In 2020, we reimagined what webinars could be and that included more giveaways, virtual panels, introduced workshops, community member guests, element14 presents guest hosts, books produced, and project contests. A lot happened. The first webinar of 2020 was Embedded Video Processing Using the UltraZed-EV and I remember the presenter, drozwood90 was really impressed with the community members questions, something that I have found to be a reoccurring theme the longer I've done these. He's part of a great team led by bhfletcher and they produced some great webinars throughout the year. That was the also last webinar we conducted from our Chicago office in 2020, every other webinar was hosted from my apartment due to the pandemic. It's crazy think of all the hours in preparation, dry runs, and managing live events that we were able to accomplish during what would seemingly be a challenging circumstance. As it turned out the whole world was in the same boat, and were quietly becoming professional webinar presenters through the countless hours they spent on Teams and Zoom, whether it was conducting business, or staying connected with friends and family. The next webinar we did in 2020 was a Virtual Panel on Careers Webinar (Engineering Careers Virtual Panel: How to Find Success in a Career in Engineering ). It happened on March 17th, 2020, the first day of the lockdown in Chicago. 2020 saw great ZedBoard webinars, PYNQ Webinar/Workshops, a Vivado workshops, Arty-S7 workshops, and so much more. It also saw the return of Arduino for the first time in two years and ended up with a bang with what some suggest was the best webinar of the 2020 pandemic:
Without further ado here are the highlights from this year's webinar program.....
Zedboard Webinars
Throughout the year we had some really great Zedboard webinars with presenters from Avnet. I found them to be extremely knowledgeable and easy to work with. Lots of great questions were asked and they were eager to respond and share their knowledge. We're looking forward to more of the same this year.
Thanks Dan, for your knowledgeable insight on U96-EV, and for your answers, this hardware boasts almost everything related to Video Processing and High Speed Electronics @ it's core, and definitely comes for it's price, I dream to have this one for verifying my theories of my Sci-Fi projects.Thanks, Tariq and Element14 once again (almost congratulating), for this Webinar. I hope the same for upcoming season.
- Thanks & Regards, - ankur608
Thanks a lot for your detailed answer, it surely gave me a lot of clarity. I have been working on mathematically trying to improve resolution of a thermal camera by using programming logic and math (like bilinear interpolation, which has been done by someone on the internet). I saw in one of the videos on your site where 4 ML models were running on the same deep learning engine - It will really be helpful in places like India where the amount of humans or objects are very large, and if one actually wishes to run this system on a place like railway stations, which has multiple security cams, roughly 30 on a major station, this system can really find a place. They use nothing currently but manual surveillance there. - thebluephoenix
Careers Virtual Panels & eBook
The first Careers Virtual Panel occurred on March 17th 2020. The day that Chicago went under lockdown and we all got use to a new way of working remotely. The first session featured youth vs experience with presenters from 3M, Molex, Kemet, and Keysight Technologies. We heard perspectives from guests that recently got their foot in the door in the industry along with senior level people who could offer wisdom based on their experience. The second session featured 3 female engineers from Tektronix and they shared their story about how they founded a chapter of Women in Technology and created an inclusive community within Tek that has made a new space for women and men to learn, share, and grow through events and programs. We transcribed our conversations and published 2 extremely useful career ebooks around topics discussed during both sessions.
“I think having a mentor inside your organization, set in a friendship, is a good thing because they'll understand all of the political challenges, the financial challenges, the history around things, they will be able to help you navigate those kind of issues. And this is often what young engineers trip on, is that there's history or some sort of nastiness associated with their ideas that preceded them, you know, a perception about a certain kind of solution. And so talking to an advocate or someone who I would consider a friend that would know these things, has been there a while. I think they can help you navigate those objections and help you put your story together and make it stronger.
