Play poker with your fridge

Another day on the stand describing the Micro Framework. Half way through an explanation I mentioned to one chap that on Thursday in our lunchtime session Roger will be demonstrating his program that lets you play wireless poker using Zigbee devices connected to a Micro Framework board. The delegate thought about this for a moment. "You mean the .NET Micro Framework lets you play poker against your fridge?" he asked.

I can't think of a better way of putting it. You can easily add lots of intelligence to a tiny device, and then connect it to other things to make life interesting. Although in that situation a poor poker player might starve to death, or at least have to drink black coffee for the rest of their life.....

After stand duty it was time to head up to a demonstration of the framework. I had been invited to provide some closing remarks (nobody can close down an event better than me) and so I told everyone there about one of my major claims to fame - around 10 years or so I wrote some code which helps put datestamps on bottles of Budweiser beer. There was no .NET Micro Framework then, of course, so the application was forged in the hell of cross compiling, no debugging, and code that had to be strange "just so it would work". I made the point that if I was doing the job today it would take me a lot less time, and be much more fun to do. You can read one report of the event here - it is great to hear nice things about the platform.

On the way to the event I poked the camera out of the bus window and grabbed a few snaps.

Apparently "Inverted pimply pyramid" means "Titanic Museum" in Orlando

Believe it or not

Nirvana in a box?