Go one step beyond the browser and leverage your existing JavaScript skills to explore the possibilities of hardware. Do you have an Arduino gathering dust, just waiting for an application beyond the hello world of blinking an LED? It’s time to take that hardware off the shelf, and learn how to create interactive experiences in the physical world. This session will explore how to utilize the popular Node robotics frameworks to control an Arduino, showing you how to get quickly up and running in this new and emerging world of hardware. In this session, we’ll create a calender reader which accesses your calendar and reads your day to you with just the click of a button. This is an ideal introductory session for those curious on how to get started with some of the popular microcontrollers and microprocessors using JavaScript.

The world of IoT and hardware has unlimited possibilities on what you can create and do. Why not add the Cognitive Services suite to your toolbox, enabling you to create more user friendly, powerful and complex hacks? Cognitive Services allows you to add computer vision, speech recognition, language understanding and so much more by simply calling an API. In this session let’s learn about the powerful RaspberryPi and how we can utilize facial and voice recognition to keep your valuables safe in this awesome 2-step lock prototype! If you love taking selfies and talking to hardware when no one is looking – this hack is for you!