I’m still really busy with Brighton Robotics. It’s great to create something so many people find useful and interesting and the urge is to spend all my time adding to it & improving it.  There is something to be said in perhaps spending the next six months concentrating solely on developing the group and site and pick up my personal learning when there is some self-perpetuating momentum behind the group.

There is a problem with this though.  I seem to be slowly becoming known around the Brighton area as ‘The robot girl’ and am building quite a strong online presence on twitter, and as this continues, more and more people will come to me for advice or help.  At the moment the best I can do is point them at a more suitable person, but it’s somewhat embarrassing to be known for something you know next to nothing about.  So I shall take some time out from building the group - not enough to allow it to fade out however - and resume my own learning.  That’s why I got into this in the first place after all.

So I sat down at my computer yesterday evening and went through all the blog post,tweets and book recommendations that I had bookmarked over the last 4 months and compiled a list in amazon for my next phase of learning.  I then cropped it massively as I did not have £150 to spend on books!  After ordering these I pulled down off my bookshelf the only robotics and electronics book on there that I have not yet read from cover to cover - ‘Making Things Talk’ from the clever guys at Make magazine.

Making Things Talk is dedicated to demonstrating how to get different physical objects to talk to one another.  It takes you from the very basics - explaining the different layers of communication and the tools you use to connect them - up to creating complex networks of smart devices that communicate both physically and wirelessly.  Although the main method of programming this communication in the book is with Arduino, everything is explained so clearly that it would be easy enough to replace the Arduino with a PIC, STAMP or Wiring microcontroller instead.

This is only my first impression of the book.  I’ve not actaully built anything from it yet so it may yet turn out to be the wrong thing for me, but certainly it looks promising from here.  I’ll let you know how I get on.