Hardware Morning
In which software people attempt to make something hard
October 11, 2018
It's Final Friday!
Well, delayed this time until a Wednesday morning - but the point remains. This time, Josh guided us on a hardware project! Everybody got a little kit that Josh had assembled, and we worked to make a physical button that could deploy our project codebase. (Don't worry clients - we're not going to be deploying your code without the usual care and oversight).
We broke into teams to accomplish this: one team working on hardware assembly and configuration, one team working on writing code for the hardware, and one team writing new code for our automation and deployment environment. This was fun! I helped with the hardware, and got to actually solder some boards together. Josh led this, and then Mark jumped in and worked like someone who assembles his own keyboards for fun.
The final result is a little package with a battery, USB charging and data transfer, a wifi connection (that's hardcoded to our office network), and a tiny screen. Turn everything on, and you can connect to our list of code repositories, cycle thru a list, make a selection, and send a deploy command. The last step is a slack notification, which is mostly for fun.
