Building the Matrix by Jan Peter Sanderman

For a client of ours we build a next level escaperoom / fort boyard experience and called it: Beat the Matrix. We run a fully automated and distributed game on 60+ Raspberry Pi's, 15 Arduino's, lots of sensors and actuators, and a couple of PCs to do the VR and AR work. 32 people can play at the same time, with only 1 attendant, making in commercially attractive. This talk will be about how we built the Matrix and our lessons learned, with the main focus on the hardware part. Java and Spring Boot are used for running the software. And yes, we got a CI/CD pipeline in place. Nothing fancy here. But when it comes to hardware (and we made lots of it ourselves), there is a lot to learn and discover (when you only have a software development background just like us)! Where to start? Are you going to use a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino or something else? What's the difference? And is it really that easy to get your first LED blinking? Or is there some stuff you need to take into account? And how to continue? What if you want to scale up? How to control the GPIO pins using Java or Python? And what if you run out of GPIO pins? Come to my talk and I will get all these questions answered and get you started on hardware development or your first IoT project. I have been working in the IT industry for more than 18 years. Using Java since 2005. I have worked for several big Dutch companies, including the Kadaster and KPN, as a software engineer, technical team lead, integration specialist and software architect. In 2017 I started my own company: Twict.