This is a follow up post to element14 at CES 2019! by danzima . Thought I would share some more pictures and videos. Plus, I wanted to put everything together just in case someone asks what I did in Vegas! As Dan mentioned we shared a booth with Avnet. element14 shared the following kiosk with Katie and Ella from Hackster:
They were great by the way, so were the folks from Not Impossible Labs around the corner from us, and the people from Avnet. Very good vibes all around for the entire week. Both teams, element14 and Hackster, shared the kiosk together representing the developer communities of Avnet. The longer we spent working alongside one another, the more it felt like we were part of the same team. Didn't really know a lot about what they did before the week began and vice versa so this was a good learning opportunity for all of us.
Everyone I spoke to around the Avnet booth had a lot of great things to say about the element14 community and what makes us unique part of the Avnet family. There was a lot of mutual respect back and forth between all of the various families assembled under the same tent. We found that we all had a lot in common. We were also able to respect and appreciate the things we do differently.
Going into the booth area there was also this really cool display:
I'm told it got quite a few views on Instagram. 
Not Impossible Labs, Meet Design for a Cause
Earlier this year, we introduced Not Impossible Labs to element14 and helped link some content on the community to Design for a Cause | Not Impossible Labs: Podcast Episode Archive . Around that same time we launched a Design for a Cause - Design Challenge as well as a Design for a Cause space. The idea behind the Design for a Cause space was to dedicate an area of our website to inspiring more people to help others through assistive care, accessibility, resource conservation, and improving quality of life. At the time, Design for a Cause - Design Challenge was just the latest in a proud tradition of Design Challenges dedicated to improving the world. Engineers after all, are problem solvers who like to fix things. Previous Design Challenges such as Make Life Accessible, Sudden Impact Wearables Design Challenge , and Safe and Sound always bring out the best in our community members. Also, several Project14 involved making the world a better place such as Mixing Electronics & Water , Solar Power Devices , Going Green , and Solar Powered Yard Gadget .
We gave the Not Impossible Labs a tour of several of your projects in these spaces. Also showed them some past Ben Heck accessibility projects as well as Sean_Miller element14 presents video in support of the Design for a Cause - Design Challenge :
Sean's accessibility project was for MS, which is a condition his wife, and mother of Connor has. It is a cause dear to my heart as I have an older brother who also has MS. We also showed them some recent projects from Wearable Tech project for a good cause. Projects such as UV Exposure Badge by Workshopshed , Helping Alzeihmer Patients with tech! by vimarsh_ , and Saving Sleep with PocketBeagle by vlasov01, as well as, Elderly Person in the Community Care: Arduino MKR 1300 WAN by 14rhb , Smart Little/Special Child Safety Watch by mahmood.hassan , and Arduino MKR WAN 1300: Detecting forestry fire using Lora Protocol by daniloo94 were projects from recent Arduino Projects.
Afterwards, I stopped over at their booth to demo their Music: Not Impossible wearables. It was the same piece of tech that was adapted as an assistive piece of wearable technology in Design for a Cause | Project C.O.D.I: Help Build a Superhero Costume for Cody! In that project the impulses produced for the sounds that Cody could not hear, would be experienced as a sensory experience that he could feel. As danzima mentioned in element14 at CES 2019, their wearable attempted to use skin as a replacement for the ear drum, which has been validated in studies as a way the brain perceives sound information. I guess that's what they say about music giving goosebumps. It was pretty cool to feel the actual tingle it produced in your body as you listened to music in their headphones. One of their guys told me that they hoped to package these around concerts so you can experience a concert in a whole new way. Hopefully this is what it will take to bring David Gilmour and Roger Waters back together!
| Not Impossible Labs Gear | Demoing Not Impossible Lab Gear |
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"Though the skin isn't as skilled as the ear at distinguishing among frequencies, it gives good feedback about shifts in amplitude, and the demo reminded me of a distinct memory I have of seeing a concert as a kid, feeling the instruments almost moving my organs around, whereas before then listening on the radio had seemed like an experience entirely for my head." - Dan Zima, element14 team member
Special thanks to Katya from Not Impossible Labs, who is from Vegas, and shared suggestions on where to go to avoid places that were too touristy. I followed her suggestion and grabbed some really wonderful house made pasta from Ester's Kitchen for dinner my final evening in town:
Meeting a Veteran, Community Member
Joe discovered the Raspberry Pi and then element14 after a tour of duty in army and used it to build his own Picade. Now he uses it to teach his son coding. He’s been a member for 5 years. He wanted to have his picture taken with element14 because he’s a huge fan of what the community does!
Special thanks to Joe and his army buddies (who took this photo) for their service. We're an even bigger fan of what you do!
Dancing Robots Everywhere!
The dancing robots were a hit at CES 2019. They even met a friend, a robotic cat that dances as well.
I was told that these Promobots use a Raspberry Pi as part of their technology but I can not find any documentation to confirm or deny whether that is the case. The Promobot is from a Russian based company that builds autonomous robots designed for business purposes.
