September 2026 Newsletter
Everyone gets a chance
This month’s meeting was all about giving everyone a fair chance to talk and get help on their projects
Agenda
Following your feedback last month, we introduced a revised agenda for the meeting with time-boxed activities.
- We tried to stick with the meeting agenda with the timings
- Geoff gave the acknowledgement of country
- Following the Projects and Presentations – there was still time left over for group discussion
Projects from the Members
Shubham
Shubam presented his video streaming project where he streams from an ESP-S3-CAM module into an Android app built on C++ (not Java or Kotlin). He uses an edge model running on the app for person detection. We saw faces detected with a decent framerate. He plans to expand his project for more use-cases.
Daniel
Our old friend Daniel showed off his ping-pong ball shooter. A self designed mechanical catapult built from complicated gearing and an elaborate harness. It does shoot the ping-pong balls with substantial force and almost destroyed a laptop. Daniel plans to add a funnel for some rapid-fire action. He noted the changes to the group since he had been there with all the new energy and structure.
Victoria
Victoria explained her lost-and-found portal concept and the reason for her doing the project as a person from construction who wants to explore the exciting field of software products at all layers of the development lifecycle. She later demonstrated her concept from both the looser and finder perspectives. She hopes to get architectural ideas to implement the front-end and back-end of the project. She was later suggested to use a mainstream stack with Typescript, namely Nest.js or Golang for the backend REST APIs and React for the front-end.
Binh
Binh, a student of UniMelb showed off his project using a fine-tuned Yolo model which detects cubes of different colors with a high level of confidence. This is part of his university project and he explained many nitty-gritties of getting it all to work with a very successful demonstration. He was introduced to Warwick who is working on the color LED bar detector in the ChromaVertex project.
Jin
Jin is interested in home automation and is trying to get enough knowledge to run his setup off-grid. He was introduced to Haig (wearing a cool red LED grid badge) to explore his work on Home Assistant and explain its concepts.
Alexander
Alexander demonstrated his threat intelligence NIST CVE aggregating natural language LLM based assistant. The bot also filters the relevant vulnerabilities. He spoke about the libraries he used including one for wake-work detection. He also showed us a cool ESP32-S3 based smart speaker development board which he plans to utilize in the future in addition to expanding the project with RSS feeds and other data sources.
Presentation
We welcomed Alexar from LUV (Linux Users Victoria)
Alexar from LUV gave an excellent introduction to the activities of LUV and the importance of Linux in the modern world. Some attendees were surprised that they had a Linux based device in their pocket. Almost everybody spoke about their favorite distros in this interactive session. LUV has their Town Hall meeting on…. Also spoke about Hardware Freedom Day and other events.
Fareed from MTG and Alexar explored the idea of doing an inter-group collaboration project. The proposal is as follows – MTG uses Ahmet’s Raspberry Pi Zeros to build a hat PCB (with MTG and LUV branding) that has the option of users attaching a small color display, 8-10 buttons (D-pad + few control buttons), cheap I2S DAC + amp, IR receiver, RFID and some cheap sensors like temperature. The Linux group works on a distro over headless Raspbian to get this to work including optimized drivers and other components that gives an out of the box experience for builders to make interesting projects by using the PCB, soldering the components and making interesting projects.
Alexar was given 2 Raspberry Pi Zeros for experimentation and Fareed will give the writeup of his Anti-mobile project so far. It has much of the above interfacing already done but it is quite difficult to maintain and does not run reliably (as demonstrated).
Honorable mentions
- A day visitor, Alex, a bright and enthusiastic young man, was accompanied by his father and was interested in ‘stuff like Chris’ robots’ and Chris mentored him throughout the session. He was seen playing and exploring Chris’ robots running after him. He left with a good deal of motivation and a free Raspberry Pi Zero.
- Thanks to Alexar for distributing hardware goodies. Amongst interesting random items, one honorable mention was scored by Fareed which turned out to be an unused SMC 8003EP 61-600328-00 BNC ISA 8 bit network card from the early 90s.