I was thinking about how to display live sensor readings from a micro:bit in an augmented reality iPhone app, and the first method that I came up with was going to be cumbersome to say the least. My plan was to encode the readings somehow in a 5x5 matrix and then display that as a pattern on the micro:bit LEDs, which could be read and then decoded with some computer vision code in the iPhone app.

When I have the chance I like to volunteer with Teen-Turn as a mentor for their Project Squad afterschool programmes in The Digital Hub, where I get to work with teenagers and offer what help I can as they work on projects for BT Young Scientist, SciFest or Technovation Challenge. Some of the projects I’ve been involved with over the past couple of years have been building an RFID smart shelf to help blind people in the kitchen, creating a mobile app to help improve teenage mental health, and most recently using a Raspberry Pi and sensors to create an intensive care unit for sick houseplants!

There are lots of different experiences you can have in virtual reality, and really I don’t think that you can say you truly know what VR is until you have tried most of them. To that end, I propose the concept of the VR Passport - a single place or sheet where you collect stamps for each category of experience, and once you have the full collection of stamps, you can be confident that you are a seasoned traveller and are starting to know the medium.

As I mentioned last time, we have six Oculus Quests at The Digital Hub that we use for internal projects, for technology demos with client companies, and for education and community initiatives. We usually want to have all six of them set up the same way with the same apps so we use a single Oculus account to log in on all headsets. Create an Email Address As we are going to use a single account to sign in to all headsets, it makes sense for that to be a generic email address that can be shared with others without worrying about giving access to your email.

We are lucky to have six Oculus Quest VR headsets at The Digital Hub that we use for internal projects, for technology demos with client companies, and for education and community initiatives. When we first got the headsets and started setting them up, it was clear that we were going to need to get organised and have a system for managing the process. I wasn’t able to find any online guide so I just made it up as I went along, and now I am sharing it in case others find it useful.

This is part 1 of a multipart series with the end goal of being able to ask my Amazon Echo, “is there enough hot water for a shower?" Introduction People in Ireland often think to themselves… I’d like to have a shower, but will there be enough hot water or do I need to turn on the immersion? If you have never lived in Ireland, you might not know that many Irish homes have a hot water tank (in a “hot press”) with an electric coil sticking into it that essentially heats the water in the tank like a kettle.

Last year I had a few days to myself so I decided to take part in Startup Weekend without any real idea of what to expect. From being around the startup and developer scene in Dublin, I knew some of the organisers and some of the speakers and mentors, and I knew the premise of the weekend, but that was all. I was diving in headfirst and somewhat out of my comfort zone.