From robots for business uses to robots for S.T.E.M. This cute little robot is for kids and is designed to improve S.T.E.M. skills.
Lots and Lots of Cars & Autonomous Vehicles
Our booth was near automotive so whenever we got a break, we got a chance to check out all the autonomous vehicles around us. Stuff we saw included a really cool helicopter along with plenty of cars that stretched the imagination!
Special thanks to Maureen O'Leary from Avnet for sharing a bunch of photos she took of the cars she saw. It wasn't always easy to get a photo on my phone because there was a crowd everywhere you went!
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I stopped by a booth run by an Israeli software company that specialized in software that thwarted attempts of people attempting to hack autonomous vehicles.
Malicious code is uploaded to the Arduino prototype and the autonomous vehicle turns from Green to Red.
| Arduino Based Prototype | Hacked Autonomous Vehicle Prototype |
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But if you use their software then the hacking attempt is thwarted and the prototype stays green meaning control of the autonomous vehicle is not lost.
Introducing Matrix Labs to Raising Awesome's 4D IoT Gaming Engine
I met Alfred Gonzalez-Cuzan, an innovation manager, for Matrix Labs who produce the MATRIX Voice and MATRIX Creator. We had a MATRIX Creator board on our booth, as one of the boards (along with a Raspberry Pi 3, a Cloud.io add on, and an Arduino MKR Zero. The MATRIX Voice, is a Raspberry Pi-based or stand-alone dev board that allows makers and advanced industrial hardware developers to create voice-control apps easily. Helping it to do this is voice recognition integration with Google Voice and Amazon Alexa. It offers a radial array of 7 MEMS microphones connected to a Xilinx Spartan6 FPGA and 64 Mbit SDRAM, which, when combined provides developers with the opportunity to integrate custom voice and other hardware-accelerated machine learning algorithms right onto the silicon. I mentioned to him how their board looked perfect for our upcoming Home Automation competition and that I wouldn't be surprised if one of their boards found itself in a Project14 project. The MATRIX Creator we had is like the Voice but only bigger. It is used for fast and affordable development of functional hardware devices such as drones, robots, DIY Amazon Alexa speakers, etc.
I showed Alfred the 4D IoT Game Engine Blog by Sean_Miller . It uses the MATRIX creator in a unique and interesting way. I also gave him a heads up to check out element14 presents this Friday as they were going to episode on it:
He watched the episode and wrote me:
"We loved the element14 presents video that came out last week! That game is amazing and you guys did a great job making the video and explaining everything." - Alfred Gonzalez-Cuzan, Innovation Manager at Matrix Labs
Alfred even wore an element14 presents T-Shirt on his CES live stream as promised :
Showing Off the Community to Massimo Banzi
Maybe the coolest thing I've been a part of since I've been a part of the element14 team is the Open Arduino competition. For the first birthday of Project14 we decided to celebrate it by celebrating Arduino's birthday with Project14 | The Birthday Special: Arduino Projects for Arduino Day! I could hardly contain my excitement when I got to meet Massimo Banzi and Fabio from Arduino. I used my time with the Arduino folks to run through as many projects from our community members as I could, starting with the Arduino Projects for Arduino Day. They were very impressed by all the great projects from mcb1, balearicdynamics, carmelito, jomoenginer , urkraft , sunnyiut , idanre1 , ntewinkel , 14rhb , kk99 , Jan Cumps , rsc , makethingstoday , fvan , dougw, and many others. It was always our intention to present these to Arduino as a birthday present, and now we were literally doing it!
I played gam3t3ch 's Happy Birthday Arduino and Project14 to Massimo and Fabio:
Also walked them through the MKR contests we have going on currently: Auto Hacks and Beyond , Build a Smarter World , and Freedom of FPGA ! They got to see some of the great projects such as LoRa GeLo MKR - Long Range Geo-Locator MKR 1300 by dougw , Arduino MKR WAN 1300: Detecting forestry fire using Lora Protocol by daniloo94 , Smarter Access Control using Arduino MKR WAN 1300 boards by BigG , and a favorite of theirs was MKR WAN 1300: LoRa Marine Environmental Ranger by fmilburn .
We discussed possibly collaborating on a show and tell where the community members could tell him about their projects in a Show and Tell format. Kind of the same concept behind the Show and Tell that goes on during Maker Faire. It could be something live and raw with community members interviewing community members.
Odds & Ends
There was so much to see and so much to do. I only got a chance to wander outside of the Westgate Plaza where we were set up briefly on Friday before I left. Suffice to say I ran into a similar problem as danzima but I was foolish enough to soldier on see what I could. I did get to check out some wearables, medical devices, and consumer electronics over in the Sands Auditorium.
Here's some more photos from the trip:
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I did get to check out some wearables, medical devices, home automation, music, and consumer electronics over in the Sands Auditorium on my last day working the booth.
Unfortunately, I missed my first flight out but did manage to get the next one out. It was close to 2am by the time I arrived into Chicago and everything I saw made it worth it.
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