Nodebots / Hardware

Nodebots / Hardware Other Kit Items & Wrap Up

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Steve Kinney
Steve Kinney
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Steve wraps up the course by discussing other parts in the Johnny-Five Inventor's Kit and applications of nodebots.

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Transcript from the "Other Kit Items & Wrap Up" Lesson

[00:00:00]
>> Steve Kinney: So, before we go, I just wanna spend a little bit of time to talk about the pieces that we didn't get a chance to use today. So, this piece I'm holding right here is a motor controller which by itself doesn't, I mean it controls motors, but that's only really interesting if you have motors, which you do.

[00:00:17] And so there's a bunch of really cool things. This workshop was slightly geared to my interests with a lot of this stuff, which is integrating a whole bunch of web technologies together and controlling it in the physical world. But there's a whole other edge of this community that is kind of interested in actually building robots, right?

[00:00:42] Turning some wheels, moving a claw, stuff along those lines. JSConf US, which has been not happening for the last few years but I believe it's happening again this year, they had, it was a three day conference. And what they did was the first day was conference, the second day was like a play day and then the third day was conference again.

[00:01:02] And you got to see all the interesting things people are doing on the robot side. So there was no bots, like turning some wheels, moving some claws, stuff along those lines. But there was also node boats, right? Which was basically boats controlled by JavaScript, so take all the fun electric stuff we've been doing and then add water.

[00:01:28] And then finally, just to kind of one up, there's node copters right, but finally there's also node rockets. Which were JavaScript powered rockets. There's also just a lot of fun stuff that you can do along those lines as well. There's other interesting things. One of my friends, Cass Perch, she has clothing where she's sewn in LEDs.

[00:01:53] And there was one where based on the sentiment analysis of a tweet that you would send her, her clothes would change different colors. My friend Susan has meow shoes. That's in our book, Make a JavaScript Robotics which show you how to make those as well. So there's lots of other interesting applications.

[00:02:12] It's like, this has definitely been bent to my interest which is like, playing around the APIs, sending data out into the data in and stuff along those lines. But between pulling some of this hardware stuff into clothing, launching it into the sky, having it roll around your office.

[00:02:28] There's a lot of really, really interesting stuff you can do along those lines as well. So now, again, the major part here is seeing the flip side, right? That we can hook in to third party APIs and have stuff happen, right? There are real-time APIs, but you could also have a border loop that checks the weather and flashes an LED red if it's about to thunderstorm, right?

[00:02:49] There's lots of different combinations when you think about all the APIs out there, and all the kind of crazy things that you could do as you start to combine all of these things, right? And so, my job today was to kind of show you some of the different pieces individually in small digestible chunks.

[00:03:10] But hopefully if I've done my job well, is that over the next days, weeks, months, is that you will start thinking about interesting combinations of things, realize that you have this suite of components. You have all of the APIs on the Internet. The ability to real time push information, real time pull information.

[00:03:28] Talk to web servers. Pull information from web servers. Send emails. You can send text messages with the Twilio API. All the APIs that are out there give you a whole bunch of interesting combinations where you can take the real physical world and the Internet world and combine them in really, really interesting ways.

[00:03:47] So I hope this has been, I had a lot of fun. I hope this has been fun for you as well. And I hope that, my real hope is gonna come over the next few days, weeks, and months as you start to create really interesting things and send them to me.

[00:04:02] Cool, thank you so much.
>> [APPLAUSE]