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The Maker Show: Remote controlled Robot Arms with Raspberry Pi, .NET, Azure, Blazor and SignalR

Goran Vuksic — Wed, 17 Mar 2021 19:04:59 +0000

The Maker Show is series of monthly one hour show for developers hosted by Sherry List and Goran Vuksic. On each episode we highlight tools and projects from the community that can inspire new creations and inventions.

Pete Gallagher is a Freelance IT Consultant, Microsoft Certified Trainer and Azure MVP, Pluralsight Author and owner of PJG Creations Ltd. He has been creating software for decades and is happy programming in just about any language. Pete has been involved in a wide span of tech in his many years of industry experience, including IoT Projects for; Royal Mail Stamp Vending before there was such a thing as modern IoT, Building Monitoring Systems, Internet Connected Self Service Kiosks and much more. He has presented all over the UK on a variety of IoT Topics, including Azure IoT Hubs, Amazon Alexa, Particle Photon, Arduino etc etc. Pete also organises Notts IoT, co-organises Dot Net Notts, Notts Dev Workshop and sits on the Board of LATi, a Loughborough based Advanced Technology networking group. He is also an active STEM Ambassador and is passionate about making STEM subjects accessible to all ages. Pete particularly likes gadgets of all kinds!
In this super interesting episode of Maker Show, Pete took us through everything needed in order to build a robot arm with a Raspberry Pi, .NET 5 a Blazor App and SignalR.

Pete started by talking about .NET 5 and how easy it is to install .NET 5. Then we had a look through the various circuits and he spun up a console application to explore how we can control the GPIO on the Pi. We have seen how the Servos are wired up and how to get the code in place to start moving our Raspberry pi based Robot Arm. Finally we saw a simple Blazor and SignalR app that controls the robot remotely! This talk appeals to all knowledge levels and anyone interested in getting into STEM, Electronics and Robotics.

Feel free to check out recording of the show:

Presentation from the session can be found on SlideShare.

Code repository is on the GitHub.

Check this post to discover how to Connect Raspberry Pi online simulator to Azure IoT Hub (Node.js)

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The Maker Show: TinyML for wildlife conservation 🐘

Goran Vuksic — Thu, 25 Feb 2021 07:16:56 +0000

Biodiversity is declining at a rapid pace and several wild species are at risk of extinction. With technical support as IoT solutions and machine learning, conservation efforts can be facilitated.

Sara Olsson is a Maker who recently took a big step into the world of things. She has a background in software development and image processing and is now exploring the combined field of IoT and Machine Learning. She is an ambassador at Edge Impulse and uses their tools to train ML for wildlife conservation.

Sara gave a talk on machine learning for camera traps and running inference on the edge. She demonstrated image classification, from model training to deployment, using tools as Edge Impulse, Azure IoT Edge, and the OpenMV camera board.

Feel free to check out recording of the show:

Demo resources:
• Hackster submission
• Edge Impulse
• Kaggle Dataset: Africa Wildlife
• IoTMQTTSample

Related project mentioned:
• Project Ngulia: projectngulia.org
• Master thesis: Edge Machine Learning for Animal Detection, Classification, and Tracking
• with co-author Amanda Tydén

Inspiration and related projects:
• Microsoft AI for Earth and their CameraTrap repo
• Project 15 and their github repo
• Hack The Poacher
• Smart Parks

Follow us on our ForDevs Twitter account if you would like to be notified when our next show will be announced. You can also join our Meetup group and subscribe to our Youtube channel.

The Maker Show: Making The Skull 💀

Goran Vuksic — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 06:52:10 +0000

In first episode in 2021 we had Uri Shaked as a guest speaker about "Making The Skull", a mind-bending Arduino based hardware puzzle.

Uri is a Maker who loves voiding warranties; Currently building AVR8js, an open-source AVR simulator in JavaScript and working on "The Skull", an ATtiny85 reverse engineering puzzle.

Uris blog post with the details of manufacturing in China can be found here, and here's the story of making his first PCB: "Electronics with a Personal Touch, the Hard Way and the Easy Way". You can also read more about his first CTF, that he made and sold on Tindie, year before the skull, in the blogpost here.

Feel free to check out recording of the show:

Follow us on our ForDevs Twitter account if you would like to be notified when our next show will be announced. You can also join our Meetup group and subscribe to our Youtube channel.

The Maker Show: IoT powered holiday lights 🎄

Goran Vuksic — Sat, 26 Dec 2020 17:13:35 +0000

We have just kicked off the very first episode of The Maker Show! This show is series of monthly one hour show for developers hosted by Sherry List and Goran Vuksic. On each episode we will highlight tools and projects from the community that can inspire new creations and inventions.

