After tirelessly crisscrossing the globe for several years offering hands-on technical training, the Atmel team kicked off a new Tech on Tour era this past January with a tricked-out mobile trailer. Designed to literally drive the Internet of Things (and other next-gen technologies), 40’ x 85′ trailer brings hands-on training, hackathons, key technology demonstrations and other gatherings based around Atmel MCUs, MPUs, wireless, touch solutions and easy-to-use software tools. With more than 150 stops spanning across 30 states and 4 Canadian provinces, Tech on Tour is estimated to reach nearly 4,000 engineers this year alone.
Tens of thousands of miles later, the big rig has navigated the country — from Silicon Valley to the Hudson Valley, Atmel’s XSense Fab to the White House, Southern California to North Carolina, the deserts of Arizona to the plains of Kansas, the woods of Washington to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Thousands of engineers, execs and Makers alike have set foot onboard the trailer, including AVR Man, Sir Mix-A-Lot and even 13-year-old CEO Quin Etnyre. It has shared good times with our valued partners and lovable ol’ pals while turning heads and making new friends along the way. It has hosted a number of expert panel discussions, found itself parked in a middle of a tradeshow floor (link) and even had the chance to take in some of the landmarks in our nation’s capital. There have been sightings in the wild to selfies standing before the truck. And, after all of that, as we take a look back at the first six months of its inaugural tour, we must say that it’s been pretty truckin’ awesome!
“The IoT is being led by a rising generation of tinkerers, inventors and innovators. These are dedicated people who are working out of universities, garages and small companies. We are going and meeting them,” explained Sander Arts, Atmel VP of Marketing.
Already having made stops in both Minnesota, Illinois and Pennsylvania, the second leg of the tour is well underway. The Tech on Tour trailer will continue driving the Internet of Things (literally…) en route to:
Sept. 17: Melville, NY
Sept. 19: Waterbury, CT
Sept. 24: Westford, MA
Sept. 29: North Reading, MA
Oct. 2: Point Claire, QC
Oct. 7: Syracuse, NY
Oct. 15: Vaughan, ON
With upcoming stops in:
Cleveland, OH
Detroit, MI
Indianapolis,IN
Milwaukee, WI
Madison, WI
Next up, the teched-out truck will be making its way to Long Island with our friends from Avenet Electronics on September 17th to showcase a wide variety of tech, conducting training to include touch, mass storage class boot loading and Atmel’s SAM D21 Xplained Pro (ARM-based MCUs).
Interested in joining our ToTerrific team of tech experts for a day of SMART ARM-based Cortex M0+ training? Registration for this stop is now open!
Event Details
September 29, 2014
8:30 am – 5:00 pm
Avnet Electronics
400 Riverpark Drive
North Reading, MA 01864
Registration fee of $64.00 USD includes:
- Hands-on training with an Atmel Technology Expert
- Step-by-step training materials
- Atmel SAMD21 Xplained Pro Evaluation Kit
- Atmel QT1 Xplained Pro
Get your hands-on training and roll up your sleeves with first-hand instruction and building with Atmel’s latest ARM Cortex M0+ microcontroller and development board. This Atmel | SMART SAM D21 is intended for the next IoT, wearables, or industrial embedded system. With connectivity options including interface integration, the SAM D21 device also has various design tools and development boards to quickly jump start learning and design integration. Accelerating your product to MVP and fit the connectivity design parameters and ultra low power sipping parameters are key to today’s next emergent embedded systems.
A couple of days later, the mobile trailer will take a quick trip north to Pointe Claire, Quebec at Future Electronics. Registration for this stop is also now open!
Event Details
October 2, 2014
8:30 am – 5:00 pm
Future Electronics
237 Hymus Blvd
Pointe Claire, Quebec H9R 5C7
During this stop, attendees will learn more about:
- Hands-on training with an Atmel Technology Expert
- Step-by-step training materials
- Atmel SAMD21 Xplained Pro Evaluation Kit
- Atmel QT1 Xplained Pro
In a majority of upcoming stops, the one-day sessions will feature hands-on technical training based on the Atmel | SMART SAM D21, an evolution of the industry’s first microcontroller with robust, high-performance, easy-to-use capacitive touch support. The SAM D20/21 represent a paradigm shift for capacitive touch sensing in terms of noise tolerance, power consumption, touch quality, and application integration. This is enabled through the on-chip hardware Peripheral Touch Controller (PTC), complemented with this new generation of touch support in the Atmel Studio 6 development Ecosystem. While onboard the big rig, explore how to easily configure the noise filtering and sensitivity of your user interface, based on specific application based considerations, using the QTouch Analyzer, using live trace logging of capacitive sensing signals. Understand the significantly simplified process of building and integrating a touch based user interface alongside your application, leveraging the interrupt-driven, non-blocking QTouch library code (only 5% of CPU resources, while scanning 10 channels at 50ms scan rate).
Become familiar with this Atmel Software Framework (ASF) compatible design process, giving you the ability to mix and match capacitive buttons, sliders and wheels with standard MCU components of your application such as the differentiated USB, DMA and TCC peripherals on the SAM D21. SMART Microcontroller based products go to market with firmware programmed at the factory.
Whenever a bug is fixed or new feature is implemented, the firmware on the product needs to be updated. The process of updating the firmware becomes easy if the product has the capability of updating its firmware by itself. In this hands-on training we will develop a USB Host bootloader project for a SAM D21 device, that can detect a mass storage device (for example a USB thumb-/flash-drive) when connected to the USB-port. If this device contains an updated firmware image, the bootloader will then update the flash of the device with new firmware.
To find out when Atmel’s Tech on Tour training will be heading to a city near you, follow along with our up-to-date schedule here. Don’t forget to register and reserve your seat. Space is limited!
Atmel | Bits & Pieces 