The Chiang Mai Maker Party 4.0 is now taking place until December 9, and I went there today, as I was especially interested in the scheduled NB-IoT talk and workshop to find out what was the status about LPWA in Thailand. But there are many other activities planned, and if you happen to be in Chiang Main in the next few days, you may want to check out the schedule on the event page or Facebook.
I’m going to go though what I’ve done today to give you a better idea about the event, or even the maker movement in Thailand.
Booth and activity area should be the same over the 4 days, but the talks, open activity, and workshop will be different each day. Today, people could learn how to solder in the activity area.
… and slighter higher up in a different zone, companies and makers were showcasing their products or projects. I still managed to spent 5 interesting hours at the event attending to talks and checking out the various projects.
I started my day with a talk entitled “Maker Movement in South East Asia” presented by William Hooi, previously a teacher, who found One Maker Group and setup the first MakerSpace in Singapore, as well as helped introduce the Maker Faire in Singapore in 2012 onwards.
There was three parts to talk with an history of the Maker movement (worldwide), the maker movement in Singapore, and whether Making should be integrated into school curriculum.
One I was done with the talk, I walked around, so I’ll report about some of the interesting project I came across. I may write more detailed posts for some of the items lateron.
Falling object detection demo using OpenCV on the software side, a webcam connected to…
… ASUS Tinker board to handle fall detection, and an NVIDIA Jetson board for artificial intelligence. If fall is detection an alert to send to the tablet, and the system also interfaces with Xiaomi Mi band 2.
Nordic Technology House showcased a magic mirror based on Raspberry Pi 3, and a webcam to detect your dance move, but their actual product shown above is a real-time indoor air monitoring system that report temperature, humidity, CO2 level, and PM 2.5 levels, and come sent alerts via LINE if thresholds are exceeded.
One booth had some drones including the larger one above spraying insecticides for the agriculture market.
There was also a large about sewing machines, including some smarter one where you can design embroidery in a table before sewing.
There were also a few custom ESP8266 or ESP32 boards, but I forgot to take photos.
The Maker Party is also a good place to go with your want to buy some board or smart home devices.
Beside Raspberry Pi Zero W / 3, ESP8266 boards and Asus Tinker board seem to be popular items in Thailand. I could also spot Sonoff wireless switch, and an Amazon Dot, although I could confirm only English is supported, no Thai language.
M5Stack modules, and Raspberry Pi 3 Voice Kit were also for sale.
Books are also available for ESP32, Raspberry Pi 3, IoT, etc… in Thai language.
But if you can’t read Thai there was also a choice of book in English about RPi, Arduino, Linux for Makers, IoT and so on.
I’ll go into more details in a separate post tomorrow, but if you want to get started the good news is that it’s now possible to pre-order a 1,990 THB Arduino Shield ($61) between December 6-9, and get it shipped on February 14, 2018. NB-IoT connectivity is free for one year, and will then cost 350 Baht (around $10) per year per device. However, there’s a cost to enable NB-IoT on LTE base stations, so AIS will only enable NB-IoT at some universities, and maker spaces, meaning for example, I would most certainly be able to use such kit from home. An AIS representative told me their no roadmap for deployment, it will depend on the business demand for such services.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
@cnxsoft
Great find!
Looking forward to find more maker space event down in Bangkok 🙂
@sky770 (aka TheOldMonk)
There should even be more events in Bangkok, or at least it will likely be bigger.
Instead of a Maker Party, they have a Mini Maker Faire.
I think the next one is in January 2018 – http://www.bangkokmakerfaire.com/
@cnxsoft
Nice..thanks for the heads’up.
I am marking the date!
Wishing that there was a calendar for this sort of a thing 😀
@cnxsoft
Wondering if they deploy IOT-NB in Koh Samui in 2018…
@Alexey Roslyakov
I would not count on it. They’ll start letting makers play with NB-IoT in specific locations (but sadly not the beach) in mid-February next year, and after it will depend on the business demand.
@sky770 (aka TheOldMonk)
If you are using Facebook, you could join some groups like SMEoT https://www.facebook.com/groups/1495858784049466/, or other groups / pages related to IoT / Makers in Thailand. They may post when events occur.
Yes I’m interested for Plc working