In this episode we had Jim Bennett as a guest speaker about "IoT powered holiday lights 🎄".

Jim does things with IoT and Azure in the Developer Relations team at Microsoft, mainly creating content for students and faculty to help them be successful with Microsoft technologies.

As an IoT enthusiast, Jim has wired up his lights to a Raspberry Pi, and he controls them using cloud IoT Services with no code apps. This allows him to turn lights on and off, or to change the color via a mobile app.

Feel free to check out recording here:

Resources from the show are available at the following link: http://aka.ms/Jim/MakerShow

Follow us on our ForDevs Twitter account if you would like to be notified when our next show will be announced. You can also join our Meetup group and subscribe to our Youtube channel.

CONTRIBUTING: Eddie Jaoude

Floor Drees — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 10:45:44 +0000

Leading up to (and during) the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet Eddie Jaoude, a fullstack developer of 15 years, and contributor to open source for 10 of those years.

Check out this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers

My first contribution was fixing a typo. Come to think of it, my second contribution also fixed a typo. And maybe my third too. And then from that I got involved in the conversation, started adding more improvements, adding more value to projects by improving the test code coverage, adding new features, fixing bugs... It all snowballed from there and I want that for you too. I believe my success has come from contributing to open source and learning not only the technical skills but how to collaborate and network with other people.

Recently I was selected as a GitHub Star out of the 44 million people on GitHub. There's 20 of us, and I love seeing what great stuff the others are up to, contributing to the community.

When I'm not contributing to open source, you can find me speaking at meetups, conferences, or on my YouTube channel. I believe open source is for everybody, that means for you too!

What can you tell us about your project?
I don't contribute to 1 or 2 projects, I try and contribute to all projects that I use. You're probably using a lot of OSS projects at the moment, from React to Firebase to Angular, and when you use these projects, and you find documentation is missing, or a bug, then I suggest you submit that as your contribution.

We have a community organization and Discord where we work on our projects together. It's amazing, when you join a community you find a whole world of projects you didn't even know existed, and then you'll find the project that's right for you. The "right project" might be because of the technology, or the speed of the project, ...

In our GitHub organization we have many different projects, including frontend and backend projects. Some might use Svelte, evolve around Discord bot, and everything inbetween. Come find out what projects interest you!

What contributions are you welcoming?
Our community projects welcome everyone - and everyone who is new (to open source) especially, because they can add so much value to a project. You may think I'm new to tech, or I'm new to open source, what value can I really add? Well, you have a fresh pair of eyes, you can look at the project from a different perspective and then help us make the project more inclusive, lower the barrier to entry for the next people. Therefor the project contributions can grow, and the project grows as a result. You can spot holes that we missed in documentation. There might be things that we made assumptions on that aren't correct. So remember: your fresh pair of eyes, you being new to the project adds so much!

What skills do people need to contribute?
You don't need any specific skill to join, we're actually looking for the right attitude. If you want to collaborate and work with people in a team that's really the most important thing. Skills can be learned - and we're all learning all the time. And I'm sure that you will have skills that you can teach us!

One thing you do need is a GitHub account, so signup for free and you can start contributing. Open Source doesn't care what you're wearing, where you're from, how old you are, what the weather is like, all it cares about is that you visit every once in a while.

How do folks get started?
There are so many projects on GitHub and it's hard to find the right one, but it doesn't have to be difficult. I want you to find an inclusive project, that will help you getting involved in open source and realizes the benefit that you can add, because that's very important. Join a community, be it on Discord, Meetup, or GitHub, and find the people that want you to succeed.

Don't wait for the right project because you will never find it if you keep waiting. Get involved in the conversation, raise an issue on a project, reply to an issue, raise a pull request, review a PR. Even if you're new to a project. The more you get involved the more likely you'll find a project that fits your learning objectives or style. Get started today!

A few tips on finding an inclusive project on GitHub:

If you look along the tabs on the top of a project, you'll see there's an Insight tab. If you select that, a panel will appear on the left hand side. Have a look at GitHub's community suggestions. Do they have a Code of Conduct, a README, a Contribution guide? These are good indicators in deciding whether you will want to get involved. And if items are missing, maybe that could be a good contribution to make.
Have a look at the closed issues and closed pull requests, specifically the ones that have not been merged. Were these closed with a friendly comment and a suggestion? If PRs are closed without feedback, then the project maybe isn't very inclusive - there is no way of knowing how you could contribute in the future or what the project is looking for.
Check the Issues tab and in the panel on the right filter for labels like good-first-issue (or: good-first-contribution). You can then further filter by technology, or other labels, to find where you could fit in.

