Spring / Printemps 2017 23 The intermediate and advanced workshops assume that the participants have experimented with a development board before and are at least familiar with the environment. On average, about 75% of participants sign up for all three workshops, so the instructors tend to know the level of knowledge and what is expected. For those that sign up to multiple workshops, one assumes they have tinkered with the boards in the weeks in-between sessions. These workshops introduce more peripherals like different types of sensors, seven-segment displays, serial interfaces, and even the use of interrupt signals. One of the goals is to help people become more independent as they progress through different workshops. This is accomplished by providing the participants the theory behind the components and terminology they may encounter when reading about the subject. In addition, some time will be dedicated to putting datasheets on the screen and highlighting key information like operating conditions, maximum ratings, and how to interface the device to a microcontroller. Essentially providing enough knowledge to interface with simple components. Finally, the more advanced workshops have small interrelated examples that lead to a project to be completed during the session. A more grandiose end-goal keeps the interest from participants throughout the session and challenges them to think of how all the parts will fit together. Some of the most ambitious hands-on projects are described in the next section. Regardless of the audience, there is a significant amount of effort associated with developing materials in advance of the workshop. Most of the instructors are used to working with state-of-the-art commercial software available through the university or place of employment. Initially, these were used to develop the material for the workshop, but many participants asked for open-source equivalents that they could try at home. Thus, there has been a trend to move towards open-source tools for all the materials unless specifically advertised as part of the workshop goals, like the case of the printed circuit board (PCB) workshop where students designed an Arduino shield using Altium Designer. The slides are developed in Google Slides and a link to view the files is shared with all participants at the beginning of the workshop. The advantage of this system is that it allows one instructor to continue presenting material while another person annotates the slides as needed based on feedback from participants. In the first few events, the code examples were distributed through the websites for student groups, however, more recently there was a transition to GitHub repositories to track changes during development and subconsciously promote good habits for configuration management. Finally, the diagrams and schematics have been developed in Fritzing to allow students to jump back and forth between schematics, vector graphics of the breadboard layouts, and even PCBs if desired. The vector graphics include everything from the development board, breadboard, passive components, sensors, and jumper cables. Thus, it is easy to make a high quality image that has improved legibility over an annotated photograph. Finally, handouts were developed on rare occasions for advanced workshops where text descriptions were easier to follow than bullets on a slide. There have been many approaches used for handling workshop components and costs. Nominally, at the UofM and RRC, students register online in advance of the workshop and select whether they want to purchase any parts at cost through the student branch. This is often preferred as the bulk orders are often eligible for educational discounts. At the end of the workshop, the students get to take home all the components to continue experimenting. Any funding obtained by the student branches is only used to cover the cost of refreshments or equipment that will be kept by the branch for future activities. This is very different for high school workshops where either the school purchases parts for a physics or computer science class or the instructor signs out a set of development boards used for outreach activities by the UofM Faculty of Engineering. In contrast, the library purchased components as part of a Makerspace initiative and makes them available for short term loans. Over the years, the workshops became more popular, the students involved in the activities transitioned to Young Professionals, and there was a natural opportunity to expand the activities beyond the University of Manitoba. These included joint workshops with the Red River College student branch, followed by high school visits coordinated by WISE Kid-Netic Energy, workshops for teachers through the IEEE Teacher In-Service Program (TISP), and other initiatives. The activities were customized for different audiences and delivered by a growing number of instructors working with anywhere from 15-25 participants per session. Examples of Workshops Outside the introductory workshops already described, there are many special events that show the potential for these events within the community. The following are six examples that give an overview of the range of activities in Winnipeg. GPS Receivers at Shaftesbury High School In the Spring of 2012, a physics teacher from Shaftesbury High School, Mr. Robert Striemer, asked if the group could run a custom workshop to help his high school students interface a GPS to an Arduino for a high altitude weather balloon experiment. The teacher had already attended the Arduino workshop series, but wanted some assistance with new concepts like installing libraries, communicating with an asynchronous serial device, parsing data, and validating readings. Two UofM IEEE Student Branch members volunteered to run the activity and prepared some slides talking about GPS receivers, how they work, how the data is formatted, and serial interfaces. The initial tests were conducted in the classroom confirming the unit was reporting the correct coordinates. Afterwards, Robert presented a unique challenge to make the on-board LED blink whenever we entered the endzone of the school’s football field. This required extracting the latitude and longitude coordinates from Google Maps and writing some simple logic to turn on the LED at the correct time. Testing the circuit was a memorable experience as shown in the picture. The rain did not deter students from walking with their Arduinos under an umbrella to see whether the lights would blink. Culinary Arts and Embedded Systems at RRC In March 2014, Red River College and IEEE Young Professionals organized a workshop to learn to interface with motors and sensors for a manufacturing environment. To make this more realistic, the instruct- ors developed a test system that added motors to a cookie extruder purchased online and linked that to a conveyor belt that could carry