GeekCampSG 2012 has come and gone. Not fantastic timing - on the last day of Ramadan - leaving me to prepare notes in the middle of the night - while travelling etc. But for some reason, people seemed to like the talk entitled Hardware is not Boring where I used an Arduino to control the speed of toy racing cars in response to commands sent from mobile phones.

You can find the slides on SpeakerDeck

The video is missing - as is one other slide which did not get included for some reason.... but the essence is there.

The demo did not go as smoothly as hoped - they never do. I should not have used the Scalextric Micro - the cars have magnets that make them hard to move.
When I tried it on the full sized Scalextric later it went like a dream. It also managed to power little Ali's Thomas the Tank Engine as well.

For once I finished in record time - so I finished up showing something I had hacked together half an hour before - using an Arduino Leonardo and a 3D Accelerometer to work as a mouse.

We are looking at having Arduino classes again soon at Hackerspace SG. Please check  either at Hackerspace,  on Curica or back here for details