TCF 2017 Presentation went okay, I guess ...

I again did my Trenton Computer Festival (TCF) HA Presentation (2017-03-18) and I again stayed up until 3AM the night before fiddling with it. This time it was mostly for the better. At the end of the presentation I was able to start to demo the actual working Sonoff Basic and 4CH. Unfortunately, during the presentation, the WiFi router didn't cooperate and I ran out of time, so the partial demo was brief. I figured out all the issues the following day at IXR and found out I wouldn't have figured it all out during the presentation. Many people have told me it was a still a good presentation. It was just not what I intended, oh well.

Now, the night before, I built everything to work with a Raspberry Pi 3, the TP-Link 703N (nice device), the Sonoff BASIC and the Sonoff 4CH. I set the Sonoff devices up with the arendst/Sonoff-Tasmota Arduino firmware, found on Github. Then setup the router to feed DHCP to all the devices. I hard-coded the device's IP to their MAC addresses and even rebooted everything to make sure it worked. What I didn't count on was my router restarting the next day and not keeping the hard-coded addresses. It was important that I demonstrate the use of DHCP and wireless to show ease of use. But at the same time I needed easy to remember (hardcoded) IPs to run scripts for the demo. Also it seems I left out screen shots of some of the Arduino code, the compile and upload screen shots (grr). Then there wasn't even time for first start up of the Sonoff devices. Showing how easy it was to configure it the first time and then updating its information to the MQTT. Of course I'll do this all again next year but in the mean time I think I'm going to turn this into a set of classes that I can present at IXR.