Don't try and put in 100 hours on a weekend - ok, that's not physically possible, but you know what I mean. Don't try and do everything in one go, and then do nothing in 6 months. Open source is like brushing your teeth - you brush your teeth twice a day and you don't think anything of it. Over time though your teeth benefit. It's the same like open source work, you want to do it little and often and it will not only benefit others, but it will benefit your career. You'll learn many technical skills, as well as collaboration skills.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out on GitHub, Discord, Twitter, and ask publicly so that the community can see your viewpoint and feedback as well!

Check contributing.today regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers, as well as online events to help you get involved in open source.

CONTRIBUTING: Michael Hawker on Windows Community Toolkit

Floor Drees — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 09:38:59 +0000

Leading up to (and during) the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet Michael Hawker, aka XAML Llama, a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft, and maintainer of the Windows Community Toolkit. Michael is also an avid streamer.

Check out this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers

I work in PAX, the Partner, Analytics, and essential eXperiences team (at Microsoft). PAX focuses on driving the ISV ecosystem through technical engagement with partners and industry as well as providing essential first party experiences.

What can you tell us about your project?
The Windows Community Toolkit is a set of helpers and controls for Windows developers, mostly focused on UWP (Universal Windows Platform) technologies, but also on .NET. There's great tools and components in there that help you build great applications.

What contributions are you welcoming?
We have a lot of things in the toolkit, a variety of controls, layout components, monitoring, it's hard for me to keep track of all the features sometimes! We're always looking for people to help us fix bugs, or add new features that help scenarios we've discovered. We also like seeing community members come up with their own ideas for contributions.

A lot of the time the things we add in the toolkit end up in the platform library as well, and it's great to see that full circle of development where an idea ends up being used by tens of thousands of developers.

What skills do people need to contribute?
Mostly C# and XAML, the main things we do in the toolkit. Another skill is patience when working with us. We're a smaller team that is working on the toolkit, sometimes it will take us some time to get around to reviewing PRs, or responding to every issue. But we really appreciate people coming in and helping us on the project, so come in with initiative and we'll make great things happen together.

How do folks get started?
To get started, we have a sample app in the Microsoft store to download on your PC. It's a great way to see not only what the toolkit has to offer you as an app developer, but also to try things out. If you find a bug in the sample app you can now go clone the repo, build up the sample app on your box, and have it side by side with the store version and reproduce and fix the issue.

We have a wiki with contribution guidelines and goes into how you can download preview packages for any PRs in case you want to try out new features that people are building and give feedback or reply to PRs are all great ways to get started. We're looking forward to feedback on our process and guidelines as well. Hopefully the wiki helps bootstrap understanding how the project works and how to contribute - and there's ample opportunity to contribute!

Check contributing.today regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers, as well as online events to help you get involved in open source.

Contributing: Samson Goddy on Sugar Labs

Floor Drees — Thu, 29 Oct 2020 16:38:16 +0000

Leading up to (and during) the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet Samson Goddy, co-founder of Open Source Community Africa, and one of the maintainers for the Sugar Labs project.

Check out this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers

OSCA is a project I started with a friend and a couple of other people to encourage folks to contribute to open source. Sugar Labs is a software project that helps kids to learn how to code, a mathematics and science learning environment, on Linux.

What can you tell us about your project?
Sugar Labs is a huge project, it started from a popular project called One Laptop per Child. The idea was to give developing countries a way to use computers in a more creative way in classrooms. It targets from 8 years old up to 18 years old. I got a computer when I was 8, so I grew up in the ecosystem, and then became a core maintainer for the project. We still believe in the vision of enabling kids that love science and technology to have an an environment that encourages their creativity - one good example is musicblocks, teaching the concepts of both music and programming at the same time. You can think of Sugar Labs as a sort of an App Store, a collection of activities.

What contributions are you welcoming?
We're looking for any type of contribution! The project is 100% open and free. We're particularly looking for people with knowledge of Python and JavaScript - the Sugar Labs ecosystem is divided into 2 parts, the web part is written in JavaScript, the desktop side of things heavily depends on Python. Specifically things like PyGtk, which is the Gnome Toolkit. We also have some PHP on our App Store.

If you can code, if you can code, do technical writing, we very much welcome your contributions!

