DevFest Lagos 2021

DevFest is an annual celebration of the developer ecosystem, sponsored by Google Developers and organized by various Google Developer Groups around the world.

DevFest Lagos was organized and hosted by GDG Lagos on the 3rd of December. Arm and Sparkfun Electronics turned up as sponsors of the event. Sparkfun Electronics donated 20 units of the Sparkfun Edge development board for my workshop.

I facilitated a workshop on programming microcontrollers, particularly from the perspective of Machine Learning on the edge. This is a particularly good use-case for Arm-based microcontrollers.

The Sparkfun Edge development boards donated by Sparkfun feature an Arm Cortex-M4F microprocessor. These are RISC chips with floating-point arithmetic designed for embedded systems with low power utilization.

The original plan was to have a hands-on lab with only 20 participants. Unfortunately, the realities of the conference meant that we had more participants and less time. As a result, we pivoted our model and did the following:

• A 15-minute talk about microcontrollers and programming them
• A 15-minute demonstration session on setting up the Ambiq SDK for programming the Sparkfun Edge development boards
• A 10-minute giveaway session for the participants, utilizing a random draw from the participant pool.

Although this was a software developer conference, we had as many as 40 people turn up for our workshop. This is a sign of their interest in programming hardware.

We ran surveys before and after the workshop in order to get a sense of what participants already knew coming into the workshop, and how they felt afterward. The survey was also an opportunity for us to collect emails so we could follow up with the participants subsequently. We got their consent for a follow-up.

The result of the pre-workshop survey showed that 58% of the participants had prior experience with programming hardware (Arduino, etc), while only 42% had heard of TinyML.

The result of the post-workshop survey showed that 71% felt that the workshop delivered great value. An additional 25% were of the opinion that the workshop delivered some value.

93% of respondents gave us permission to follow up with them, and we will be doing so as soon as we are able to plan a webinar to take them through the entire workshop activity that we couldn't deliver on during the conference.

I am working on a 2022 plan for reaching more people and getting development boards into their hands. This includes:

• reaching more learners/makers across the African continent (a minimum of 25 countries in 2022)
• getting more people to learn embedded programming and TinyML on Arm-based microcontrollers (a learning challenge is in the works, targeting at least 25,000 learners)
• pushing out more articles and some videos

Getting a hold of boards has been a huge challenge, and I hope that the new COVID-19 variant will not lead to factory closures and greater shortages.

Plans for 2022

In a push to create more embedded engineers in Africa, I am proposing a learning challenge for 2022. The courses and content we would like to promote are, rather unfortunately, only in English at the moment, so we can only target countries that officially speak English, although we will be happy to support learners from non-English speaking countries who are able to take the courses in English.

There are 25 countries in Africa where English is spoken as an official language. I would love to be able to commit an average of 200 boards per country, for a total of 5000 boards for the learning challenge. An additional 1000 boards would go towards incentivizing mentors and other ecosystem builders to get involved. I know that this is a big, hairy, audacious goal!

As a reward for participating in the learning challenge we will send each learner a development board when they complete either the second course in the Tiny Machine Learning specialization on EdX, or the first course in the Embedded Systems Essentials with Arm specialization on EdX. The breakdown for this is 200 boards to learners in 25 countries where English is spoken as an official language.

The completion rate for online courses is low, typically below 20%. We will need to onboard about 25,000 learners on the continent in order to accomplish this mission. We will also be organizing the learners into groups and assigning mentors who will help them through the program.

Appreciation

First, thank you to John Otu and Abdullahi Deji Ibrahim for serving as teaching assistants during the workshop, I couldn't have managed without them.

I would like to say a huge thank you to Sparkfun Electronics for all of the support that they provided. I had to get technical support from them in order to get the SDK up, and that has proven useful in making the workshop a reality. I would like to specifically give a shoutout to Kirk Benell (CTO), Kyle Wenner (Software Engineering), and Jahnell Pereira, all of Sparkfun. I would also like to say a big thank you to Mary Bennion, Sr. Manager, AI Ecosystem at Arm Ltd.

All of this wouldn't have been possible without Stephen Ozoigbo (Sr. Director, Emerging Economies at Arm) making the best effort to get us boards for the workshop. Thank you, Stephen!