.contentimage_5F00_191405.jpg:620:384]

Ten years ago I was contemplating going back to college for Computer Engineering Technology. Eventually I did enroll and am now an undergrad studying Electrical Engineering.

I loved the new idea behind the MP3 players and how you could carry hundreds, thousands of songs on a tiny device versa CD's. So, as a music lover that would have been the one thing I couldn't live without! Since then technology has caught my interest much more and has lead me to follow my dream of designing kid friendly development boards to complement drag and drop / block code for kids. My new project is now on Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

Thanks