“Even at my level you are constantly leaning on people to think through and, you know, express ideas and to get by.” - Julie Campbell (presenter)
“You know, I think setbacks happen to all of us. I think every single one of us …can talk about a place where we've had something that (seems) very frustrating, a setback, something (seems) unfair, something that came completely out of the blue. “These are the best learning tools you can ever get, is that if you can take a perspective on a setback and understand what happened. Continue to prepare appropriately. Continue to learn from it. I think that is the way that you become unstoppable, is as you can take setbacks, we all get setbacks of different scales and different magnitudes, but it takes learning from that, and to grow into it, and to really lean into it, and accept whatever responsibility we all have for it, and really continue to build from that, and continue to build your foundation. I think it could be a wonderful way to grow.
“In the academic world, there's a right answer in the real world of where we work, there may not be a right answer. And really understanding that you may have a setback because there was no right answer, and you worked on the wrong problem, is one of those areas that I had to really learn. I think I see so many students go through that experience of, you know, you can do really, really well in school and study, and there's a right answer. Many times in some of the problems we solve, there's not a right answer. You just have to make a choice.” - Terry Collier (Presenter)
PYNQ Workshop & Contest
This was the first workshop we ever did on the community and it's got a special place in my heart. For this workshop, we set up a space in Project14 ( PYNQ Workshop) and set up a project competition where we challenged those attending the workshop to create something really cool. You can check out the progress our members made in the PYNQ workshop area, check out the winning prize. The Grand Prize went to Fred27 for what else, a project based on Pong! adamtaylorcengfiet hosted these webinars and did a magnificent job. He was able to discuss really technical material in a very approachable manner.
Workshops on FPGAs were very interesting!
PYNQ workshop by Adam Taylor was my first workshop series here and that brought me to the community. Happy that I really fell in love with it and that made me buy a PYNQ-Z2 and gear up with FPGAs. Adding on, the ARTY-S7 workshop made me get one and it's really a cool tool to further move on with FPGAs with Spartan-7 enabling rapid prototyping.
Glad to be a part of these and thanks to E14 and sponsors for organizing these. And great community support indeed. Great going! - navadeepganeshu
Brilliant! - ipv1
Great session! Thanks Adam! - yuricts
Getting to Know Vivado Workshop
Adam Taylor returned for a Getting to Know Vivado Workshop series that was especially popular. This series was set up nicely with Getting Started with Xilinx Development Tools and after the workshop was done and a 3 part workshop, Winners Announced: We're Giving Away Up to 10 Arty-S7 Boards to Use in an Upcoming Xilinx Workshop! that included a giveaway of boards.
| Getting to Know Vivado Workshop | |
|---|---|
 |  |
| Xilinx Workshop: Getting to Know Vivado Part I | Xilinx Workshop: Getting to Know Vivado Part II |
 | |
| Xilinx Workshop: Getting to Know Vivado Part III | |
Thanks, Adam, the lab is fantastic.
I love the rhythm you take, there is no time to get bored and you can follow the lab very well.
I was lazy to start with FPGA development, but I think it will completely hook me.
Great job! - javagoza
ADAS Virtual Panel
Another highlight was an ADAS Virtual Panel who discussed the latest in automotive innovation, from what's happening in advanced driver assistance system development to the ever evolving future of truly autonomous vehicles. The panel touched on the enabling technologies such as AI-based processing methods for Forward Camera perception; 4D Imaging RADAR; driver-assisted systems including LiDAR, RADAR, and Camera Systems; and in-vehicle driver and occupant monitoring systems.
| ADAS Virtual Panel | |
|---|---|
 | |
| In the Driver's Seat: A Deep Dive into ADAS and Driver Monitor Systems | |
LoRa and the Return of Arduino
Arduino visited the community for the first time in a couple of years. To make things more fun we included a giveaway of the MKR 1010 boards and the response was amazing. There were 397 questions asked during this webinar and andrearichetta stuck around late answering as many questions as he could. He picked the top 10 questions he liked the most and we sent boards out to the members.
