If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll already know that I was at the NCRIoT IoT Meetup yesterday at the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, NC. You may not know what NC RIoT is. Hell, until recently, I didn’t either, which is a crime really because it’s an amazing group of IoT fanatics doing some really cool stuff with IoT. I even met a guy who does as many crazy things with IoT as I do – you should follow @LogicalDan on twitter, and tweet at him in case he’s wearing his shirt that lights up when you tweet at him. No really, his shirt blinks like crazy when you tweet him. Did I not tell you I met my people yesterday? 

So Anyway, why was it so great? Well, for me, not so much because of it being at the NASCAR Hall of Fame, because I don’t much care about cars turning left at 200 MPH. It was because of the people I met, and the content. Some of my favorite things, in no particular order:

  • Hearing about the things NASCAR is trying to do with IoT. Some of what they are talking about isn’t strictly IoT, but they do have some interesting problems to solve. For instance, I hadn’t considered their telemetry problem much, but yeah, the dollar effect does come into play to some degree when you’re screaming around a track at 200 MPH. “Why am I just hearing about this now? It happened way back there!”
  • The Renesas Developer kits for IoT Development. My only disappointment all day was that I didn’t win the drawing for a free one, but we’re working on that one. 
  • Hearing from @LogicalDan from Logical Advantage. I used to do what Roger called “Stupid SPOT Tricks” back in the day, but Dan has nearly set fire to the cat doing his, so he’s right up there. 
  • Meeting all the IoT Hackers that showed up! 
  • The NXP Truck was there, and had a bunch of great demos in it. I was more interested in the boards and processors underlying the demos personally, but it was a pretty cool truck! Too bad they don’t need an Evangelist for that thing!
  • Hearing from NXP, Nordic, etc. both on the Panel and then at their booths during the evening activities.

I wish I’d taken more pictures, especially of some of the stuff Dan brought along, but I was too busy listening and taking notes to bother whipping out my phone all the time. This is why I don’t have an Instagram feed: I suck at taking pictures of literally everything that happens.