The element14 Team Join Intel at Maker Faire Paris

As you might have heard a week or two back, our good buddies over at Intel invited to join them on their stand at Maker Faire Paris, which turned out to be a sensational weekend of making, hacking and how-do-you-dos!

Now the team is back on home territory, we thought you might like a bit of an update as to what went down on the show floor.

And what better way than with a gallery! By my calculations, this should be worth something in the region of 10,000 words.

Don't forget to check out the photo shows on our social media channels, too.

As you can imagine, it's no small task attending something like a Maker Faire. Not just in terms of costs, but the logistics and travel add layer upon layer of complication, so Intel's courteous invite made things significantly simpler for us and gave us the opportunity to enjoy the proceedings even more.

Naturally we wanted to give our presence there an Intel spin, which wasn't hard. The Edison and Genuino 101 served that purpose beautifully, and we thought you might like to take a look at some of the demos we put together to get the crowds as excited about the boards as we are here on the element14 Community.

Genuino 101 CurieBLE Heart Rate Monitor Demo

Genuino 101 has an onboard Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) block inside the Curie module. The sketch implements the standard BLE "Heart Rate Monitor" service. The Heart Rate service takes values from a heart rate sensor and sends them over BLE to your smartphone/device to create a graph of the data using the app nRF Toolbox for BLE.

Genuino 101 Step Counter Demo

This demo uses the 101's on-board accelerometer to act as a pedometer by detecting when a step motion has been made by the board. A function from the CurieImu library is used to detect steps and each iteration of the loop compares the current step count with the previous step count, printing an update when it has been incremented.

Genuino 101 CurieIMU Gyroscope Demo

This demo uses the Genuino 101's on-board 6-axis accelerometer/gyro to read the X, Y, and Z values of both the accelerometer and the gyroscope. While the accelerometer is able to determine the orientation of the board, the gyroscope measures the angular velocity of the board. The results are displayed on the screen using a model of the board.

Play Games On The Intel Edison

The Intel Edison is a tiny computer the size of an SD card, which runs a type of Linux called "Yocto" Linux. The games featured in this demo use command line text to create the graphics of the game. They are definitely fun to play but don’t have the feel of a cutting edge game like FIFA15.

We also had the opportunity to run some micro-workshops that allowed Maker Faire Paris visitors to try their hand at Arduino using the Intel boards, which as you'll know is the perfect way to convert the uninitiated. Speaking of which, we're especially keen to see some Edison and Genuino 101 (and the forthcoming Arduino 101) projects here on the Community's Intel space, so do let us know what you've been working on.

A very successful Maker Faire Paris trip all round, and it was great that some of our element14 members had the opportunity to meet the team; not least of them being our own fvan who had his own stand on the Maker Faire floor!