How do folks get started?
I'd highly recommend you to go to our Docs for more information about the project, on what to contribute to and how, and when you can't find the answer you're looking for there's also a way to contact the community. We look forward to your contributions!

Check contributing.today regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers, as well as online events to help you get involved in open source.

CONTRIBUTING: PnPjs

Floor Drees — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 17:30:11 +0000

Leading up to (and during) the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet Patrick Rodgers & Julie Turner, co-maintainers for the PnPjs project.

Check out this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers

What can you tell us about your project?
PnPjs is a fluid JavaScript library that is designed to help you make requests to SharePoint and Microsoft Graph. We've been around since 2016, so that's 4.5 years of great, fun work with the community. Right now we process about 9.2 billion requests to SharePoint online, coming out of about 19.000 tenants.

What contributions are you welcoming?
We'd love for people to contribute to Docs, helping us clarify and streamline documentation so that people can consume the library better. We also list Issues in our repo that are an opportunity to contribute. But also if you have ideas, things you'd like see as part of the library, we welcome that as well! Submit your PR and we will review and if it's a good fit we'll absolutely include your addition in the next version - and we release on a monthly cadence.

What skills do people need to contribute?
From a skills perspective it's really good if you have some general understanding of how to use TypeScript and build client-side solutions - you'll need to be able to write TS, and review the library that's already there, so that you can extend it. It's build in such a way that it has a core set of functionality, and the way that we extend it is to build on top of that. It takes a little bit to understand that (core set of functionality), but you can have a look at some of the other features of the library to help you get started on extending PnPjs for whatever RESTful endpoints we're not yet covering, or for things we could do a little better.

And if you have questions on getting started contributing, of course you could post those on our Issues list, and we'll do our best to help you out!

How do folks get started?
In order to get started, you can check out the Contribution guidelines, which give you step by step guidance on how to get your workstation set up. It's also our Docs, so more information on how to use the library can also be found there.

Check contributing.today regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers, as well as online events to help you get involved in open source.

Contributing: Megan Sullivan on Gatsby

Floor Drees — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 17:28:49 +0000

Leading up to and during the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet Megan Sullivan, Senior Software Engineer who works on documentation at Gatsby.

Check out this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers

What can you tell us about your project?
Gatsby is an open source project that's been around since 2015, and the company started in 2018. Gatsby is a framework that lets you build React apps quickly. Our goal is to make building the right thing, the easy thing. So that means that we give you some accessibility features off the bat, and we think about performance and security so you don't have to. You can focus on building your UI as quickly as possible.

What contributions are you welcoming?
For Hacktoberfest we have 2 main ways for you to contribute to our project. The first way is to work on the Docs. Our documentation has a few Issues open looking for contributions. The second way is to contribute to the code. There is one issue in particular, for the TypeScript migration - there's a long list of files that we're transferring over to TypeScript, and we would love your help with that.

What skills do people need to contribute?
Our project is written in JavaScript, it uses Node and React, and also Graphql, so depending on what part of the codebase you want to contribute to, you'll need to know some or all of those. We also use npm, or yarn, depending which part of the codebase you're in. And if you want to contribute to our Docs, those are written in markdown.

How do folks get started?
The best way to get started is to go and look at our GitHub Issues list. There are a few different labels you can look for there. For now you can look for the hacktoberfest label. Once Hacktoberfest is over you can look for the good-first-issue or help-wanted labels. On our website we have Contributing guide that outlines advice on how to get started, our Code of Conduct, as well as recommendations to make sure your contribution gets accepted!

Check contributing.today regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers, as well as online events to help you get involved in open source.

CONTRIBUTING: Ahmad Awais on Shades of Purple

Floor Drees — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 09:51:43 +0000

Leading up to (and during) the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet Ahmad Awais, award-winning "Open Sourcer", GDE, and Node.js Outreach Champion on the OpenJS Foundation. Ahmad created ~100 open source projects around automation, like his Corona CLI project, and Shades of Purple.

Check out this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers

What can you tell us about your project?
If you know me, you know I love the color purple. When programming with VS Code I found out that I didn't really like any of the purple themes available in the marketplace. Dogfooding my own need I ended up creating my own theme. It grew to become this giant campaign where in the first year we had 2 million downloads. The Shades of Purple core team ended up writing themes for ~10 different software projects like zsh, Chrome browser, ...

About 3 million developers worldwide use Shades of Purple. It uses yellow on purple for contrast, and syntax colors are based on the old COBOL theme. It might take a while to get used to the color scheme, but I'm sure you'll enjoy it too.

