I've just got back from presenting a talk at PyCon UK - the UK conference for all things Python. Part of my talk was a live demo of The Things Network. Live demos can be hairy at the best of times, but even more so when you're reliant on a temporary WiFi setup in an unfamiliar place. Luckily, the Python worked flawlessly: sending a test message via a LoraWAN gateway, which was received by another Python script over MQTT using the libraries from http://www.eclipse.org/paho/ . I'll be publishing a step by step guide on my blog later.
PyCon UK also had an education track and this fitted our vision of empowering complete beginners learning to code and taking their first steps to creating their own IoT solutions.
I needn't have worried about whether the demo worked or not; PyCon is an amazingly friendly and welcoming conference. Everyone I met was chatty, approachable and interesting, and there were some really knowledgeable people with plenty of suggestions and ideas.
And by the time I returned home I discovered someone had created The Things Network Cardiff as a result of my talk!
All the talks have been uploaded to youtube by a dedicated team of volunteers at the conference. You can view my talk "Python Cat Flaps - creating smart devices with Python" on creating energy efficient IoT devices in Python here.
