We've just got back from a fabulous weekend technology festival in Hebden Bridge. Wuthering Bytes was two days of talks and a day of workshops, and this year we were privileged to be asked to speak on Saturday and run a workshop on Sunday.

I'll post a link to the presentation when it's published over the next few days as we had 20 minutes to give an overview of the system that might help fill in any gaps in the documentation. BTW if anything isn't clear then please do leave a comment and I can expand on that bit.

The system behaved impeccably even with everyone watching it although we didn't have time to do the live demo we hoped for. The workshop was great fun although exhausting and we were very fortunate to have two contributions from workshop participants during the day!

Anton Whalley re-wrote our database and API to use mySQL rather than Cassandra. We talked about several options and eventually decided that it had been fun working with a really big scale noSQL datastore, but we didn't really need to fight it's restrictions. And Beth McMillan made a start on some graphs, which we're really grateful for.

I had loads of interesting conversations with people - including one with a grey-beard developer of proprietary hardware who told me that Arduino's were 'just toys' and that open source hardware didn't achieve the levels of quality that commercial products require! (With hindsight I think he must misunderstand how the Arduino is conceived - as a development board - he seemed very bothered  about EMC compliance!)

I replied that the thing I loved about working in an open way was the potential to co-operate - and that this advantage was the key leverage point. Just the next day we get valuable contributions from people who have just heard a bit about the project, and want to help out! To get that sort of help, you need to be both open and worthwhile, and I'm proud to say that both we and our aquaPionics project are.