Show and Tell Isn’t Just for Grade School

Adafruit Show-and-Tell sticker I earned for this presentation.

Adafruit Show-and-Tell sticker I earned for this presentation.

Either “Show-and-Tell” isn’t just for young gradeschool kids or people in the maker industry who like to tinker with electronic gadgets and computers are actually kids who never grew up. Each week the folks at Adafruit Industries host a video chat Google+ where gadget lovers and makers can show off the things they built with microcontrollers such as Arduino or small computers like a Raspberry Pi.

This week I took the opportunity to share my own creation which I call “A Remote Control Remote Control”. It’s a gadget I built so it’s easier for me to work a TV remote while I’m in bed. It’s based on the Arduino Uno microcontroller.

Typically during the live chat sessions participants hold up there gadgets and demonstrate them live on a WebCam but that wasn’t going to be practical for me so I decided to create a premade YouTube video to demonstrate my project. I then got on the WebCam live discuss it with the hosts.

Other projects included a educational prototyping board that a woman from Canada had created for her local school system. A guy who made a gag Christmas presents for a friend or relative. When you open the box and had blinking lights and the fish headed guy from Star Wars yelling “It’s a Trap!”. And what appeared to be about a 10 or 12-year-old kid who had an Arduino controller, the blinking LEDs, and a thermal text printer. I’m not really sure what it did but it was cool for a kid’s age. Another guy had a Arduino/Raspberry Pi controlled engraving machine that was pretty cool.

Here is the entire 30 minute online chat.

Here is the video that I showed at the beginning of the chat you want to see a better look at what I was doing then was available during the live presentation.

I will probably go back and share more of my projects including my IR remote control mouse and keyboard emulator. I’m also working on a remote that will replace the remote I use on my wheelchair. That will have to wait until after dad recovers from his pacemaker surgery. The chat is at 9:30 PM on Saturday nights and that won’t work with the guy I have coming in to put me to bed about that time.

2 thoughts on “Show and Tell Isn’t Just for Grade School

  1. Hey Cy, I realise this is a really old post but I’m interested in the bracket the screen over your bed hangs from. I’ve found that almost all brackets are limited in the amount of downwards angle they can get. I need one which can swivel left-right because I turn my screen round to show things to people or to watch TV with my flatmate, but any bracket with left-right swivel seems that will hold a 12kg screen seems not to angle downwards more than about 10 or 15 degrees. Any suggestions?

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