Bad Dog Designs, Steve Spencer and Rob Miles Triple Bill!

As we're taking a break in April, we have an extra special Triple Bill evening of fab speakers this month!

We'll be starting at the earlier time of 6pm so we can give our speakers as much time as they need!

What we'll be doing:

Bad Dog Designs - Making Cool Things:

The Award winning Bad Dog Designs workshops are based in Pillaton, Staffordshire. They create unique and individual things with vintage Nixie tubes.

A Nixie tube is a device created in the 1950's to display numbers, before the invention of the LED. A wonderful warm neon glow that will last in excess of 20 years and has a vintage charm all of its own. We use these tubes to make unique and unusual clocks and art pieces and send them all over the world.

Steve Spencer - Unlock that door with IoT hub, ESP8266 and Cognitive Services:

Using a cheap low powered ESP8266 and micropython, we connect to the Azure IoT hub to send and receive messages. The solution integrates with Azure Functions and Cognitive services and uses face recognition to unlock a door. This presentation is about the easy way to integrate these components together along with Service bus to provide a serverless solution. There will be a door and it will get unlocked.

Rob Miles - Air Quality, Azure Functions and Spider Eggs:

Good quality air is important. After all, everyone breathes. But dig a little deeper into the subject and most of what you find is what we don't know. Is air pollution produced by local traffic? Does it waft in on the breeze? Are there times when I really shouldn't go out for a run?

In this talk I'll describe how you can build your own connected air quality sensor and get data from it. I'll touch on embedded devices the MQTT protocol, LoRa networking, Azure IoT Hub and Azure Functions, along with our Connected Humber effort to spread sensors over Humberside. And I'll even mention spider eggs and show off my "Air Quality Top Hat".

Our speakers:

Bad Dog Designs:

Founded in 2014 Bad Dog Designs has been bringing Nixies back to life ever since!

Twitter: https://twitter.com/BadDogDesigns_

Steve Spencer:

Steve is an experienced .NET Developer, Microsoft Azure MVP and a Senior Solution Architect at Liberis. Steve has spoken at previous DDD events covering Microsoft Azure, Gadgeteer, Service Bus and Azure Web jobs

Steve has also appeared on channel9 also talking on Service Fabric - https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechDaysOnline/UK-TechDays-Online-September-2016/Service-Fabric-for-the-Microservices-Win-baby

Blog: http://blogs.recneps.net/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/sdspencer

Rob Miles:

Rob Miles has spent over 30 years teaching programming to a succession of students at the University of Hull in the UK. He’s a Microsoft MVP with a passion for programming, C# and creating new things. He's written a few books over the years, and coloured in a lot more.

If he had any spare time he’d spend it writing even more code. He loves making programs and then running them to see what happens. He reckons that programming is the most creative thing you can learn how to do.

Having worked with many languages and platforms over the years he now likes nothing more than writing C# using Visual Studio, preferably for a small device of some kind. If there are motors and lights involved, so much the better.

He claims to know a lot of really good jokes, but nobody has ever heard him tell one.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/robmiles

Food and Drink:

With food from Rebel and Microsoft plus Drinks from Urban Monitoring and PJG Creations.

Swag:

We'll be giving away a JetBrains license to one lucky attendee!