Episode 2: From Summit to Summit

How was your month of November? I would say that mine was full of summits - technology events. Some were physical while a few were virtual. I didn't get to attend all of them, but they are worth mentioning all the same.

Arm DevSummit 2022

If you don't know who Arm is, it's the world's largest licensor of silicon Intellectual Property (IP). They are responsible for a lot of the chips in phones, some of the chips on laptops, and a lot of chips on servers (cloud computing). Their chips are also found in boards from Arduino , Micro:bit, 意法半导体 , and lots more.

The Arm DevSummit went virtual last year and is available on demand. It's targeted at "individuals and organizations developing and deploying on Arm-based hardware". You can find out more about the summit here.

Mobile World Congress Africa

A physical event that took place in Kigali, Rwanda, over a period of three days, bringing together various companies and titans of industry in the mobile space. Stephen Ozoigbo was there to present the latest in 5G technology from Arm . You can read Stephen's post here.

A partnership between Arm and Safaricom was announced during MWC. In addition to the partnership that will see the Raspberry Pi Pico manufactured in Kenya, I would say that it's time to keep an eye on the country because the pace of IoT development is about to enter higher gear.

You can also visit the event website to download the 2022 event report.

GDG Community Summit

This summit brought together the most active Google Developer Group (GDG) organizers and Women Tech Makers (WTM Ambassadors) from West Africa and Central Africa for two days of networking and attendance at DevFest Lagos 2022. The summit was the western equivalent of the East Africa (plus Southern Africa) summit. While these summits are not open, they are extremely important for creating bonds. I still maintain relations formed at the summit that I attended in 2018!

DevFest Lagos 2022

How do you organize an event that gets 2000 signups within 24 hours of being announced? The organizers say that they treat it as a startup, and I must mention that they do an admirable job at that.

A DevFest is a celebration of the developer ecosystem from Google's perspective. It's a time of networking and education. From my perspective, working in tech requires constant upskilling. Do you know of any tool that doesn't get a new release at least once in 12 months? What's new in TensorFlow, for example? If you think that only Google Tech is discussed at DevFest Lagos then that's a good reason for you to attend (or speak) at DevFest Lagos 2023 so you can find out what all of the buzz is about. Yes, there was a lot of buzz on social media, just search for #devfest2022 and #devFestLagos.

New Hardware

The Arduino Opta will find use in both industrial settings and home automation projects. It is powered by the same STM32H747XI processor that is found on the Portenta H7, so the learning curve won't be steep. The Opta comes in three variants:

• Opta Lite, with on-board Ethernet and USB-C
• Opta RS-485, adds RS-485 to the Lite
• Opta WiFi, adds a WiFi module to the RS-485

The Opta can be mounted on a DIN-rail, provides four relays, and supports over-the-air updates. You can read Arduino's blog post here.

Blog Posts

If you have got your hands on the Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect and would like to get started on either Windows or Linux, please check out this article.

In Conclusion

If you are into building products on Arm-based hardware, I would like to invite you to join the Arm Developer Program.

Thanks for reading, please share if you enjoyed it, and see you in the next episode.