| LoRa and the Return of Arduino | |
|---|---|
 | |
| LoRa Meets Arduino, a Journey in the LPWAN World | |
This was a very informative webinar. A big thanks to Andrea for expending extra time to answer more questions live. - luislabmo
"Thanks Andrea
and thanks Tariq for hosting this wonderful webinar." - jissdeodates
EXCELLENT webinar! - kmikemoo
I learned a great deal from the webinar and I think I will have to watch it again in preparation for using the MKR 1310 boards. I don't have much radio experience so I'm pleased to be awarded these boards and I am looking forward to using them. Not sure what for yet though. Maybe something to do with mobile robots although I think my question was about that and the answer was that LoRa wasn't good for this type of control but maybe for monitoring and low data rate sensor information. Alternatively maybe something for the next Project14 challenge - Art meets LoRa maybe! - dubbie
Analog Virtual Panel
Maxim integrated gave a really informative webinar that was all about Analog.
| Analog Virtual Panel | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Analog Virtual Panel: 4 Things You Need to Know About Analog | |
Thanks a lot for Maxim team, very informative webinar. - waleedelmughrabi
Arty-S7 Workshop Series
Following up on the heels of the Vivado workshop, the Arty-S7 workshop was a huge success. It included a giveaway of 10 boards to engineers on the community so that they could blog about their experience attending the workshop. jaysonb had a lot of energy and these workshops were extremely engaging.
This is great, I’ve been wanting some FPGA training for upcoming projects. I want to offload some image processing tasks from the cpu. This will be a great re-introduction to FPGAs and the tools! Thanks Element 14! - aminotg
Excited to get started with FPGA boards!!!. Thanks guys.! - surbhika
Vintage Upcycling with Raspberry Pi & Arduino Contest
Enrico gave a 3 part Project14 workshop on upcycling. After the workshop was done he published a book which we gave away for upcycling project ideas. The goal was to inspire members to upcycle something vintage. It helped inspire the Recycle & Retrofit and the winner of that competition, simont.arts, used the Pi he received for his idea to build the grand prize winning Project14 project. You can check out his project as well as the winning projects in Project14 | Winners Announcement: Recycle & Retrofit: Upcycling the Past! You can also purchase balearicdynamics 's book using the link below!
Thank you for these series. I am looking forward for them.
I want to upcycle an old telescope, so it can automatically focus on the celestial object. I really that it will also adjust position if object is getting out of focus. - ilvyanyatka
Introduction to TinyML with Edge Impulse & Nano Sense 33 Giveaway
TinyML is an extremely interesting topic and those who attended the webinar seem to agree. The feedback below speaks for itself.
| Introduction to TinyML with Edge Impulse & Nano Sense 33 Giveaway | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Introduction to TinyML by Edge Impulse (Featuring Arduino Nano Sense 33) | |
That was really interesting, thanks for organising Tariq. Thanks to Jenny and Dan as well for a great presentation and Q&A. - Andrew J
The best QA in a Webinar this year. Thank you - lesmalave
This was most definitely the best webinar I've ever attended. Thank you very much for having it. - worthi_creations
I really enjoyed that, even thought the topic is a bit above my pay grade.
Thanks to Tariq, Jenny and Dan. - neilk
Great presentation and demo. The Edge Impulse solution looks great for problem-solving, and easier to use than expected.
Perfect for getting the most out of sensors. - shabaz
I've been looking forward to this webinar for weeks! Great presentation, Jenny and Daniel were great, in addition to the ever present Tariq. Thank you all - redcharly
Awesome Webinar.
I'm, putting a task on my list to test out the Edge Impulse Software.
I think it will work nicely with some projects I am working on.
Thanks Tariq for organizing this.
Thanks Jenny for presenting.
Very cool stuff. - jomoenginer
This was a very interesting webinar, thanks to Tariq for hosting, Jenny for presenting and Dan for answering all our questions. - gpolder
Thanks for the informative webinar. Some of the questions went over my head, but thats how we learn.
The EdgeImpulse concept is interesting, I'd need to make a flowchart to wrap my head around building Arduino code for it. - robogary
Top Comments