What contributions are you welcoming?
I look forward to any kind of contribution. Upon frequent request we're now looking into a Shades of Purple theme for Visual Studio, Sublime, Notepad - if you use any of these editors and want to add a theme that is more context aware and uses consistent syntax highlighting across 30+ languages, we would love to have you on the team. The idea is to create hundreds of themes across different editors and terminals (like Vim).

You're going to be interfacing with the editor you love, the browser you use, things you enjoy working with.

What skills do people need to contribute?
You don't need any specific skillset in order to contribute. A running joke in the community of theme-makers is you're going to have a poor experience with software you're creating a theme for, with the exception maybe of VS Code and Firefox. So you'll need to be frustration-free, tolerant of poor or bad documentation, and you'll need to familiarize yourself with our design guidelines. Use the Issues to discuss, or join the Purplers Discord, and we can hack together.

How do folks get started?
To get started, go to ShadesOfPurple.pro and in the Shades of Purple syntax section find all the colors listed that you can use with corresponding HEX values. Many other themes throw around colors that are just good for contrast, we only show red color when there's an error. Guidance for this you can find on the repository's README page. So, have a look at that, tell us what software is missing this type of theme, and let's start hacking together a theme for your use case!

Check contributing.today regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers, as well as online events to help you get involved in open source.

CONTRIBUTING: Chrissy LeMaire on PowerShell dba tools

Floor Drees — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 09:05:31 +0000

Leading up to (and during) the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet Chrissy LeMaire, the creator and maintainer of dbatools. Chrissy is a dual Microsoft MVP, and GitHub Star.

Check out this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers

What can you tell us about your project?
dbatools is a PowerShell toolkit for the SQL Server community. It takes boring day-to-day tasks and makes it a ton of fun. Even tedious tasks like migrations, where you're migrating one entire instance to the other, dbatools takes that and zips it down to one line of code. I've been told it makes people's jobs more enjoyable.

When it comes to the contributing side, we make it a point to be as welcoming as possible, offer help with Git and GitHub... It's not just a toolkit for SQL Server, it's also a toolkit for the community.

What contributions are you welcoming?
We're looking for a number of contributions, to documentation for instance, or adding presentations. When it comes to the source code there are additions that can be made - we just got a request for more auditing within SQL Server, and also SQL Server replication is a big feature set that our tool is missing - so if anyone has the experience to contribute there, that would be very welcome!

What skills do people need to contribute?
There are 2 types of skills sets that are needed - if you're a beginner then it'd probably be PowerShell, T-SQL, and Git. When it comes to Git I can totally recommend GitHub Desktop. When you go after the more advanced PowerShell programming, you're going to want to know the SMO API provided by Microsoft (SQL Server Management Objects, a .NET Framework object model).

How do folks get started?
To get started you will want to install VS Code, and clone our repository, using GitHub Desktop, or VS Code - we include a .vscode folder in our repository, allowing you to use all the settings that we require: things like code formatting, tabs vs spaces.

Join us on the SQL community Slack at dbatools.io/slack, then join the #dbatools-dev channel, where we can walk you through any design questions you may have, or any types of questions regarding contributing to the project.

Check contributing.today regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers, as well as online events to help you get involved in open source.

CONTRIBUTING: M365 CLI

Floor Drees — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 14:25:41 +0000

Leading up to (and during) the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet Rabia, Albert-Jan and Garry, working on the CLI tool for Microsoft 365 projects.

Check out this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers

Rabia is a Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, Albert-Jan is a Dutch MVP for Office apps and services, and Garry is a Microsoft MVP from the UK.

What can you tell us about your project?
Using the CLI for Microsoft 365 you can manage your M365 tenant, and SharePoint Framework projects.

What contributions are you welcoming?
We welcome many different types of contributions to the project - from fixing something in our documentation to updating a command or creating a whole new command. We have tons of Issues listed on our repo where you can go in and take a look. When you're new to the repository and have never contributed before, look out for the good-first-issue labelled Issues to get involved with.

What skills do people need to contribute?
Common sense, really. We have a couple of appropriate good-first-issue entries, documentation on the "minimal path to awesome", which is everything you'll need to get building. We manage everything in the open, so if you have any questions or feedback, you can raise an Issue, check the wiki for guidance, or start a Discussion on GitHub.

Whether you want to add a new command, update our Docs, or write sample scripts, we're here for all of it!

How do folks get started?
Set up your dev environment using the minimal path to awesome guide, and check the Contributing guidelines to get started

Check contributing.today regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers, as well as online events to help you get involved in open source.