This is going to be a bit of a busy week for your humble narrator, especially Wednesday 18 November, now I come to think about it, although today (Monday), Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday aren’t too far behind on the “Busy Meter” front.

In the case of Wednesday, my workday will commence at 7:30 a.m. USA Central Time when I give the keynote presentation at the Qt Goes Virt: Embedded online event for embedded software architects, developers, and executives.

Since this event is being hosted in Finland, which is eight hours ahead of me, this will be 3:30 p.m. in the afternoon their time. Mayhap you will be able to attend the conference and hear my presentation, which is titled Not Your Grandmother’s Embedded Systems. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently; all that remains is for me to actually write the talk (eeek!)

Later, from 2:50 p.m. to 3:20 p.m. my time (which will be 3:50 p.m. to 4:20 p.m. USA Eastern Time), my entry will be one of the contenders in the Spectacular Sensors Smackdown. This auspicious occasion will form part of the Sensors Innovation Fall Week expo, which is taking place as we speak, running 16, 17, and 18 November.

As my entry to the Smackdown, and as you can see in this video, I added one of Adafruit’s 9-DOF Absolute Orientation IMU Fusion breakout boards (BOBs) to my 12×12 ping pong ball array.

This sensor BOB is a bodacious little beauty. It features a Bosch BNO055 MEMS device containing a 3-axis accelerometer, a 3-axis gyroscope, and a 3-axis magnetometer. Even better for a bear of little brain like yours truly, the BNO055 also contains a 32-bit Arm Cortex-M0+ that performs sensor fusion and presents results to you in a form you can use without your brains leaking out of your ears.

I’m really looking forward to the smackdown, although — truth to tell — I now have little hope of winning because I hear that my chum (the aptly named) Nick Bild has entered one of his creations (see Magic Rings of Homegrown Computers).

Nick has constructed all sorts of amazing things over the past couple of years, like his pair of smart sunglasses. Why smart? Well, the only portions of the lenses that darken are those directly between the wearer’s eyeballs and a source of light like the sun.

The last I heard, Nick was using computer vision in the form of sensors coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) to detect his gestures and use them to control things in his home.

Ah well, I’ll be happy with my five minutes of fame, and it will be fun to see what Nick has been up to. Hopefully, we will see you there. The event is free, but you will have to register before all of the good (virtual) seats are taken.