These are images from the soldering project. They’re from the classroom or workshop, and include general scenes from Kathmandu. The city is in the process of rebuilding after the spring 2015 earthquake.
After landing in Kathmandu, I went to a WordPress meetup and met Sakin, one of the main WordPress community leaders who organizes WordCamp Nepal/Kathmandu AND has contributed to WordPress core.
I also met Suvash at the WP MeetUp who arranged a soldering session in his HTML class. These students attend the People’s Campus Community College.
The components were first identified, along with the basic properties of the component.
The students took turns and soldered a Weevil kit from Sparkfun.
The photocell is light sensitive, such that when it senses the absence of light, the LEDs light up.
It’s always nice when all the solder joints are good and it works!
This image was taken while driving past a village of tents for those displaced from the earthquake that happened last year on April 25, 2015.
Another Kathmandu street scene: getting fuel tanks refilled.
A few classroom sessions were spent at the Shree Mangal DVIP School, a school in Kathmandu for students from Himalayan villages.
Students learned about resistors, light sensors, LEDs, and other polarized components like transistors.
The school had experienced some damage from the earthquake, but it was being actively worked on for repairs. After entering the building and stepping through some scafolding, I climbed up the stairs to the teachers lounge and principal’s office. The building appeared to be stable.
A session in a different classroom.
Yes! It works!
This was the scene happening across from the hotel. Workers were in the process of salvaging bricks from the third floor by putting them into two piles. The bricks that could be reused went down one slide, then workers on the ground pounded off the concrete from the brick to get it ready to use again.
Two other presentations were given, one to the Python Meetup, and another with the PyGirls group that combined the talk with the Raspberry Pi and included a soldering workshop.
One of the ways to communicate with the RPi is with a USB to TTY cable from SparkFun that operates with the 3.3 V logic of the GPIO RX and TX pins, while powering it with 5V. This can be used with minicom or screen and was used for the basic “Hello World!” python program of blinking an LED light.
Group photo after soldering at LeapFrog!
There’re really awesome things happening at the LeapFrog Academy, where the next day, Rojina and two others guys rocked a Node.js and Express presentation/workshop.
A common scene, the back up batteries that were in the hotels for use when the electricity went out. About 10-16 hours a day Kathmandu is without electricity. Next time backup USB battery packs need to be brought to power the soldering irons (along with USB soldering irons that work!)
The World Heritage Boudhanath site on the outskirts of Kathmandu was also in the process of being rebuilt.
